Poor Pellegrini’s misfortunes dated from the time when, abandoning the practice of caricature, he sought to establish himself as a painter in oils. Soon after he had started upon this perilous enterprise he said to me one day at the Arts Club, “Joe, I will make that you have not told the lie.” “What lie?” I inquired. “You have say,” he replied, “that I shall be the finest portrait-painter of the day. You will see--I _will_ be.” As a matter of fact I had never ventured upon any such daring prophecy, neither did I have any faith in the chances of his success. Nor, I am sure, did he ever believe I had said it. It was rather, I suspect, a wily device of the Neapolitan to pledge my support for the new departure which he had taken in his art. Towards the close of his life he rarely came to any Club, and I think he felt deeply the failure that had overtaken him. Very quaintly, as we drove home one night, he gave expression to the consciousness that lay upon him that he had not long to live. “When I die,” he said, “which ’appen short----” and then he turned away with the sentence unfinished. Of his talent as a caricaturist there can never be any question. He had the rare power of finding an equation for every face, summarising in a few lines its salient points of oddity. And this same power he exhibited in his shrewd judgment of character. At a dinner-table little that was characteristic escaped his humorous regard. Though alien born, and almost jealously retaining to the end of his life amongst us his individuality as a foreigner, he possessed a quick and just appreciation of our national characteristics, more especially as they lent themselves to humorous portrayal. He once said to me, “A man may caricature the people of a race that is not his own, but it needs a native to judge them seriously.” He forgot his own maxim, poor fellow, when he launched out as a painter of portraits, for the source of his failure lay not merely in insufficient power, but in the lack of true comprehension of the deeper qualities of character. CHAPTER X THE GROSVENOR GALLERY AND THE NEW GALLERY When, for reasons that need not now be discussed, Mr. Hallé and I severed our connection with the Grosvenor Gallery, we at once cast about to establish its successor. It was obvious to us both that if the experiment was to be made successfully it must be made without delay, and, as a matter of fact, the New Gallery as it stands to-day was constructed and completed within the brief period of three months. One of our initial difficulties was to secure a suitable site, and the second obstacle, scarcely less formidable, was to procure from those who favoured the movement sufficient resources to justify us in proceeding with the work.