Miss Mitford owed to her friendship with Sir William Elford her first acquaintance with the artist Haydon. Describing in later years to a friend how this came about, she said: “An amateur painter himself, painting interested Sir William particularly, and he often spoke much, and warmly, of the young man from Plymouth, whose picture of the ‘Judgement of Solomon’ was then on exhibition in London. ‘You must see it,’ said he, ‘even if you come to town on purpose.’ “It so happened,” continued Miss Mitford, “that I merely passed through London that season ... and I arrived at the exhibition in company with a still younger friend so near the period of closing that more punctual visitors were moving out, and the doorkeeper actually turned us and our money back. I persisted, however, assuring him that I only wanted to look at one picture, and promising not to detain him long. Whether my entreaties would have carried the point or not I cannot tell, but half a crown did; so we stood admiringly before the ‘Judgement of Solomon.’ I am no great judge of painting; but that picture impressed me then, as it does now, as excellent in composition, in colour, and in that great quality of telling a story which appeals at once to every mind. Our delight was sincerely felt, and most enthusiastically expressed, as we kept gazing at the picture, and [it] seemed to give much pleasure to the only gentleman who remained in the room—a young and very distinguished-looking person, who had watched with evident amusement our negotiation with the doorkeeper.... I soon surmised that we were seeing the painter as well as his painting; and when two or three years afterwards a friend took me ... to view the ‘Entry into Jerusalem,’ Haydon’s next great picture, then near its completion, I found I had not been mistaken. “Haydon was at that period a remarkable person to look at and listen to.... His figure was short, slight, elastic and vigorous; his complexion clear and healthful.... But how shall I attempt to tell you,” she adds, “of his brilliant conversation, of his rapid energetic manner, of his quick turns of thought as he flew from topic to topic, dashing his brush here and there upon the canvas?... Among the studies I remarked that day in his apartment was one of a mother who had just lost her only child—a most masterly rendering of an unspeakable grief. A sonnet which I could not help writing on the sketch gave rise to our long correspondence, and to a friendship which never flagged.”