The First Letter

Joseph Clark (1834-1926)

Pencil

H 27.9 cm x W 19.1 cm

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Accession no. E.942-2003

Credit: Given by Rosemary Chiles

Downloaded here, with thanks, for non-commercial online use.

The little boy, wearing a fashionable sailor suit, bends over the paper, concentrating hard on his task; his mother, one hand on the back of his chair, the other on the table in front of him, looks on just as intently. As Henry Stacy Marks had noted long ago, when the two art-students were both setting out on their artistic careers, Clark would spend a good deal of time on his preliminary sketching, producing "little more than a head, or sometimes a figure, slightly but always charmingly indicated" (1: 26) — Jacqueline Banerjee