The career of _Hubert Herkomer_ is amongst those adventurous ones which become less and less frequent in the nineteenth century; there are not many who have risen so rapidly to fame and fortune from such modest circumstances. His father was a carver of sacred images in the little Bavarian village of Waal, where Hubert was born in 1849. In 1851 the enterprising Bavarian tried his fortune in the New World. But there he did not succeed in making progress, and in 1857 the family appeared in England, at Southampton. Here he fought his way honestly at the bench where he carved, and as a journeyman worker, whilst his wife gave lessons in music. A commission to carve Peter Vischer's four evangelists in wood brought him with his son to Munich, where they occupied room in the back buildings of a master-carpenter's house, in which they slept, cooked, and worked. In the preparatory class of the Munich Academy the younger Herkomer received his first teaching, and began to draw from the nude, the antique serving as model. At a frame-maker's in Southampton he gave his first exhibition, and drew illustrations for a comic paper. With the few pence which he saved from these earnings he went to London, where he lived from hand to mouth with a companion as poor as himself. He cooked, and his friend scoured the pans; meanwhile he worked as a mason on the frieze of the South Kensington Museum, and hired himself out for the evenings as a zither-player. Then _The Graphic_ became his salvation, and after his drawings had made him known he soon had success with his paintings. "After the Toil of the Day," a picture which he exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1873--a thoughtful scene from the village life of Bavaria, carried out after the manner of Fred Walker--found a purchaser immediately. He was then able to make a home for his parents in the village of Bushey, which he afterwards glorified in the picture "Our Village," and he began his masterpiece "The Last Muster," which obtained in 1878 the great medal at the World Exhibition in Paris. Since then he found the eyes of the English public fixed upon him. There followed at first a series of pictures in which he proceeded upon the lines of Fred Walker's poetic realism: "Eventide," a scene in the Westminster Union; "The Gloom of Idwal," a romantic mountain picture from North Wales; "God's Shrine," a lonely Bavarian hillside path, with peasants praying at a shrine; "Der Bittgang," a group of country people praying for harvest; "Contrasts," a picture of English ladies surrounded by school-children in the Bavarian mountains. At the same time he became celebrated as a portrait painter, his first successes in this field being the likenesses of Wagner and Tennyson, Archibald Forbes, his own father, John Ruskin, Stanley, and the conductor Hans Richter. And he reached the summit of his international fame when his portrait of Miss Grant, "The Lady in White," appeared in