Every one naturally expected that in the following year the mysterious
Priam Farll would, in accordance with the universal rule for a
successful career in British art, contribute another portrait of another
policeman to the New Gallery--and so on for about twenty years, at the
end of which period England would have learnt to recognize him as its
favourite painter of policemen. But Priam Farll contributed nothing to
the New Gallery. He had apparently forgotten the New Gallery: which was
considered to be ungracious, if not ungrateful, on his part. Instead, he
adorned the Paris salon with a large seascape showing penguins in the
foreground. Now these penguins became the penguins of the continental
year; they made penguins the fashionable bird in Paris, and also (twelve
months later) in London. The French Government offered to buy the
picture on behalf of the Republic at its customary price of five hundred
francs, but Priam Farll sold it to the American connoisseur Whitney C.
Whitt for five thousand dollars. Shortly afterwards he sold the
policeman, whom he had kept by him, to the same connoisseur for ten
thousand dollars. Whitney C. Whitt was the expert who had paid two
hundred thousand dollars for a Madonna and St. Joseph, with donor, of
Raphael.
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