Stephen Ferris sketched his sleeping four-year-old son Gerome in October 1867. He used this pencil drawing as a model for the sleeping child in his painting Grandma’s Spinning Wheel, also completed in 1867. At a later date, Gerome Ferris came across this sketch and noted in pencil: “I have seen no drawing better than this past or present JLGF," but, of course, he was the subject and possibly prejudiced
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