This is something of an aside from my usual run of queries, but . . . . .
In the summer of 1900, Kipling sat to the well-known portrait painter, John Collier - the resulting portrait is now at Bateman's, and is the three-quarter length one, full-face, of RK standing, pipe in hand, in his study at the Elms.  (The head is used on the dust-jacket of Andrew Lycett's biography - personally, I don't think it is nearly so good a likeness as Phil Burne-Jones' one taken the previous year.) 

But this was the second portrait of Kipling that Collier made - the previous one had been painted in 1891, just before his health broke down, and he went off on his hoped-for world cruise.  In it, he is again facing the artist, in a half-length full-face portrait, and he is wearing what (as a naval officer) I would refer to as an ice-cream suit - a single-breasted white tunic, buttoned high up the neck, these days, I believe, referred to as a 'Nehru jacket'.  This portrait also now hangs at Bateman's, I believe.

Question - who commissioned the 1891 portrait and why?  In 1891. although he was becoming wealthy enough, and had, in his two uncles-by-marriage, connections with the visual art world in London, would Kipling have commissioned it himself. for himself?  Or was it for Wolcott Balestier?  Anyone know?

Alastair Wilson