Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2099 page)

* * 1820. May 1st. — Went to Bayham Abbey, for the purpose of sketching at the fˆete given in honour of the coming of age of Lord Brecknock, (May 2nd.) 3rd. Returned with Mr. Watson Taylor and Sir Henry Hardinge.”

The result of the visit above mentioned to the seat of Lord Camden, was a picture, exhibited in 1822, of the birth-day fˆete. Later in the autumn of this year, (1820,) I find the painter, by the following letter, visiting Lord Liverpool at Walmer Castle; and afterwards extending his visit to Chichester and the southern coast.

“To MRS. COLLINS.

“Walmer Castle, 1820.

“My dear Mother, — As I shall stay here until Monday evening, or, it is possible, till Tuesday, and consequently not arrive in London as soon as I had purposed, I write to beg you will send me a few lines by return of post, telling me whether by this latter plan, I shall be too late for any engagements you may have made for me in the way of business. I write this in great haste, as I am very busy sketching. I am, thank God, quite well and happy. Lord Liverpool will leave us on Sunday evening. His lordship will probably take some of my sketches to town with him. He will send them, if he does so, to you; but I am not quite certain whether I shall have them dry enough by Sunday.” * * *

“Rye, Aug. 14th, 1820.

“Lord Camden will bring the sketch I made of the Abbey to town, as it was not sufficiently dry to be removed when I left him. Should my presence in any way be useful at home, I can return immediately. I find little here, or at Winchelsea, to sketch. I am, however, not quite idle; and, consequently, not quite miserable.” * * *

“Little Hampton, Sept. 14th, 1820.

“I trust I shall escape the
beauties,
so ‘flat, stale, and unprofitable,’ of this neighbourhood in a few hours, when I shall have reached Arundel, from whence I propose proceeding to Bognor, Chichester, and home. Unless Bognor affords more substantial matter for the pencil I shall soon leave it; and, in that case, probably reach London on Saturday evening. Frank has lost nothing by not joining me, and if I find any place worth his visiting, I will write again. * * *

“Yours affectionately,

“WILLIAM COLLINS.”

In this year the painter suffered the sudden loss of two relatives, an uncle and. a cousin. His father’s brother, the Rev. James Collins, accompanied by his son, had, more than a year previously, departed for Sierra Leone; the former as chaplain to the British factory, the latter in some other official situation. Both, after a sojourn of short duration on the scene of their new duties, sunk under the pestilential climate of the place the son receiving the first intimation of the father’s death by hearing the digging of his grave under the bedroom-window where he then lay, sick and exhausted himself.

Among Mr. Collins’s professional friends, at this period, the name of John Constable, R.A., the landscape painter, must not be omitted. As original as a man as he was as an artist, his innocent and simple life contrasting strangely with his marked and eccentric character, Constable possessed unusual claims to the friendship of one, who, like my father, was connected with the same branch of Art as himself. An intimacy soon established itself between them; and, to a student of character, few more welcome companions than Constable could have been selected. He possessed a capacity for dry, sarcastic humour, which incessantly showed itself in his conversation; and which, though sometimes perhaps too personal in its application, was never false in its essence, and rarely erroneous in its design. Although occasionally a little tinctured by that tendency to paradox, which appears an inherent quality in the mental composition of men of strong individual genius, his opinions on Art were searching, comprehensive, and direct, and were often as felicitously illustrated as they were boldly advanced. I am here, however, trenching upon ground already well occupied: the character and genius of this admirable and original painter have become a public possession, through the medium of Mr. Leslie’s interesting narrative of his life and labours. During the progress of that work, my father thus wrote to the author upon the subject of Constable; noticing, it will be observed, those sportive sallies, remembered with delight by his friends, but too private in their nature and too personal in their interest to be confided with advantage to the world:

“I have been cudgelling my brains on the subject of the Constable anecdotes, and the result is the recollection of a number of good things, calculated, alas! only for table-talk among friends. This, as I told you, I feared would be the case. The great charm of our lamented friend’s conversation upon Art, was not only its originality but its real worth, and the evidence it afforded of his heartfelt love of his pursuit, independent of any worldly advantages to be obtained from it. I mentioned to you his admirable remarks upon the composition of a picture, namely, that its parts were all so necessary to it as a whole, that it resembled a sum in arithmetic, take away or add the smallest item, and it must be wrong. His observations, too, on
chiaroscuro
were all that could be made on that deep subject. How rejoiced I am to find that so many of the great things he did will at last be got together, for the benefit of future students!”

In the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1821, my father’s pictures were, — ”A Scene in Borrowdale, Cumberland,” “Dartmouth, Devon,” and “Morning on the Coast of Kent.” He also sent to the British Institution, in the same year, one small contribution, entitled “The Bird Trap.” The first of these pictures was a beautiful combination of mountain landscape and figures, fresh and graceful in colour and treatment; it was painted for Mr. William Marshall. The second, a clear, varied scene, finely diversified in its different parts, was painted for Mr. Phillimore Hicks. The third, a bright, delicate sea-piece, the largest of the artist’s pictures of the year, was painted for Mr. Jesse Watts Russell, M. P. “The Bird Trap,” a rustic scene, representing two cottage boys setting their trap, was made the subject of a mezzotinto engraving, on a small scale; which preserves much of the softness and delicacy of the original work.

Of all the Exhibitions at the Royal Academy with which the painter had been connected, that of 1821 was attended with the greatest anxiety and doubt that had ever tried his patience or perplexed his fancy; for in this year he incurred, as the new Academician, the ungracious duty of making one of the Committee appointed to hang the pictures at the annual Exhibition. It may not be uninteresting to the general reader to describe some of the tribulations attached to this difficult office; tribulations which are doubly felt by those who find themselves exposed to their share of them for the first time. From this moment they discover that one of the privileges attaching to their new dignity, is that of encountering the enmity of no inconsiderable portion of their profession at large. For, when it is considered that the average number of pictures which the Royal Academy has space enough to exhibit seldom amounts to more than two-thirds of the number of pictures sent to it for exhibition, — that out of those exhibited works certainly not more than one-third, from the natural construction of rooms, can be honoured with convenient and conspicuous places, and that, of these two classes of the unfortunate, the discarded and the indifferently hung, there are probably not a dozen individuals who do not labour under the most insurmountable conviction that their maltreated production is the finest work of its class that can be produced, — the amount of anger, disappointment and despair inherited by the “Hanging Committee” will not be easily calculated. None but those personally acquainted with the perilous process of publishing to the world the yearly achievements of contemporary Art, can rightly estimate the difficulties and fatigues of the task. The preliminary processes of accepting and rejecting are but “ prologues to the swelling act.” To give each picture its due position as regards place and light, to hang no pictures near each other but such as in tone and colour harmonize with, or agreeably contrast each other; to attend to the just claims of the members, while exercising strict impartiality towards the merits of the general exhibitors, to make such an arrangement as shall please the critics in its component and combined parts, and attract the public by the variety of its materials and the universality of its interest; are some of the labours attempted each year by the Committee, — labours involving doubts, which a synod of ancient philosophers might vainly endeavour to solve, and producing difficulties, in comparison with which the cleansing of the Augean stable must be viewed as the morning’s amusement of a crossing-sweeper or a groom!

The length of time occupied by this more than Herculean task is three weeks; after which, the new Academician is not unfrequently startled by the following collateral phenomena, informing him as eloquently as a visit to the Institution itself, that the Exhibition has at last opened to the public:- He goes into the street, meets an artist whom he knows intimately, stretches out to him the hand of unconscious friendship, and is welcomed by a lofty look and a passing bow. This artist is disgusted with the position of his picture. Sad and sorry, he passes on, — ventures, perhaps, within the walls of the Academy itself, — pauses opposite a picture of some merit placed in an admirable situation, and is joined by a friend, (not a professional friend this time.) “Ah,” says the latter, “grand work that; painted by a relation of mine, but it has been shockingly treated. Look at that picture by the side of it, — it absolutely kills it! He says it is all your doing, that you are jealous of his talent, and have done it on purpose, and so forth. Of course I tried to pacify him, but it was of no use: he is talking about it everywhere. Great acquaintance, you know — quite thick with the aristocracy may do you some harm, I’m afraid. — Sorry very sorry — wish you had taken more pains about him. Good morning.” Irritated and disappointed, our new Academician goes off sulkily to dine at his club; and, taking up the paper, finds in it a critique upon the Exhibition. All is praise and congratulation until his own works fall under review, and on these sarcasm and abuse descend with crushing severity. He looks round indignantly, and becomes aware of the presence of a literary friend at the next table, who has been lazily watching him over his pint of Marsala for the last half-hour. Greetings, propinquity, explanations ensue. The literary friend’s attention is directed to the criticism. He reads it coolly all through, from beginning to end; and then observes, that it was only yesterday that he saw a friend of his, an artist, who had heard that his water-colour portrait of an officer had been placed in the wrong light in the miniature-room, who had ascribed this indignity to the meddling spirit and utter incapacity of the new Academician, and who had gone off to his brother, who was a great critic, “in fact, altogether a very talented fellow — quite enthusiastic about all his relations,” and had prompted him to forget his usual impartiality, and write down the new Academician’s pictures in revenge. The junior member of the “Hanging Committee” stays not to hear more, but goes home in despair. On his table he finds several letters, — most of them in unknown handwritings. These he opens first; they are anonymous epistles, varying in style, from the abruptly insolent to the elabourately sarcastic. This last visitation of injury proceeds from a cause more deplorable than any hitherto enumerated; the authorship of the anonymous letters being attributable to those modern Raphaels and Michael Angelos whose pictures have been utterly turned out!

Such are some of the tribulations which Academic “flesh is heir to.” For Mr. Collins, the task of assisting in the arrangement of the pictures was one which his extreme delicacy of feeling and great anxiety to be at once merciful and just, rendered of no ordinary difficulty and fatigue. Notwithstanding his solicitude at all times to fulfil his duties in the gentlest possible manner, the most satisfactory evidence that he inherited his due share of the persecutions above enumerated appears among his papers in the shape of letters and petitions, — some anonymous and some signed; some exceedingly insolent and some deplorably lachrymose. In addition to these, a few memorials have been found, addressed to the Hanging Committee of the Academy generally, one of which, emanating from an amateur artist, dated 1821, and consequently inferentially including Mr. Collins in its animadversions, is so unique a specimen of mock humility and disappointed self-conceit; and is, moreover, expressed with such a wonderfully romantic fervour of language, that I cannot resist the temptation of extracting it for the reader’s amusement; merely premising that the different names appearing in it will be concealed, in order to avoid the remotest possibility of giving personal offence to any one.

The remonstrance, or memorial, begins as follows:

“To THE HANGING COMMITTEE OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY.

“1821.

“Gentlemen, — If, in the following lines, any expression which may in the slightest, degree be construed into a want of respect to the Academy shall escape me, I must beg of you to lay it to the score of inadvertence only, and not to an intentional wish to offend, as everything of the kind is, I assure you, furthest from my thoughts. I declare, upon my honour, that I do not know the name of any one single person, out of the eight who compose the Hanging Committee (as I understand it to be called) for the year. Nothing, therefore, of a personal nature towards any individual among you, can possibly be laid to my charge.