Perhaps it was time the neo-classical school came along to give us a new lead! But of course it was far more of a revolution in Art than it was in letters. I am afraid I am a very poor first-hand witness about the artistic movements of my time, for the old painters used to expect such a lot of you! They exhibited, of course, at the Academy and other accessible places every now and then, but even so it was rather trying to have the artists standing on guard, as they always did, and explaining to the sight-seer, not what their pictures were about, but what sort of emotions they ought to evoke! Some of them went further, and said you must not look at their pictures unless you were fasting, or unless you had recently taken opium. (Opium-smoking was not as common then as it is now, but already you were sometimes offered it in Chelsea.) I was too busy in one way and another to devote my life to picture-inspecting; and indeed, it was only a small group of people who took any interest in painting at all.
But I did once come in close touch with it, when I sat for my own portrait to Sanderson, the great Præteritist. In those days, when chromography gave very little help to the artist, you would often have to “sit” twice or three times before the painter caught what he considered a likeness. It was during the enforced idleness of one of these “sittings” that I had a long conversation with him which interested me so much that I wrote down notes of it afterwards.
We talked of Futurism; he said it was all very well, but the trouble about it was it had no future. He told me (what I did not know) that the term “futurism,” when it was first invented, in the early part of the century (“before you were born, my dear”—waving his brush at me), meant simply a dissatisfaction with present standards in art and a determination to find new methods: it was only with Lennox and Burstall that it took on its new meaning. The old Futurists refused, indeed, to draw the thing as they saw it, but they had not reached the idea of portraying things _as one day they would be_. It was Lennox’s _Ruins of Westminster Cathedral_ that first heralded this much-criticized departure; and it was Burstall who developed the notion in portrait-painting. He was something of a missionary: unhappily married himself, he maintained that it was one of the functions of Art to show the evanescence of beauty, and when _débutantes_ came to sit to him he represented them as those wrinkled old women whom we still see and admire (he was speaking, of course, in 1960) in his portraits. He was a missionary, and something of a martyr; in consequence of his decision, he had to struggle for a long time with neglect and poverty; and it was only his portrait of Prince Albert, then three years old, as six foot high and a Colonel of Hussars, that drew attention to him once more. He got all the babies after that.