[Six to Sixteen by Juliana Horatia Ewing]@TWC D-Link bookSix to Sixteen CHAPTER X 3/11
Each sketch was a sort of idyll.
Indeed, he would tell me stories of each as he showed them. Long as my great-grandfather had lived, he was never a robust man, and Elspeth's chief ideas on the subject of his sketches bore reference to the colds he had caught, and the illnesses he had induced, by sitting in the east winds or lying on damp grass to do this or that sketch. "That'll be the one the master did before he was laid by with the rheumatics," Elspeth said, when I described one of my favourites to her. It was a spring sketch.
My great-grandfather had lain face downwards on the lawn to do it.
This was to bring his eyes on a level with the subject of his painting, which was this: a crocus of the exquisite shades of lilac to be seen in some varieties, just full-blown, standing up in its first beauty and freshness from its fringe of narrow silver-striped leaves.
The portrait was not an opaque and polished-looking painting on smooth cardboard, but a sketch--indefinite at the outer edges of the whole subject--on water-colour paper of moderate roughness.
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