Her shortness of sight handicapped her sadly in this branch of art, and prevented her from seeing many facts of nature in a broad way; for example, while ‘The Old Farm House’ has great merits of breeziness, truth, and transparency of colour, with a sense of ‘out-of-doorness’ not often so freshly and easily obtained, the great tree at the back lacks substance, as well as shadow and mystery, for its branches are spread out like a fan, and do not seem, any of them, to grow towards the spectator. There is no such fault in ‘The Stick Fire’—a subject curiously recalling Fred Walker; for here the landscape, although a little empty, is clearly studied from nature and set down with great reticence and intelligence. And what could be prettier than the pose of the two girls, big and little, on the left? When she leaves realism and touches the landscapes and groups with her own inimitable convention, Miss Greenaway becomes truly herself and can be compared with none other. Glance, for instance, at ‘The Bracken Gatherers.’ It has the sense of style and ‘bigness’ which triumphs over any mannerism; and the heads, especially that of the girl set so well upon her neck, are so full of dignity that they may be considered a serious effort in art.
She was undoubtedly influenced at times by Mrs. Allingham and Fred Walker, as well as by Ford Madox Brown (see ‘Brother and Sister,’ in which the little girl might almost have come from his pencil). We find traces, too, of Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A. (in ‘Strawberries’—a drawing not here reproduced), of Stothard (as in the masterly sketch for ‘The May Dance’ with its fine sense of grace and movement, and its excellent spacing), of Downman (as in the portraits belonging to the Hon. Gerald Ponsonby), of Richard Doyle (as in the large drawing of ‘The Elf Ring’), and sometimes we recognise echoes of Stacy Marks, of Mason, and of Calvert. But what does it all amount to? Merely this, that when she wandered beyond the garden of that Greenawayland which she had called into being, the artist was sometimes moved by the emotions with which she had been thrilled when in past years she gazed with enthusiasm at these men’s work. The resemblance was in the main accidental; for every one of these painters, like herself, is characteristically and peculiarly English in his view of art as in his methods of execution.