Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2104 page)

CHAPTER III.

1822-1824.

Pictures of 1823 — Summer residence at Hampstead — Method of painting — Anecdotes of models — Correspondence with Mr. Danby — Letter from Sir David Wilkie — Royal Academy Club — Sir George Beaumont, Sir David Wilkie, and Mr. Collins — Visit to Turvey Abbey — Anecdote of “Old Odell” — Visits in the latter part of the year — Pictures of 1824 — Method of painting children’s portraits — Wilkie in the character of a sponsor — Commission from His Majesty — Second visit to Turvey — Letter to Mrs. W. Collins — Stay at the house of the late Mr. Wells, of Redleaf — Epigram on “Martin, the Game-keeper” — Difficulties of the Annual Royal Academy Dinner — Letter to Sir William Elford, Bart.

IN the year 1823, Mr. Collins exhibited at the Royal Academy three pictures:- “A Fish Auction, on the South Coast of Devonshire” — ”A scene in Borrowdale, Cumberland,” and, “A View of Walmer Castle.” The first of these works represented a curious custom among the Devonshire fishermen — that of selling their fish on the beach by auction, and “knocking down the lots” by dropping a stone on the sand. In this picture, the fisherman, surrounded by men, women, and children, is on the point of dropping the stone, while the objects of the commercial contention — the fresh, tempting fish — lie around in baskets, and on the beach. The calm sea and the rocky coast, form the background of the work, which attracted universal attention, from its force and originality. It was painted with extraordinary care and brilliancy, conveying the idea of a clear, sunshiny day, and a varied, animated scene, with perfect intelligibility and success. The picture was a commission from the Earl of Essex. The scene in Borrowdale, (painted for Mr. Ripley,) was an inland view, with fertile wood and mountain scenery, rising high in the canvas, and a group of Cumberland children playing by the banks of a brook, that ripples into the foreground of the picture — the tone of which is bright, lively, and transparent; the character of the figures being remarkably attractive, in their aspect of simplicity and truth. In the view of Walmer Castle, that fine building is seen across a common, the sea occupying the left-hand side of the picture, and the sky being slightly overcast. The colouring in the composition is pearly and delicate — the tone, shadowy and sober. This work was painted for the Earl of Liverpool, and afterwards reproduced, on a smaller scale, for the Duchess of Devonshire.

During the summer of this year Mr. Collins took a cottage at Hampstead, — a place which, in spite of its vicinity to London, has been the source of some of the best pictures of our best landscape-painters, and which was the scene of many of the most elabourate and useful studies collected for future works, by the subject of this biography. Here, with his wife, he lived in perfect tranquillity and retirement through-out the summer months, studying Nature unremittingly in all her aspects, removed from the interruptions of a London life, enjoying occasionally the society of men of kindred talents and pursuits, and preparing his next year’s pictures under all the peculiar advantages which his residence so liberally offered to the votary of landscape Art.

Some reference, in this place, to Mr. Collins’s method of painting, may not be unacceptable to those who are admirers of his works, and who may be interested in the observation of practical Art. The general composition of his pictures, the arrangement of the clouds, the line of the landscape, the disposition of the figures, he usually sketched at once in chalk upon the canvas, from the resources of his own mind, aided by sketches. The production of the different parts, in their due bearings and condition, next occupied his attention. For this he made new studies and consulted old sketches with the most diligent perseverance, covering sheet after sheet of paper, sometimes for many days together, with separate experiments, — extended to every possible variety in light and shade, colour and composition; watching, whatever his other accidental occupations, and where-ever they might happen to take him, for the smallest and remotest assistance of external Nature, and not unfrequently consulting, on points of pictorial eloquence, probability and truth, the impressions of persons who, while conversant with Nature, were unacquainted with Art. After having thus collected his materials, as patiently and gradually as if he were the veriest tyro in his pursuit, after having realized completely in his own mind every part of his picture, after having weighed the merits of his projected work first in the balance with Nature and then with the old masters, he again approached the canvas; and then his power and dexterity became at once apparent, in the extraordinary freedom and decision with which he worked. His landscapes, after the first preparatory, or “dead” colouring, were invariably begun by the sky, which in many of his pictures was finished in one day, and painted honestly throughout, in all its finish, delicacy, and elabouration, with the brush, without any tricks of execution gained by the palette knife, or any artifice of surface acquired by the use of the finger. This was to him always the most anxious part of a picture; he estimated its vast importance and difficulty in their true light. When his sky was not finished at once, he never allowed any portion of it to get dry until the whole was completed; taking care, at such times, to ensure the moisture of the colours, by hanging a wet sheet before his picture during the night. His last operation was to go over the finished sky with a large camel’s-hair brush, perfectly soft and dry, which he used with such extraordinary lightness of hand that it was difficult, with the closest watching, to detect that he touched the picture at all. His composition was then carried down, portion by portion, generally in a horizontal direction, to the foreground. His figures, (the true light and shade OIL which he sometimes secured by grouping them in a large box, using dressed dolls for the purpose,) were seldom finished till they could take their tone and sentiment from a large extent of completed landscape around them. In all these operations, from the delicate tinting of the distant horizon to the vigorous shading of the foreground masses, every touch of the brush produced an immediate and palpable effect. The applications of colour were neither wasted nor misapplied; every component part of the delicate and subtle workmanship proceeded smoothly, swiftly, securely. An instinctive impression of the harmonies of colour, the graces of shape, and the relative processes and varieties of execution, seemed ever present to direct the attentive eye, and to guide the quiet steady hand. But easy and successful as the painter’s progress in his work appeared to others, his facility was not the facility of carelessness, mechanism, or chance. From the first moment when he sat down before his easel to the last when he rose from it, every faculty of his body and mind was absorbed in his task. While engaged in painting, he could seldom speak himself, or attend to what was spoken by others; the presence of any one, even a member of his family, looking over his shoulder while he was engaged in completing a work, perplexed and interrupted him if persevered in for any length of time. To so high a degree of finish were his pictures wrought, especially about this period, so frequently and perseveringly were the parts laboured and relaboured, that, but for the dexterity and security of workmanship above alluded to, he could seldom have succeeded in contributing more than one, or at most two pictures to each Exhibition. Among the first of his anxieties was to paint with such mechanical materials as should ensure the perfect preservation of his works, as regarded colour and surface, to the most distant time. Colours whose duration was in the slightest degree doubtful, any oils, varnishes, and other aids to painting which, in their various combinations he found by long and patient experiment to be doubtful in their application, he rigorously eschewed, whatever might be their actual attraction in the processes of his Art. It was his maxim, that the purchasers of his pictures had a right to expect a possession which should not only remain unaltered and undeteriorated during their own life time, but which should descend unchanged to their posterity, as a work whose colour and surface should last as long as the material on which it was painted. To produce a good picture was his first labour, and to make an endurable one was his last.

From the pictures of Mr. Collins, the transition is natural to the different original materials from which he formed their component parts; and especially, to the rustic figures, which so often supplied some of their most powerful attractions. In selecting the models from which these figures were painted, he enjoyed advantages, and, at the same time, incurred disappointments, to which the historical painter is a stranger. In choosing for his studies people, who in their most ordinary dress and appearance were most fitted for his purposes, he escaped the inconvenience of calling in the help of those who are models by trade, and whose modern and mechanical “presence,” often renders them — however lusty of limb, or regular of feature — by no means inspiring, as a foundation for the pourtrayal of the heroes and heroines of poetry and adventure. But on the other hand, in selecting his models from the country lane and the village fireside, he occasionally encountered obstacles of a somewhat irritating, though decidedly amusing nature. On one occasion, when a little cottage girl was sitting to him, finding that the child figetted so perseveringly as to defy all his efforts to paint her, he endeavoured at last to quiet her by an appeal to her vanity, asking her whether she would not like to be
“put into a pretty picture?”
No sooner, however, had he pronounced the words, than the small model fairly burst into tears, and resolutely refused to sit any longer; because, if she was to be put
into
a picture, she should “never be able to get
out
again, and go home to Mammy!” At another time, having observed a little boy in a most picturesquely dirty and ragged condition, playing before a cottage door, he was so much struck with the excellent pictorial qualities of this unsophisticated young rustic, that he engaged the boy’s mother to bring him the next morning to the house he was then staying at. At the appointed time, mother and son presented themselves; but, in the appearance of the latter, a fatal metamorphosis had been worked. His dirty face had been scrubbed with soap and water, into a shining, mottled red — his tangled locks had been combed down and flattened straight over his forehead, with mathematical regularity — his various, Murillo-like rags, had been exchanged for a clean pinafore; which, in dismal monotony of white, without speck or fold, covered him decently from chin to ankles — his hands were washed — his stockings were ironed — his shoe-strings were tied; in the theatrical phrase, he had been “got up, regardless of expense, for the occasion.” When the astonished painter remonstrated against this alteration, and pleaded for a future resumption of the young gentleman’s working-day vestments and impurified physiognomy, the good woman indignantly replied that he should not be painted at all, if he was not painted in his clean face and his Sunday clothes; and marched off with her offspring, in high indignation and alarm.

My father was not, however, always thus unlucky in the study of Nature. He often found cottagers who gloried in being painted, and who sat like professional models, under an erroneous impression that it was for their personal beauties and perfections that their likenesses were pourtrayed. The remarks of these and other good people, who sat to the painter in perfect ignorance of the use or object of his labours, were often exquisitely original. He used to quote the criticism of a celebrated country rat-catcher on the study he had made from him, with hearty triumph and delight. When asked whether he thought his portrait like; the rat-catcher, — who perhaps in virtue of his calling — was a gruff and unhesitating man, immediately declared that the face was “not a morsel like,” but vowed with a great oath, that nothing could ever be equal to the correctness of the
dirt shine on his old leather breeches,
and the
grip that he had of the necks of his ferrets!

The cool self-possession of an old deaf beggar, whom the painter was once engaged in drawing at Hendon, was as amusing, in its way, as the answer of the rat-catcher; and may serve, moreover, to tranquillize the natural apprehensions of those who may be placed, with regard to picturesque models in general, in the same position as my father on this particular occasion. Finding, from certain indications, that the body and garments of this English Edie Ochiltree afforded a sort of pasture-ground to a herd of many animals, of minute size but of magnificent propagating and feeding powers, he hinted his fears —
in a loud bawl
— to the old man, that he might leave some of his small pensioners, or body-guard, behind him. “No fear sir, no fear!” — replied this deaf and venerable vagrant, contemplating the artist with serious serenity — ”I don’t think they are any of them likely to leave
me
for
you!”

In this year my father painted a small picture, engraved, but never exhibited — ”View on the Brent, Hendon,” for Mr. Danby, of Swinton Park; which, that gentleman criticised, in a letter containing so many excellent remarks upon the painter’s style, exhibiting so intimate a sympathy with the objects of Art, and calling forth so characteristic an answer from Mr. Collins, as to make it, in every way, worthy of insertion in these pages. It was as follows:

“To W. COLLINS, ESQ., R.A.

“Swinton Park, June 1, 1823.

“Dear Sir, — Being lately arrived here, I am glad to take this early opportunity of expressing to you the satisfaction which the picture you last sent has given me. It is, I think, as beautiful a choice, and representation of natural scenery, as I ever saw, or can well conceive; and it has a clearness and freshness that remind me of your beautiful view on the coast of Norfolk, which was at the Exhibition some years ago, and is now, I suppose, in His Majesty’s collection. The purity of the atmosphere in that picture, with which this corresponds, seems to me to be the greatest foundation of our enjoyment of natural scenery, however different it may be, and is, perhaps, one great proof of the general justice with which the Author of Nature has bestowed his gifts, as well as of the tendency which he means them all to have. In this little landscape of yours, there is, 1 think, everything that can be desired, — the distribution of light and shade, the brilliancy of light in the haystack, the transparency of the shades by the stream, the drawing, figures, distance, colouring, the general repose and harmony of the whole, have really a sort of magical effect, in reminding me of what I have seen of Nature in her happiest states, and of what has often occurred to me, viz. — how much the observation of natural scenery, and the representation of it in painting, assist each other. That you have felt this in the strongest degree, is, I think, evinced by the manner in which you have painted your picture; and that your feelings are, in other respects, correspondent with this, I am sufficiently induced to believe, from the little conversation I had with you in New Cavendish-street, about two years ago. That you may continue to enjoy such privileges as these, with the natural results of them, and health to secure them, is the best wish I can give you; and, should any occasion call you into these parts, I shall be happy to renew my personal assurance of it; and am, dear Sir,