Mafeking had been relieved, and that relieved the heart of Great Britain. The siege, with General Cronje commanding the Boers, had lasted about six months. It was lifted by Lord Methuen and sixteen thousand troops, and it brought a new day to England.... Gutzon’s work in England was widely talked of though little of it now remains. One of his principal commissions came to him after he had left the country, and the work was executed in the United States. A somewhat incongruous product of the Thirty-eighth Street studio, it was a series of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester, England, nearing completion with advertising accompaniments that said it would be the finest in the British Isles. The order, placed by the Midland Railway Company, owners of the hotel, was remarkable in that it broke what had long been considered an untouchable precedent. It was the first large order for fine art work ever placed by England in America, and brought the painter wide publicity at a time when it seems to have been considerably needed. Twelve panels were included in the series, and the Midland Railway Company agreed to pay $25,000, a sum almost incredible in those hard times; but the fee was payable on delivery. The Midland’s art committee knew what it was getting. In 1898 Borglum had painted a series of panels for the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, another property of the railroad. They were a graceful, joyous group, and Gutzon admitted in his diary that he was a little proud of them. They represented the four seasons with lithe, slender maidens as the central figures. They were pleasant-looking and the critics liked them. For “Spring,” they danced with garlands of flowers, the trees and background shrubbery in harmony with pale spring colors. For “Summer,” the same girls were shown relaxed on the bank of a bubbling pool with young Pan playing his pipes for them. The “Autumn” panel pictured them dancing out the juice of the grapes. And in “Winter,” Pan, now old and gray, sat on a bleak shore gazing at the hardly visible wraiths of the maidens as they pirouetted away over the ocean. These panels are still extant. The group of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester was finished in 1903, and it seems to have pleased the critics even more than it did Borglum, who admitted that he was pleased with it. The central figure in a panel twenty-seven feet high showed Sir Lancelot escorting Guenevere to King Arthur’s court. Lancelot, “the chief of knights and darling of the court,” and Queen Guenevere, the loveliest of the ladies, were in the foreground on horseback, traveling through a leafy English wood. Mounted men in armor followed at a distance.