"UNCLE TOBY"

Evening Post, Issue 37, 12 August 1936, Page 8

"UNCLE TOBY"

A FAMILIAR PAINTING

LOCAL ASSOCIATION

The Tate Gallery , picture "Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman," to be seen in the British Empire Loan collection, is one of the most popular of English pictures. It may be more familiar to English people in the form of engravings and coloured prints than it is in its original form when hung-in the Tate Gallery, for probably a very small percentage of London's population of 8,000,000 frequent the gallery. They intend to "do" the pictures and are always "going," but if a census were taken it might be found that more visitors than residents visited the London art galleries and museums.

The artist who painted "Uncle Toby" was C. R. Leslie, R.A., who died in 1859. He went to "Tristram Shandy" for his subject and the author of that famous novel supplied the artist with a full description of the -doughty, wounded warrior. Toby Shandy is seen sitting beside the widow Wadman, who has asked him to look closely into her eye. She turns its lid ever so slightly upwards. "I protest, 'madame (said Toby),' I can see nothing whatever in your eye.", "It is not in the white," said Mrs. Wadman. Uncle Toby then looked "with might and main" into the pupil, and says Tristram, "The eye did my Uncle Toby's business," adding that it was an eye of "gentle salutations—and soft response." Now this picture possesses a local interest, for the lady who sat to the painter for the Widow Wadman was his sister-in-law, Mrs. John Beauchamp, grandmother of Sir Harold Beauchamp of Wellington, who has been so closely identified with the inception of the New Zealand National Gallery. Charles Robert Leslie, R.A., was his great uncle. Mrs. John Beauchamp also posed as "Lady Jane Grey," another of Leslie's famous works. As Miss Anne Stone, she was one of a famous family of beautiful sisters called "the six precious Stones:" They belonged to an artistic coterie of St. John's Wood, London, then in the country, and the Constables of Well Walk, Hampstead, and the Beauchamps, of Hornsey Lane, Highgate, were also members of it. On the authority of her son Arthur, who settled in New Zealand at Picton, the "Widow Wadman" of the picture was a striking , likeness of his mother, Anne Beaucham"