PORTRAIT OF BALLANCE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 258, 31 October 1932, Page 9

PORTRAIT OF BALLANCE.

OFFERED TO GOVERNMENT. OWNED BY SEDDOX FAMILY. (By Telegraph.—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, Saturday. A fine portrait in oils of John Ballance, Premier, of New Zealand from ISOI until- his.ideath on April 27, 1893, lias been offered for sale to the Government by members of the Seddon famiV, and is at present in the Prime Minister's room at Parliament Buildings for inspection by members of the Cabinet. «

The portrait is by P. Tennyson Cole, an eminent English painter, who, in a book of reminiscences, "Vanity Varnished," which* he published in London last year, wrote: "I had not been long in New Zealand when I was privileged to paint the Countess of Glasgow and her daughter, now Countess of Cranbrook, and the late Premiers, John Ballance and Dick Seddon. Premier Ballance succumbed to an operation shortly after I painted him, but to those frivolous friends who declared he died from the shock of seeing my finished portrait of him I was able to prove that the regrettable death of this distinguished sitter was so sudden that he never saw the finished result of the sittings. When later his devoted friend, Mr. Seddon, who succeeded him as Premier, saw the portrait, nothing would satisfy him but that he should possess it and at once he commissioned me to paint his own portrait."

The Prime Minister, the Tit. Hon. G. W. Forbes, remarked that the portrait was a very fine work. "But unfortunately," he added, "the Government has no money to buy it."