[Boston—Monday, 21 June 1875]
Monday noon arrived Bayard Taylor from N.Y as reporter for the Tribune. He dined with us and went to hear Dr. Holmes & Dr Ellis at the opening of the Exhibition of relics. It was a touching scene—there was hardly a dry eye when O.W.H. had finished reading. Taylor ate enormously and called our dinner a lunch, but he was most agreeable, brought me a lovely water color drawing, had much talk on literary subjects but did not feel the great patriotic occasion, quite as he ought it seemed to me.
At tea came William Hunt whose eloquence at times is unsurpassed. He took out a letter from Duveneck, thanking him for the word of artistic recognition he so greatly needed. “Ah! He’s got the right Spirit, it is art he loves more than his native city—you see he probably loves the place where he was born and bred, we all do and we can’t help hankering after it, but he loves art more, he will go wherever he can find the most room for that. But how impossible it is to drum it into people if they can’t see it—now there’s my old friend Ned Wheeler—Well! Ned ain’t much anyway but I was at school with Ned so we always have had a kind of feeling for one another. He came and worked in my studio, one whole winter. Then he went to Newport and I built a studio for him there but whenever I went into it there was Ned for all the world like a spider in his web. He had bought at least ten fathoms of twine and had attached it at every possible angle all about his studio and when I was astonished and said old fellow what yer up to—He said Oh studying perspective, I like to be particular, get things straight!!! Well I let him—so I say about getting in Charles Norton as professor of art at Harvard—Put him in! You drive every knowing fellow out—that’s all. They’ll waste time till they discover something better, then they’ll let him alone. They talk about Millet’s not taking pains. Why he worked several weeks in my studio in Paris one winter and three weeks was constantly upon one hand. The truth is painters shouldn’t talk. They should have their mouths sewed up tight and do the thing not talk about it.
