Excerpt from Mrs. E. M. Ward's Reminiscences

About my grandfather so much has already been written that it is difficult to find anything fresh to say. He has been described as a genius, and as an animal painter it is said he stood alone in his day. He was undoubtedly a worker - a constant worker - and in that one respect at least I might say he was a. Phenomenon, for no other word sums him up SO satisfactorily.

He was one of those men Whom Fortune kisses on one cheek and Slaps on both - a man endowed with the rarest talents and handicapped in all his endeavours to excel in them by the most unusual and unremittingly adverse circumstances.

Impecuniosity, brought about by a succession of misfortunes, prevented his parents from educating him decently, and from being of any subsequent material assistance; whilst his brother William, to whom he was apprenticed to learn mezzotinting, perceiving in him a possible rival, at one time did everything he could to dissuade him from pursuing that art.

His early friendship with George Morland, son of Henry Robert Morland, who married pretty Anne Ward, and drank himself to death, was productive of nothing but misery and annoyance. The Press was dead against him, and his Magnum Opus, the elaborate Allegory of the Battle of Waterloo, on which he spent seven of the most valuable years of his life, was a comparative failure but in spite of these and other disasters, which would have completely crushed any ordinarily constituted man, my grandfather's grim, puritanical nature, sublimely heroic in its desperate struggles against the longest odds, eventually triumphed; and he won for himself a permanent reputation.

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