George Somes Layard

“ The love of red Surrey cottages, green fields, and groups of little children was common to both artists, and Kate’s imitation is more apparent than real; her renderings of them are honest and tender, full of sentiment, and of accurate, vigorous observation. She does not seem to have studied landscape for its breadth, or sought to read and transcribe the mighty message of poetry it holds for every whole-hearted worshipper. Rather did she seek for the passages of beauty and the pretty scenes which appealed to her, delighting in the sonnet, as it were, rather than in the epic. ”

“ The drawing is a fine example of Keene’s power of endowing his models with the qualities requisite to his design. Not a man of these seventeen financiers suggests a model posing, and yet all, for this was Keene’s invariable custom, were drawn from the life. Not one of them but is balanced as though he were wading in water up to his knees; and yet not one of them, we may be sure, was wading against a stream when, probably unconsciously, he was forced into the service of the artist’s pencil. The pose of one and all is as inevitable as is the expression on the face of each. ”

“ Ruskin found words to declare for himself that in her drawings ‘you have the radiance and innocence of reinstated infant divinity showered again among the flowers of English meadows.’ And privately he wrote to her: ‘Holbein lives for all time with his grim and ugly “Dance of Death”; a not dissimilar and more beautiful immortality may be in store for you if you worthily apply yourself to produce a “Dance of Life.”’
The touchstone of all art in which there is an element of greatness is the appeal which it makes to the foreigner, to the high and the low alike. ”