Moore, George: Reminiscences of the Impressionist painters (Dublin: Maunsel, 1906)

You were then a young painter, quite un-
suspected by the public which is interested in
prices rather than in pictures. Your talent
was just beginning to light up, for it was
about that time you painted the pensive girl in
the black hat—a barmaid was she not at the
Earl’s Court Exhibition ?—the girl whom I
picked out as one appealing specially to me from
the many canvases in your studio high up,
at the top of five flights of black stone
stairs overlooking the Addison Road Station.
You were poor at that time, so was I,
unable to buy a picture however slight
the price might be. But artists give each
other their pictures, and you proposed to give
me that one, and I took it away in its white
Whistlerian frame (for that frame I think I
insisted on paying you); and the picture hung
for many years in my rooms in King’s Bench
Walk ; it now hangs here, on my staircase, and
you will be glad to learn, though I have
often told you before now—but no one
minds listening to tales told twice if they are
pleasant ones—that during all these long years
I have never once disparaged that picture
either to my acquaintances—who have not
always admired it—or to myself. And you
know, my dear friend, how changing men’s
loves are. Some say that mine are always
changing, but you and I know that that is not
true.
Some years later I used to write in The
Speaker about whatever good contemporary