Page:Pen And Pencil Sketches - Volume I.djvu/56

26 wardrobe. As we got on, and began to try our luck at the Academy, Leigh encouraged us to take our pictures on a stated evening before “ sending in day,” when they would be arranged in single file along the gallery, and he, still smoking the perennial pipe, would pass from one to another, criticising, lecturing, and suggesting improvements.

Joseph Clark brought his celebrated picture of “The Sick Child” on one of these evenings. We were all struck with wonder by its technique, its pathos, its human nature. No one suspected that Clark, so quiet and retiring, could produce such a work, for at the sketching meetings, at the end of the two hours, when time was up, he would have little more than a head, or sometimes a figure, slightly but always charmingly indicated. There was the picture in answer to our doubts — but in what a state ! covered with hairs from brushes, dust, and other impurities. Leigh, who always inculcated that a clean workmanlike “surface” was one of the essentials of a picture, took a palette knife, daintily detached the excrescences, and washed and oiled the picture, much to the im- provement both of surface and appearance.

For some years before his death, Leigh used to ask a few of his older students to sup with him in batches of two or three at a time. Fie was a widower : the household consisted of his mother,