ABSTRACT
The poetic and artistic instincts of the girl were repressed, and her education consisted of the superficial , elements' taught to upper class girls of her period. But from the school-room drawing class she acquired manual skill enough to express some of her art conceptions. One special series of water colour paintings, made before she was sixteen, still survives-beautiful fairies of every age and complexion, in every imaginable graceful attitude, swinging in a cobweb, floating on the breeze on a fluffy turkey feather, hanging from a. harebell, sleeping in a. rose. Her grandfather heard of this, and sternly checked her for idleness and folly; 'girls had no need to believe nonsense, they had no power to be artists, and it would be unseemly for them to try to be. so; their sphere was the fireside, their implements the needle and the cookery book' -the old masculine arguments for the Massacre of the Innocents, i.e., the budding powers of feminine genius. But she was allowed to play cards without reproachthat entered a woman's sphere. Horatio Macculloch, in her youth one of the chief rising landscape artists of Scotland, played cards with her, the stakes being her anathematised 'fairies.' He won them, preserved them, and at his death willed them back to her. During the years they had delighted and stimulated many painters, and who knows what Sir Noel Paton, the Queen's painter of fairies, may not have owed to them. The man went on to fruition and victory, th{~ woman was crushed into inertness, and in the silence the world repeated, 'A woman can never be a great artist!' But her suppressed art instincts increased the general charm of Lady Oswald; music and painting especially delighted her, and her sympathy with highclass literature kindled many friends. She has transmitted her talents to her daughter, who, under the signature E. J. 0., is known as a. traveller, a travelwriter, a poet and an artist."
