66 OVER ON THE ISLAND

Deciding the exact style of beard or moustache was often a weighty problem. The Honourable John Hamilton Gray was first given a full beard. Later, it was found that at the Conference he was clean shaven. So the beard came off. Another difficulty faced the artist. The old House of Parliament at Quebec, where the meeting had taken place, had been burned. Much research was therefore necessary to reconstruct the appearance of the Conference room.

For this work Robert Harris received four thousand dollars; for the millions of reproductions, nothing. Moreover, the expense in connection with the under- taking was great, so that his net return must have been around one thousand dollars.

Days, weeks, and months went into the painting of that picture. In 1916, it was destroyed in a few minutes in the disastrous fire which swept through the Dominion Parliament Buildings. Three years later the government asked the artist to reproduce his picture. He started the work but his health pre- vented him from completing it. He died in 1919.

Robert Harris was an Islander. There is, however, one snag. He was born in Wales, in 1849. Like a true Islander, he finally entered Prince of Wales College. There he made cartoons of the professors—holding a book in front of him as he sketched. Later he studied in the leading art centres of Europe. He must have been homesick in foggy old London when he sat down to write on Christmas Eve:

Now as the night here shrouds each gloomy pile, Far in the west I see the sun go down.

Crimson the cliffs which guard my well loved isle, And gild the lowly spires of Charlottetown.