George Somes Layard

“ I’m depressed too by the horrid tales about people. You don’t know how miserable it makes me—I’m so sorry—it takes all the joy out of things. Goodness is so beautiful and so much best. I hate narrow people who would take all the beauty and gaiety from the world. I love all that, but I hate wickedness. Oh, it is such a pity—and the things people say are horrid. I wish they would not tell me.
In her correspondence with Miss Violet Dickinson, Kate’s spirits would sometimes overflow into sketches of a character more broadly comic than the public generally has had any example of. ”

“ Round the windows of ‘The House’ grew the biggest and brightest convolvuluses in the world (at least in the world she knew) —deep blue blossoms with ‘pinky’ stripes and deep pink blossoms with white stripes. Her intimacy with them told her every day where the newest blooms were to be found. Across the gravel path on the left as you emerged from ‘The House’ was a large oval bed, with roses, pinks, stocks, sweet Sultans, the brown scabious, white lilies, red lilies, red fuchsias, and in early summer, monster tulips, double white narcissus, peonies, crown imperials, and wallflowers. ”

“ It is clear that the ideal illustrator of a literary idea, if only the technical skill is not wanting, is the person to whose mind that idea first presents itself. In the mind of any other the conception is but a second-hand affair, and but the reflection, more or less accurate, of the original, conveyed on to the mental retina of the artist through the somewhat opaque medium of language. The writer alone knows exactly what he means and what he wants. His pencil may be unskilled, but it is nerved by the original thought. ”

“ Perhaps the most engaging of all is the miniature of ‘Joan Ponsonby,’ in which we find an artless simplicity, a candour and refreshing naturalness, wholly apart and distinct from the photographically inspired miniature of to-day. The colours are simple and the handling broad for all its precision of drawing, for the artist has resisted the temptation to finish her flowers and other details with the microscopical minuteness which she employed with so much effect on more suitable occasions. ”

“ I was so afraid you might have some work on hand that would hinder you—but now, I do trust that you will be quite happy, for indeed you will find here, when you are at liberty to do what you like best,—the exact things that become most tractable in their infinite beauty. You are doing great work already—some of the pages of the Piper are magnificent pictures, though with a white background—you will be led by the blue mountains and in the green glens to a deeper colour-melody—and—to how much else—there is no calculating. ”

“ I can never define what art really is—in painting, I mean. It isn’t realism, it isn’t all imagination, it’s a queer giving something to nature that is possible for nature to have, but always has not—at least that’s my idea. It’s what Burne-Jones does when he twists those roses all about his people in the Briar Rose. They don’t often grow like that, but they could, and it’s a great comfort to like such things, at least I find it so. ”

“ In 1896 we find her writing to Miss Dickinson with her customary pluck and energy:—
Each night when I go to bed I read a little bit of Browning—they are so wonderful—each time I read one I like it better than ever. That fires me with ambition to try to write something, and I do try, and they won’t come good; isn’t it hateful of them to be so poor and weak? But I’m going to try more than ever, and I’m going to try other things too if only I can keep well. I do mean to try and do a little more in my life. ”