MEN I HAVE PAINTED
mising to be ready earlier the next morning. He left the room with a formal bow, but after a time returned to ask a question concerning my stay in town, and then shook hands with me in a more cordial manner.
*****
My sitting with Spencer yesterday was amusing and irritating. It appears that he had looked at the portrait and discovered that I had made the upper lip too long. On sitting down to work he commented on this, admitting that his lip was unusually long, and, according to the rule, too long, but that I had made the nose also too short, which only aggravated the matter. "It is also unduly convex and prominent, and although my lip may not be concave and curved inwards, as it should be, it is not so unusually pronounced as you have indicated; in fact—in a final burst—"you have made it look like a gorilla's!"
This almost unnerved me, but I went to work, and, seeing that I had made the nose a trifle too short, I lengthened it, but it was not enough for the savant. He, at the end of the sitting, insisted on having a quarter of an inch of flesh colour added to the nose, so that it might be dry to work over on Monday, and I mildly but firmly refused to do this outrageous thing.
On the previous sitting we had been conversing about painters losing their health by overwork: at least Spencer mentioned that Frank Holl had died from overwork, that Leighton was now broken down from over-attention to his work, as were several others, like Calderon and Burgess. I admitted that it might be so, although there had been
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