DISTINCTIVE PORTRAIT

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 31, 31 October 1932, Page 8

DISTINCTIVE PORTRAIT

Painting of John Ballance OFFER TO GOVERNMENT A fine portrait in oils of the late John Ballance, Premier of New Zealand from 1891 until his death on April 27, 1893, has been submitted for sale to the Government, and now stands in the Prime room for the inspection of members of Cabinet. The portrait is by P. Tennyson Cole, an eminent English painter, who numbered among ms subjects such distinguished men as King Edward, Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes, and Joseph Chamberlain. Shortly after it was painted the likeness so impressed Mr. Seddon, who succeeded Mr. Ballance in the Premiership, that he purchased it for his private collection; and it has now been offered to the Government, for permanent hanging in Parliament Buildings, by Mr. Seddon’s relatives. ■ The painting of the portrait is briefly described by Tennyson Cole in a book of reminiscences, “Vanity Varnished,” which he published in London only last year. "I had not been long in New Zealand,”. writes Mr. Cole, “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 that he died from 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 Seddon, who succeeded him as the 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 too.” Mr. Forbes considers the portrait a very fine work. “But unfortuantely,’’ he said, "the Government has no money.”