When next I met Macdonald it was after a long lapse of time, in 1846, in
Rome. Thither he had gone to study his divine art, and there he had
remained for a number of years in the exercise of it. He was now the
Signor Lorenzo of the Palazzo Barberini, the most successful and
celebrated maker of busts, probably, in Rome, having achieved fame,
fortune, the favor of the great, and the smiles of the fair, of the most
fastidious portion of the English society that makes its winter season
in Italy. He dined several times at our house (I was living with my
sister and her husband); under his guidance we went to see the statutes
of the Vatican by torchlight; and he came out once or twice in the
summer of that year to visit us at our villa at Frascati.
I returned to Rome in 1852, and saw Macdonald frequently, in his studio,
in our own house, and in general society; and shortly before leaving
Rome I met him at dinner at Mrs. Archer Clive's (the authoress of "Paul
Ferrol"). I had a nosegay of snowdrops in the bosom of my dress, and
Macdonald, who sat next me, observed that they reminded him of Scotland,
that he had never seen one in all the years he had passed in Italy, and
did not even know that they grew there.
The next day I went to the gardener of the Villa Medici, an old friend
of mine, and begged him to procure a pot of snowdrops for me, which I
carried to Macdonald's studio, thinking an occasional reminiscence of
his own northern land, which he had not visited for years, not a bad
element to infuse into his Roman life and surroundings. Macdonald's
portraits are generally good likenesses, sufficiently idealized to be
also good works of art. In statuary he never accomplished any thing of
extraordinary excellence. I think the "Ulysses Recognized by his Dog"
his best performance in sculpture. His studio was an extremely
interesting place of resort, from the portraits of his many remarkable
sitters with which it was filled.
I met dear old Macdonald, in the winter of 1873, creeping in the sun
slowly up the Pincio as I waddled heavily down it (_Eheu!_), his
snow-white hair and moustache making his little-altered and strongly
marked features only more striking. I visited his studio and found
there, ardently and successfully creating immortal gods, a handsome,
pleasing youth, his son, inheriting his father's genius, and, strange to
say, his broadest of Scotch accents, though he had himself never been
out of Rome, where he was born.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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