It is my birthday and I am so grateful to you for the comradeship of Leaves of Grass that I must write today.
I am an artist & paint portraits sometimes miniatures.
My mother2 and sisters have just reached New York The girls are quite young loc_vm.02500_large.jpg and going to give
Recitations in the States and Canada I hope to come sometime but as I am a worker I
must wait until bye and bye.
Thanking you again and again and with greeting
I remain most sincerely Ethel WeblingCorrespondent:
Ethel Webling
(1859–1929) was an English miniaturist and illustrator. She studied at the
Slade School of Art and her work was exhibited for several years at the Royal
Academy, including a miniature of author John Ruskin in 1888. Her illustration
for the poem "Coast Gun L 33" by Martha Foote Crow was reproduced in the
December 1893 issue of The Cosmopolitan, see (vol. 16 no
2, page 157). The collection of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust houses her
detailed watercolor miniatures depicting an 1898 production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at Her Majesty's Theatre. Ethel Webling's
letter to Whitman is included in With Walt Whitman in
Camden, November 27, 1891. Her sisters Rosalind, Peggy, and Josephine were
dramatic actors, and the latter sister also wrote to Whitman in 1891. See the
letter from Josephine Webling to Whitman of November 11,
1891.