Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 1).djvu/226



PICTURE within a picture—there is a romance surrounding every canvas, a story hidden away with every product of the pencil or brush. Our frontispiece, "The Queen's First Baby," provides an excellent example. During the first few years of Her Majesty's married life a room in Buckingham Palace was fitted up with all necessities for printing etchings, and here the Queen and Prince Consort would come and take impressions of their own work from the printing press. It is such a one that we are enabled to reproduce—a fac-simile of an etching, sketched in the first place, prepared and put on the press, and finally printed by the Royal mother of the little one it represents. The original etching is now in the possession of the writer. It is probably the earliest picture known of the Empress Frederick of Germany, Princess Royal at the time—for the etching bears date February 22, 1841, when the Princess was but three months old. Every line, every item betokens how anxious the Royal artist was to obtain a faithful drawing of her first child, whose name, "Victoria," is written under it. The little Princess is so held that the nurse's face is quite concealed, and in no way divides the attention the mother was desirous of winning for her little one. When the Queen was making the sketch, a cage with a parrot had been placed on a table near at hand, in order to rivet the child's attention. The whole thing is suggestive of the simplicity and homeliness which characterised the dispositions of the Royal workers at the press; and we think the picture tells its own history of life in the Palace fifty years ago.

The history as to how the first portrait of Her Majesty after her coronation was obtained is also full of interest. The Queen is represented in all her youthful beauty in the Royal box at Drury Lane Theatre, and it is the work of E. T. Parris, a fashionable portrait painter of those days. Parris was totally ignorant of the fact that when he agreed with Mr. Henry Graves, the well-known publisher, to paint "the portrait of a lady for fifty guineas," he would have to localise himself amongst the musical instruments of the orchestra of the National Theatre, and handle his pencil in the immediate neighbourhood of the big drum. Neither was he made aware as to the identity of his subject until the eventful night arrived. Bunn was the manager of Drury Lane at the time, and he flatly refused to accommodate Mr. Graves with two seats in the orchestra. But the solution of the difficulty was easy. Bunn was indebted to Grieve, the scenic artist, for a thousand pounds. Grieve was persuaded to threaten to issue a writ for the money unless the order for two was forthcoming. Bunn succumbed, and the publisher triumphed; and whilst the young Queen watched the performance,