National Portrait Gallery | Research | Archive documents | G.F. Watts | Selected Letters

Selected Letters	Letter from Julia Margaret Cameron to George Frederic Watts, dated 3 December 1860, urging him to paint a portrait of Henry Taylor.
	Dec 3rd 1860 Dear Signor, I send you a rhymed Letter! which is a sort of running Biography to persuade you, that you who have so often told me of the high respect you have for work, should honour the Practical Poet and do him immortal honour - even as you have done immortal honour to our contemplative poet - I have always heard you also say that men in action were your Heroes. A silent course of forty years of daily devotedness to business, and to the performance of business, in the most perfect spirit of patient plodding
	thro' every detail, as well as brilliant coups d'état & successes from to time, well known to his Ministers and Masters in office, surely do make H.T.'s life very remarkable ranking so high as he does in all the walks of literature - and writing every Office paper with as much care and perfectness of diction as he gives to an Essay or to a Poem - therefore liking his face too - fulfil your reiterated intention & paint for your gallery of great men this great head - won't you? - you promised you would - Use your own inventive "whatsoever thou findest it
	"it in thy heart to do - do "quickly" - and do find in thy heart - for yours is the heart and the hand which can do it - and so there is small use in my struggling, and striving with my pen and hand which can't do it, to shew you how you might paint Henry Taylor as great and grand as Alfred Tennyson aye grander and greater too, I would say like the Irishman "I say Pat isn't one Man as good as another?" To be sure he is and better". So - this being so Godbless you. I commend this work to you (illegible)
	Julia Margaret Cameron

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