But I did once come in close touch with it, when I sat for my own portrait to Sanderson, the great Præteritist. In those days, when chromography gave very little help to the artist, you would often have to “sit” twice or three times before the painter caught what he considered a likeness. It was during the enforced idleness of one of these “sittings” that I had a long conversation with him which interested me so much that I wrote down notes of it afterwards. We talked of Futurism; he said it was all very well, but the trouble about it was it had no future. He told me (what I did not know) that the term “futurism,” when it was first invented, in the early part of the century (“before you were born, my dear”—waving his brush at me), meant simply a dissatisfaction with present standards in art and a determination to find new methods: it was only with Lennox and Burstall that it took on its new meaning. The old Futurists refused, indeed, to draw the thing as they saw it, but they had not reached the idea of portraying things _as one day they would be_. It was Lennox’s _Ruins of Westminster Cathedral_ that first heralded this much-criticized departure; and it was Burstall who developed the notion in portrait-painting. He was something of a missionary: unhappily married himself, he maintained that it was one of the functions of Art to show the evanescence of beauty, and when _débutantes_ came to sit to him he represented them as those wrinkled old women whom we still see and admire (he was speaking, of course, in 1960) in his portraits. He was a missionary, and something of a martyr; in consequence of his decision, he had to struggle for a long time with neglect and poverty; and it was only his portrait of Prince Albert, then three years old, as six foot high and a Colonel of Hussars, that drew attention to him once more. He got all the babies after that.