Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/139

118 Morris himself worked hard at drawing and painting all that spring. His wonderful faculty of pattern designing had already come to him, and with it a unique sense for justness in colour, fed on admiring study of the best early mediæval work, especially in illumination. "In all illumination and work of that kind," Rossetti writes just before Christmas, 1856, "he is quite unrivalled by anything modern that I know." In the drawing and modelling of animate forms he never could become proficient. The human figure was too much for him, and even with birds or animals in his designs he felt difficulty. So it remained afterwards. The animals in his wall-papers were, as a rule, drawn by Webb, and the figures in his tapestries by Burne-Jones; and many years later, when designing the borders for the Kelmscott Chaucer, he expressed his regret at not being able to fill them with Chaucer's favourite birds. Such figures as he designed, of which there are a number both in illuminations and in stained glass, are obviously faulty in drawing.

In June, Rossetti, writing to W. Bell Scott, mentions Morris as then busy painting his first picture. Its subject, taken from the "Morte d'Arthur," was the recognition of Tristram by the dog in King Mark's palace. This, like the few other pictures he completed, was in oil. The only recorded instance of his painting a picture in water-colour was three or four months later, when he was on a visit to Dixon at Manchester to see the famous Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. While staying there he painted a water-colour of "The Soldan's Daughter in the Palace of Glass." The Soldan's daughter was seated in a heavy wooden armchair, probably studied from one of those at Red Lion Square, and the palace was in all shades of bluish glass. To the pictures in the Manchester Exhibition