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

Selected Letters	Letter from G.F. Watts to J.M. Cameron, undated, assessing her recent photographs.
	My Dear Mrs Cameron All the Photographs are very fine as suggestions but hardly so definite as you must make them. I know you don't like me to say this but I must tell you what I think if you ask my opinion. The Mary of Bethuny is a beautiful picture but the only clear part about it is the throat & that is not enough. The expression is fine but it is always so when Mary Madonna sits & you have had that view of head & identical expression
	over & over again, for the purposes of sale repetition will not do. Both the large ones have great nobility & charming sentiment but the figure of the boy is too straight (illegible) as you have had it before. I have been making a design for an Evangelist & having a model with drapery on Monday. I spent some hours in trying to get an arrangement of folds that would make a beautiful & suggestive composition, it was a great deal of time occupied but not wasted, that is the sort of thing I want you to do, you would make fewer photographs but each one would be more valuable, I think I like the
	head of Henry best of all you sent. I have ordered (illegible) & sent back your boards which ought to have been done long ago, it is very difficult for to (illegible) this time out of my work you will excuse my abruptness Your's most sincerely Signor

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