The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-09-01

SlllefS, That Is what gives interest to the house-the sitters even more than the painter himself. They all passed up and down that broad staircase; 1t heard the rustic of their silks and the trou-frou of their brocades. And we can see these silks and broc&des in the pictures still. With little memory and little imagination we can make the scene live for ourselves. Here many time, oftener than any other sitters, came Kitty Fischer and Nelly oBrien, the two frail beauties of their day, of whom the painter has left us many portraits named and passing as such, but who sA to him as models for half his allegorical figures, Kitty lived in Cranbourne Alley, hard by, ran
 through twelve thousand pounds in
 nine months, spoke French with great
 f1uency, was the essence of small talk
 and the magazine of temporary anec-
 dote, and died a victim to cosmetics.
 Up and down that staircase she fitted
 many time. Nelly was a demurrer
 beauty, with those Irish eyes so ad- mired by Lord Bolingbroke, and lived in
 Pail Mall, next door to the Star and
 Garter, and entertained Sir Joshua at dinner lat o'clock" as his engage l ment book for July, 1762, faithfully re- cords.
 No artist in these days has worked
 harder. He would be at his easel at 9 in the morning, even of an October morning. One year the number of his
 sitters was one hundred and sixty-two.
 Another delightful visitor to the house was Mrs. Abingdon, whom he painted
 again and again, as the Comic Muse, as
 Roxalana, as Miss Prue. He delighted
 to put on his canvas her cauciness, as in the Miss Prue," where, sitting with her arms leaning on the back of her chair, she looksl lout at you with provo
 satiye beauty, the lines of her retrousse
 nose repeated in the pug dog who
 shared the sitting. And with this &C.,
 tress would come the famous Mrs.
 Baddeley, who entered the rotunda of
 the Pantheon in triumph under the
 drawn blades of her admirers, when the management tried to exclude her on the opening night
 And then the men of letters, old
 Johnson, sturdy, purblind, majestic and uncommonly untidy, and Goldsmith, with that peasant face and splendid brow. He came for his sittings the very year his Deserted Village was published, and if Reynolds fiattered the poet-as was said at the time-Gold- smiths iattery of the painter has per-
 haps never been equalled in it's simplic ity and delicacy and grace. Here are the words of it as it may be read in the dedication to the poem: 'The only dedication I ever made was seto my brother, because I loved him better than most other men. He is since dead. Permit me to inscribe this poem to you" In contrast to these two men, another of the celebrities of the day, whom they both admired but could not like, passed up that staircase from his | lodgings in Bond street to keep his ap- pointment with the painter This was l Sterne who had at that time written the first two volumes of "Tristram I Shandy,'' but had not reached his full fame.
 l He does not seem to have been among 1 the diners who would assemble at five ] o'clock in the room to the right of the 1 hall door as we go in. There the table would be laid for eight and the guests would be fifteen or sixteen, Sir Joshua 1 at the head, careless of the food and very careful of the conversation. He l would have the club set as his most I constant guests, or Burke, and Johnson,
 and Goldsmith, and Boswell, and, with l them, lawyers, actors, peers, bishops, then chance visitors who loved to meet i the wits. the sitters of the morning,
 whom his hospitality induced to remain
 to dinner
 l One can realize the scene as it passed within it's very walls. Sir Joshua was primitive in his arrangements. There l would be a difficulty about knives and l forks and plates. There were no ''din- l CTS la russo in his century. Once his l sister induced him to lay in a sufficient | stock of glasses and decanters, but 1 when they got broken he never would l replace them. We may go down stairs and see the little kitchen where these | rough-and- d-ready banquets were pre- l ptred. It stands now just as it did in | the painters time, and as we go down | the passage we pass the cellar that | held his frugal stock of wines.
 Hall, staircase, dining room, base
 ment all are still very much as they were in the painters day That low ! dows to the front, it's delicately 1iuted | low chimney piece of white marble in- l laid with green, it's double doors with reeded decreases and heavy panels, | this was the room where he received his sitters, and where they waited their | turns; for no painter was more indus trious. He would hand a portfolio of
 engravings to the sitter and let her choose her own pose. But the room | where he worked, the gallery on which he spent that fifteen hundred pounds,
 has been so altered and reconstructed
 that it scarcely has for us much re- maining association.
 The house stands still, but in few
 weeks the builders and their men will
 be active, and there will be such
 changes that the genus loci may we'll be driven from the spot. And yet, even
 to the square itself, once a duelling-
 ground and the resort of bulies and of footpads, the memory of Sir Joshua | clings irresistibly. Here it was that l one summers day he was found wan-
 derng about, trying to recapture a pet
 bird that was one of the favorites of the
 studio. and had escaped from the draw ing-room. One knows the face and
 dress so well, the spectacles, the ear | trumpet, the snuff So copiously scat tered over the lapels of the brown or l