“Wilson is the most indefatigable person.  When it is fine and clear, at the end of our fatiguing days he will spend two or three hours seated in the door of the tent, sketching each detail of the splendid mountainous coast-scene to the west.  His sketches are most astonishingly accurate; I have tested his proportions by actual angular measurement and found them correct."[136]

In addition to the drawings of land, pack, icebergs and Barrier, the primary object of which was scientific and geographical, Wilson has left a number of paintings of atmospheric phenomena which are not only scientifically accurate but are also exceedingly beautiful.  Of such are the records of auroral displays, parhelions, paraselene, lunar halos, fog bows, irridescent clouds, refracted images of mountains and mirage generally.  If you look at a picture of a parhelion by Wilson not only can you be sure that the mock suns, circles and shafts appeared in the sky as they are shown on paper, but you can also rest assured that the number of degrees between, say, the sun and the outer ring of light were in fact such as he has represented them.  You can also be certain in looking at his pictures that if cirrus cloud is shown, then cirrus and not stratus cloud was in the sky:  if it is not shown, then the sky was clear.  It is accuracy such as this which gives an exceptional value to work viewed from a scientific standpoint.  Mention should also be made of the paintings and drawings made constantly by Wilson for the various specialists on the expedition whenever they wished for colour records of their specimens; in this connection the paintings of fish and various parasites are especially valuable.

I am not specially qualified to judge Wilson from the artistic point of view.  But if you want accuracy of drawing, truth of colour, and a reproduction of the soft and delicate atmospheric effects which obtain in this part of the world, then you have them here.  Whatever may be said of the painting as such, it is undeniable that an artist of this type is of inestimable value to an expedition which is doing scientific and geographical work in a little-known part of the earth.

Wilson himself set a low value on his artistic capacity.  We used to discuss what Turner would have produced in a land which offered colour effects of such beauty.  If we urged him to try and paint some peculiar effect and he felt that to do so was beyond his powers he made no scruple of saying so.  His colour is clear, his brush-work clean:  and he handled sledging subjects with the vigour of a professional who knew all there was to be known about a sledging life.

[Illustration:  LEADING PONIES ON THE BARRIER—­E.  A. Wilson, del.]