"Sitter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which surrounded the house, afforded plenty of sitting-out room. No one who shared in the parties will ever forget the long and good talks on the lawn on which the wicker chairs were set with brightly coloured rugs for the sitter's feet. Guests worthy of that honour were taken through the orchid house by Mr. Chamberlain himself, for his knowledge and love of his favourite flower was no ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet in deciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiar temperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical and mental characteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... law of construction that any master who can color can always do any pane of his window that he likes, separately from the rest. Thus, you see, here is one of Sir Joshua's first sittings: the head is very nearly done with the first color; a piece of background is put in round it: his sitter has had a pretty silver brooch on, which Reynolds, having done as much as he chose to the face for that time, paints quietly in its place below, leaving the dress between to be fitted in afterwards; and he puts a little patch of the yellow gown that is to be, at the side. And it ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... ball,—or an oyster bedded on a rock, with silver fishes playing rapid games of hide and seek, love and hate, in the clear briny depths above and beneath! If the angels ever look out of their sphere of intense spiritual realities to indulge in a laugh, methinks such a lonely tripod-sitter, cased over with his invulnerable, non-conducting cloak and hood,—shrinking, dodging, or bracing himself up on the defensive, as the crowd fans him with its rush or jostles up against him,—like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... offered to paint a signboard which should proclaim to the passer-by the name and nature of the Society. My offer was accepted, and the Board was sent down to my studio, where I treated it as I should a most distinguished sitter—as a picture or an etching—throwing my artistic soul into the Board, which gradually became a Board no longer, as it grew into a picture. You say they say it was only a butterfly. Mendacity could go no further. I painted a lion and a butterfly. The lion lay with the butterfly—a ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... simple and solid magnificence of the mahogany furnishings, the leather-covered chairs, the big purposeful desk. Above the old-fashioned marble mantel hung a life-sized portrait in oils of Inglesby himself. The artist had done his sitter stern justice—one might call the result retribution; and one wondered if Inglesby realized how immensely revealing it was. There he sat, solid, successful, informed with a sort of brutal egotism that never gives quarter. In despite of a malevolent determination to look pleasant, his ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Sam's condescension at his wedding-feast, overtopped the mark; but it was erring on the safe side. Who would not sink the man in the gentleman? After all, perhaps the sages and wits were not altogether disinterested: almost every one of them filled Sam Winnington's famous sitter's chair, and depended on Sam's tasteful pencil handing down their precious ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... little as compared with Western customs. Neither chairs nor bedsteads existed; people sat and slept on the floor, separated from it only by mats made of rice-straw, by cushions or by woollen carpets, and in aristocratic houses there was a kind of stool to support the arm of the sitter, a lectern, and a dais for sitting on. Viands were served on tables a few inches high, and people sat while eating. From the middle of the seventh century a clepsydra of Chinese origin was used ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... echoes were faint, nor did they matter, for they were of our time. In looking at his model he had seen and felt something; he had noted this harshly, crudely, but he noted it; and to do this, is after all the main thing. His sitter had inspired him. The word "inspired" offended him; I withdrew it; I said that he had been fortunate in his model, and he admitted that: to see that thin, olive-complexioned girl with fine delicate features ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Velasquez' Lady with the Flea-bitten Nose. That was not her real name, but by that she was distinguished at Gravier's to emphasise the picture's beauty notwithstanding the somewhat revolting peculiarity of the sitter's appearance. With Ruskin, Burne-Jones, and Watts, he had put aside his bowler hat and the neat blue tie with white spots which he had worn on coming to Paris; and now disported himself in a soft, broad-brimmed ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... been carried to the bed in the inner chamber, all remained as it had been found. There were no signs of robbery—not even of a struggle. The cushions of the easy-chair still bore the impress of the sitter's weight; the footstool was hardly pushed aside; the massive library table was undisturbed; the silver spoons and sugar-tongs beside the tumbler and plate on the supper tray; the yellow light of the lamp still burnt; not a paper was ruffled, not a drawer pulled out. Only a rifle stood ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hair, and, on this occasion, masquerades in a furred robe, and falling collar. But even through the disguise of a studio 'costume,' the finely-perceptive genius of Reynolds has managed to suggest much that is most appealing in his sitter's nature. Past suffering, present endurance, the craving to be understood, the mute deprecation of contempt, are all written legibly in this pathetic picture. It has been frequently copied, often ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... of Dunstable, the girl accountant in the distance had also moved sharply, so as to look at the young man. But in the bustle of Madame Vavasour's entrance, and her passage to the sitter's chair, the girl's ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... palms on the stack, and after a time examine the large slate for a message, but find none. I may incidentally remark that this last examination unconsciously verifies in the sitter's mind the fact that I actually erased ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... phenomena. On the other hand, I certainly think that ninety per cent. of the rappings and the manifestations of musical enthusiasts is due to trickery on the part of the medium, or, if there be no professional medium present, to an over-zealous sitter. ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... accused of impressing real individuals, and compelling them to serve in my book; that this reproach was unjust, they who know me can best vouch for, while I myself can honestly aver, that I never took a portrait without the consent of the sitter. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... September 27, Tennyson read his new poem, 'Maud', to Mrs. Browning, while Rossetti, the only other person present besides the family, privately drew his likeness in pen and ink. The likeness has become well known; the unconscious sitter must also, by this time, be acquainted with it; but Miss Browning thinks no one except herself, who was near Rossetti at the table, was at the moment aware of its being made. All eyes must have been turned towards Tennyson, seated by his hostess on the sofa. Miss ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... then represented him as I wished. When the bust was finished he said, 'It is not at all like me; my expression is more unhappy.'" West, the American, who five years later painted his lordship at Leghorn, substantiates the above half-satirical anecdote, by the remark, "He was a bad sitter; he assumed a countenance that did not belong to him, as though he were thinking of a frontispiece for Chlde Harold." Thorwaldsen's bust, the first cast of which was sent to Hobhouse, and pronounced ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... the summer near Balcom's Works was sketching Editha's beauty, which lent itself wonderfully to the effects of a colorist. It had come to that confidence which is rather apt to grow between artist and sitter, and Editha had told ...
— Different Girls • Various
... first rate for a beginner, and it makes a deal of difference on our arms. The others are all paddling three, and, though Jonathan and I have beaten three before now, when our scalps depended on our doing so, it makes all the difference in the work whether you have a sitter to take along, or ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... between whiles, finding 'duty boats' hanging in dark corners under banks, like weeds - our own was a 'supervision boat' - and they, as they reported 'all right!' flashing their hidden light on us, and we flashing ours on them. These duty boats had one sitter in each: an Inspector: and were rowed 'Ran-dan,' which - for the information of those who never graduated, as I was once proud to do, under a fireman-waterman and winner of Kean's Prize Wherry: who, in the course of his tuition, took hundreds of ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... correspondent that it is by no means needful to use entirely violet-coloured glass, but the roof thereof exposed to the rays of the sun should be so protected; for although the light is much subdued, and the glare so painful to the eyes of the sitter is taken away, yet but few of the actinic rays are obstructed. It has been proposed to coat the interior with smalt mixed with starch, and afterwards varnished; but this does not appear to have answered. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... they may be styled lords, as is the Scottish custom," said James the Gross, "even as when I was laird of Balvany and a sitter on the bed of justice, it was my right ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... of Dives these old benches could have told! What troopers, and beggars, and cowled monks, and wayfarers had sat there!—each sitter helping to wear away the wood till it had come to have the depressions of a drinking-trough. Night after night in the long centuries, as the darkness fell upon the hamlet—what tales and confidences, and what murmured anguish of remorse, what ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... moment in my career. A very influential sitter of mine—you remember the fat lady with the crimson curtain behind her?—had come to the conclusion or been persuaded that I had painted her old and vulgar, which, in fact, she was. Her whole clique ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... almost in sight of the cuckold. The fair was no longer coy, and easily yielded to his desires. He in short carried the girl home and then prostituted her to the duke's pleasure, after he had been cloyed himself. The old man going home, and finding his sitter asleep, his wife fled, and his money gone, was thrown into a state of madness, and soon hanged himself. The news was soon spread about the neighbourhood, and reached the inn, where both lovers, now as weary of their purchase as desirous of it before, advised her to go ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... led through the valley of the Sitter, a stream fed by the Sentis Alps, and spanned by a bridge hundreds of feet above the water. The same smooth carpet of velvet green was ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... him, I endeavoured to make unobserved a sketch of his face. The warder noticing this, called me to the front to make it boldly, and the prisoner, smiling, told me to go on with it; which I did, and that not so badly—at least, the sitter approved ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... deaf and fearfully arbitrary, but because Lucinda had said that she must go to her cousin's wedding, and the family always had to bow to Lucinda's mandates. Lucinda was Aunt Mary's maid, but she had become so indispensable as a sitter at the off-end of the latter's ear-trumpet that none of the grand-nephews or grand-nieces ever thought for an instant of crossing one of her wishes. So it was to Arethusa that the explanations due Aunt Mary's interest in her scapegrace fell, and she bowed her back to the burden with the resignation ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... their devotions. The panes were very small and lozenge-shaped, and soldered to one another with strips of lead: the like you may see to this day in our rural cottages. The chairs were rude and primitive, all but the arm-chair, whose back, at right angles with its seat, was so high that the sitter's head stopped two feet short of the top. This chair was of oak, and carved at the summit. There was a copper pail, that went in at the waist, holding holy water, and a little hand-besom to sprinkle it far and wide; and a long, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... proceeded from a great armchair placed beside the fire, which was blazing, notwithstanding the heat of the season and of the country. It was one of those armchairs that you still see in old castles, and which seem made to read one's self to sleep in, so easy is every part of it. The sitter sinks into a circular cushion of down; if the head leans back, the cheeks rest upon pillows covered with silk, and the seat juts out so far beyond the elbows that one may believe the provident upholsterers of our forefathers sought to provide that the book ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... has reached us, and as it represents a point of view which, so far as we know, has not found sympathy in the Press opinions which have already appeared, we print it for the edification of the artist, the sitter and any others who may have a few moments to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... countenance of the sitter, and motioning him with his pencil into a particular attitude, Sir James Thornhill commenced operations; and, while he rapidly transferred his lineaments to the canvass, engaged him in conversation, in the course of which he artfully contrived to draw him into a recital ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... angles at which a face may be drawn. The first shows one-tenth of the face from the right side, the second two-tenths, and so on, waxing to full-face five-tenths; then waning sets in on the left side, four, three, and two-tenths, until ten-tenths shows nothing more than the back of the sitter's head. ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... tacit acquiescence of the subject, who sits looking out upon you with inimitable innocence, and apparently under the impression that he is in a room by himself. For Raeburn could plunge at once through all the constraint and embarrassment of the sitter, and present the face, clear, open, and intelligent as at the most disengaged moments. This is best seen in portraits where the sitter is represented in some appropriate action: Neil Gow with his fiddle, Doctor Spens shooting an arrow, or Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause. Above all, from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... planks roughly put together; now they were worm-eaten, bare, save for a thick carpet of greasy dust, which deadened the sound of booted feet. The place only boasted of a couple of chairs, both of which had to be propped against the wall lest they should break, and bring the sitter down upon the floor; otherwise a number of empty wine barrels did duty for seats, and rough deal boards on broken ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... mother, renting an old, end-of-the-road, far-in-the-country farmhouse; by then I had two small daughters. I strongly preferred to take care of my own children instead of turning them over to a baby sitter. My location and my children made it difficult for me to work any place but at home. So naturally, I made my family home into a hospital for psychotic individuals. I started out with one resident patient at a time, using no psychiatric ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... made to accommodate itself to the shape of the room, but with a hollowed-out space on the window-side large enough to hold a chair for the sitter who would use its top as a desk. On it were various articles suitable to its double use. Without being crowded, it displayed a pile of magazines and pamphlets, boxes for stationery, a writing pad with its accompaniments, a lamp, and some few ornaments, among which was a large box, richly ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... the poses are of a high artistic order, and quite a relief from the conventional positions and accessories so frequently seen in professional work. The expressions secured are also, as a rule, unusually pleasing and natural. This is, no doubt, in a great measure due to the sitter feeling more at ease in the amateur friend's drawing room than in a stranger's studio. Particularly is this the case in some excellent work—full-length pictures—sent from the other side of the Atlantic, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... the artist, once a member of the Convention and a regicide, then an Imperialist, painted the portrait of Pius VII., and the Moniteur in the number of March 30, 1805, thus praised the picture and the sitter. "A large crowd gathered in the gallery of the Senate, to see the portrait of His Holiness by M. David, member of the Institute and first painter to the Emperor. This portrait is in every way worthy of the master's reputation. If the first essential in a portrait is an ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... characters of voice and countenance with which my question was answered in all gradations, from gentle and hospitable kindness to downright brutality." Further promises and assurances are given, and in July, as we learn from a letter of Southey's, the good Matilda was still high in hopes that her sitter would eventually sit. Her hopes could not have come from Southey, who had none. "You would have found him the most wonderful man living in conversation, but the most impracticable one for a painter, and had you begun the picture it is ten thousand to one that you ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... thought Frederick's theory rather a rough one at first, she saw how he worked it out into continual production of kindness in fact. After a bad night with his mother (for he insisted on taking his turn as a sitter-up) he was busy next morning before breakfast, contriving a leg-rest for Dixon, who was beginning to feel the fatigues of watching. At breakfast-time, he interested Mr. Hale with vivid, graphic, rattling accounts of the wild life he had led ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the Seigneur Directors of the class above them, was that they differed from cattle in stipulating for seats. With the exception of that provision to suit their weakness, the accommodation extended to them resembled pens, and the seats were emphatically seats of penitence, intended to grind the sitter for his mean pittance payment and absence of aspiration to a higher state. Hard angular wood, a low roof, a shabby square of window aloof, demanding of him to quit the seat he insisted on having, if he would indulge in views of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... state of somnambulism execute a picture. But neither case would be identical in principle with mine. The artist and the mathematician would both have executed in their sleep what they had laid the foundation of when awake. I, on the other hand, would, should I transfer my aerial sitter to canvas, simply paint what I saw when wide awake, just as in undertaking to reproduce any other face from memory, whether observed once for twenty seconds or frequently and for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... works. First comes the study of her sitter, and perhaps one entire sitting will be devoted to this. Then follows the sketching of the face on the ivory—a transcript of the form and spirit. Lastly comes the actual painting, with infinitesimally small brushes, each stroke made under ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... were going away, Bastin paused beneath a very beautiful portrait of my late wife, the work of an artist famous for his power of bringing out the inner character, or what some might call the soul, of the sitter. He stared at it for a while in his short-sighted way, then said: "Do you know, Arbuthnot, it has sometimes occurred to me, and never more than at this moment, that although they were different in height and so on, there was a really curious ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... particular port first sent estimates to the Board, and permission was not allowed until the Surveyor of Sloops had certified that the estimates were reasonable. Nor were the bills paid until both the commander and mate of the cruiser, or else the Tide Surveyor or the Sitter of the Boat, as the case might be, had certified that the work was properly carried out. And the same rule applied to the supply of cordage and to ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... good-looking even now, and perhaps, after being repulsed in their quest for bed and board, drifted off into an idle dream of how they might have met her a few years ago when they were less famous but more magnetically attractive. What a sitter she would have been for them, if she wouldn't be anything else! They admired the extreme delicacy of her nose that seemed so narrow in the well-rounded face, the loose brown hair that showed such a red flash in it beneath her ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... Wild Ones, till we take This climbing cat-o'-the-mount! He shall not make A tale of God's high dances!" Out then shone Arm upon arm, past count, and closed upon The pine, and gripped; and the ground gave, and down It reeled. And that high sitter from the crown Of the green pine-top, with a shrieking cry Fell, as his mind grew clear, and there hard by Was horror visible. 'Twas his mother stood O'er him, first priestess of those rites of blood. He ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... start. Sitter after sitter sought him out in his house on the Bloemgracht; the most distinguished men in the town hastened to patronize him. His work was liked by the burghers whom he painted, its strength was felt by artists, whose canvases soon showed its influence. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... impressive pen-portrait, and being from the hand of one who knew his sitter, should ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... ordinary man, the recent introduction of high-art methods into photography has done much to diminish the unpleasantness of the operation. In the old days of crude and direct posing, there was no escape for the sitter. He had to stand up, backed by a rustic stile and a flabby canvas sheet covered with exotic trees, glaring straight into the camera. To prevent any eleventh-hour retreat, a sort of spiky thing was shoved firmly into the back of ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the very least, in the good sittings, truthfulness and exactitude much preponderate, whatever may be the source from which Phinuit obtains his facts; whether he gets them from disincarnated spirits, as he asserts; whether he reads them in the consciousness or sub-consciousness of the sitter, or whether they are furnished him by what he calls the "influence" which the persons to whom the objects presented to him ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... have several of that stamp) who like to tease other people's understandings as wool-combers tease wool. He is certainly the flower of the flock. He is the oldest frequenter of the place, the latest sitter-up, well-informed, inobtrusive, and that sturdy old English character, a lover of truth and justice. I never knew Mounsey approve of anything unfair or illiberal. There is a candour and uprightness about his mind which can neither ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... fond of sitting in chairs tilted against the wall, as we sometimes do at home. Indeed they go beyond us in this respect; for in Cuba they have invented a kind of chair which, by lowering the back and raising the knees, places the sitter precisely in the posture he would take if he sat in a chair leaning backward against a wall. It is a luxurious attitude, I must own, and I do not wonder that it is a favorite with lazy people, for it relieves one of all the trouble ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... rarely reckoned Worthy a tutor's kindly word— (For when I said we got a Second I really meant we got a Third)— The games we played were often tinged with bitter, Amidst the damns no faintest hint of praise Greeted us when we missed the authentic "sitter"— But thou wert always ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... said the Missourian, gravely eying the old man—"yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you. You are a late sitter-up in this life; past man's usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty. Hearty food, taken late, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... The Word. - Miss Bouncer discovered with her camera, arranging her photographic chemicals. She soliloquizes: "There! now, all is ready for my sitter." She calls the footman (Mr. Verdant Green), and says, "John, you may show the Lady Fitz-Canute upstairs." The footman shows in Miss Honeywood, dressed in an antiquated bonnet and mantle, waving a huge fan. John gives her a chair, into which ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... dress. But surely if ever hair bore the stamp of unstudied, even ugly custom, it does so here. Then, too, Woltmann himself, as are all who adopt this explanation, is unable to reconcile the oldest age which can be assigned to this sitter with the youngest that can be assumed for the Basel painting of 1529 upon a hypothesis of only seven years' interval. Temperament and trouble can do much in seven years; but not so much as this. I say temperament advisedly; because all the evidence of Holbein's ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... of sleeping power in him, he saw them only as so many individuals that might some day test their ability against his own. And if he peered at them closely and marked down face after face in the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game of business that he looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or that one arrayed against him in deals, and planning the method by which he would win ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... with poetry.' Linnell's pictures, are 'a sort of "Up, Guards, and at 'em" paintings,' and Mason's exquisite idylls are 'as national as a Jingo poem'! Mr. Birket Foster's landscapes 'smile at one much in the same way that Mr. Carker used to "flash his teeth,"' and Mr. John Collier gives his sitter 'a cheerful slap on the back, before he says, like a shampooer in a Turkish bath, "Next man!" Mr. Herkomer's art is, 'if not a catch-penny art, at all events a catch-many-pounds art,' and Mr. W. B. Richmond is a 'clever trifler,' who 'might do really good work' 'if he would employ his time ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... our adventurers found themselves comparatively rich men. This was satisfactory, and Ned admitted as much one morning to Tom, as he sat on a three-legged stool in his studio—i.e. a dilapidated log-hut—preparing for a sitter, while the latter was busily engaged in concluding his morning repast ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... And here we may pause in our miserable and comminatory progress to admit gladly that in such societies are to be found plenty of talent and of what is much rarer, sincerity. Here are men who take art seriously; here are men who have no prospective sitter, no rich patron, no terrible drawing-master in mind; here are men to whom painting is the most important thing in the world. Unfortunately, in their isolation they are apt, like the rest, to come on the parish. Theirs is no vulgar provincialism; ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... always eager to show woman dressed for the part, and well dressed. She was incapable of stating the deeps of character; and had she had the power, she would have looked upon it as something of an indecency—or worse, an indelicacy. She would, in fact, have preferred to deny the deeps. She sets her sitter ever in the drawing-room of fashion, draws a heavy curtain with a rattle between the drawing-room and the inner boudoir (the "sulking room"), slams the door on the bedroom, or any hint that there is a bedroom, before she ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... end of the week, and I was still without a model. My nights had been nearly sleepless, and my days full of feverish anxiety: an active anxiety to accept another sitter and withstand the temptation of Viola, which fought desperately with the more passive anxiety not to be satisfied and to be obliged to yield. Between these two I had grown thin, as they fought within me, tearing me in ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... Jane. "My belief is that I missed him. Though how I came to do it beats me. I don't suppose I've missed a sitter like that since I was a child in the nursery. Of course," she proceeded, looking on the reasonable side, "the visibility wasn't good, and I fired from the hip, but it's no use saying I oughtn't at least to have winged him, ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... had put something more of his sitter than usual. He had painted the soul of the girl in the body of the woman of thirty, and if he rendered his subject in a manner more stilted than usual, he repaid her in the real interest with which her portrait was invested. He liked Olga. He had accepted her warily at first until ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... was found that the repairs would cost about a thousand pounds; and by the plan, that the seats, at eighteen pence a sitter, would yield better than a hundred pounds a-year; so that there was no scruple, on the part of the town-council, in borrowing the money wanted. This was the first public debt ever contracted by the corporation, and people were very fain to get their ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... good studio. Madge was painting a miniature of Eleanor. The diminutive size of her undertaking was causing her a good deal of embarrassment, and she was consequently inclined to be rather severe with her sitter. ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... at the 'Southampton' was Mr. George Mouncey, of the firm of Mouncey & Gray, solicitors, Staple's Inn. 'He was,' says Hazlitt, 'the oldest frequenter of the place and the latest sitter-up; well-informed, unobtrusive, and that sturdy old English character, a lover of truth and justice. Mouncey never approved of anything unfair or illiberal, and, though good-natured and gentleman-like, never let an absurd or unjust proposition pass ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... given full rein to imagination and have retold it in my own way. It deals with the old law—the old border days—therefore it is better first. Soon, perchance, I shall have the pleasure of writing of the border of to-day, which in Joe Sitter's laconic speech, "Shore is 'most as bad an' ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... a competent portraitist at work? The infinite pains a skilled man spends on the preliminaries before he takes one step towards a likeness nearly always wears down the patience of the sitter. He measures with his eye, he plumbs, he sketches tentatively, he places in here a dab, there a blotch, he puts behind him apparently unproductive hours—and then all at once he is ready to begin something that will not have to be done over again. An amateur, ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... there is always something in Carolus-Duran’s attitude when at work which recalls the swordsman. With an enormous palette in one hand and a brush in the other, he has a way of planting himself in front of his sitter that is amusingly suggestive of a duel. His lithe body sways to and fro, his fine leonine face quivers with the intense study of his model; then with a sudden spring forward, a few rapid touches are dashed on the canvas (like home strokes in the enemy’s weakest spot) with a precision of ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... arm above the smoky mantel-shelf for roasting. The plain kitchen table is opposite the fire, at her elbow, with a candle on it in a tin sconce. Her chair, like all the others in the room, is uncushioned and unpainted; but as it has a round railed back and a seat conventionally moulded to the sitter's curves, it is comparatively a chair of state. The room has three doors, one on the same side as the fireplace, near the corner, leading to the best bedroom; one, at the opposite end of the opposite wall, leading to the scullery and washhouse; and ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... then the latest thing in hotels, but whose ancient corner of Fourth Avenue and—was it Eighteenth Street?—long ago ceased to know it; the gentle, very gentle, portraitist was Mr. Eyre Crowe and the obliging sitter my father, who sat in response to Mr. Thackeray's desire that his protege should find employment. The protector after a little departed, blessing the business, which took the form of a small full-length ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... portrayed the thinker whom the world will honour many centuries hence. Some will perhaps prefer the more objective treatment; and it is certain that Watts's ambition led him into difficult paths. Striving to represent the soul of his sitter, he was conscious at times that he failed—that he could not see or realize what he was searching for. More than once he abandoned a commission when he felt this uncertainty in himself. But when the accord between ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Denis climbed the little ladder and stepped over the threshold. He looked suspiciously from Gombauld to his sitter, and could learn nothing from the expression of their faces except that they both seemed pleased to see the visitors. Were they really glad, or were they cunningly ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Time of Tattooing, will be long remembered. An enthusiastic sitter celebrated the event in verse. Several lines were repeated to us by Hardy, some of which, in a sort of colloquial ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... portrait-sittings. He could talk and smoke, and he could incidentally acquire information. He liked to discuss any man's profession with him, and in his talks with Flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight which would enable him to appreciate the old masters. Flagg found him a tractable sitter, and a most interesting one. Once he paid him a compliment, then apologized for having said ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to Norwich about a fortnight later accompanied by Haydon, who was to become the guest of his sitter, {47a} and George was left to the compilation of Celebrated Trials. Sir Richard Phillips appears to have been a man as prolific of suggestion as he was destitute of tact. He regarded his authors as the instruments of his own ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... station, South Canterbury. Educated, Christchurch Normal School. Public school teacher for four years; afterwards private teacher and regular contributor to 'Otago Witness' and other journals. 'The Spirit of the Rangatira, and other Ballads' (Melbourne, 1889). 'The Sitter on the Rail, ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... closely connected with the motive of the artist's visit. Lyon remarked that it was a great disadvantage to him not to have had some preliminary acquaintance with Sir David—in most cases he found that so important. But the present sitter was so far advanced in life that there was doubtless no time to lose. 'Oh, I can tell you all about him,' said Mr. Ashmore; and for half an hour he told him a good deal. It was very interesting as well as very eulogistic, and Lyon could see that he was a very nice old man, to have endeared ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... public monument. We see he would have other aspects; and that they would all be the aspects of a beggar. Even if one did not admit the extraordinary qualities in the painting, one would have to admit the ordinary qualities in the sitter. If it is not a masterpiece it is a man. But a nocturne by Whistler of mist on the Thames is either a masterpiece or it is nothing; it is either a nocturne or a nightmare of childish nonsense. Made in a certain mood, viewed through a certain temperament, conceived under ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... abode in that chamber looking at the arras, and wondering whether the sitter in the ivory throne would be any other than the thrall in the greenwood cot. He abode there so long that the dusk began to gather in the house, and he could see the images no more; for he was filled with the sweetness of desire when he looked ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... no power to follow the general example, but remained the only sitter in the entire congregation, with my eyes, nay, all my senses, fixed, riveted upon the preacher. This, of course, attracted his attention. I saw him look towards me with surprise, then he started, his voice hesitated for a moment, but he almost immediately continued his benediction, and, as it seemed ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat |
