The Three Brothers; vol. 2/3

BY MRS. OLIPHANT, AUTHOR OF ‘CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,’ ‘SALEM CHAPEL,’ ‘THE MINISTER’S WIFE,’ ETC. ETC. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1870. The Right of Translation is Reserved.

LONDON: Strangeways and Walden, Printers, Castle St., Leicester Sq.

It must be admitted that the counsel thus bestowed upon Laurie in respect to his work had rather a discouraging than a stimulating effect upon him. It disgusted him, no doubt, with Edith and his big canvas, but it did not fill him, as it was intended to do, with enthusiasm for Clipstone Street, and his other opportunities of legitimate work. He made it an excuse for doing nothing, which was unfortunate, after so much trouble had been taken about him. Perhaps, on the whole, it would have been better to have let him have his way. The padrona herself thought so, though she had not been able to refrain from interfering when she had the opportunity. The Square, and the adjacent regions, had pronounced almost unanimously that the sketch was a very clever sketch; but, notwithstanding, deprecated with one voice the big canvas, and the ambitious work. ‘I did it, and you see I have not made much of it,’ said Suffolk. ‘If I thought I could make as much of it as you have done, I should go in for it to-morrow,’ cried Laurie, with an enthusiasm for which the painter’s wife could have hugged him. ‘But, dear Mr. Renton, if you would but advise him to take simpler subjects!’ Mrs. Suffolk said, with her pathetic voice. Suffolk was a man of genius, as even old Welby admitted, and slowly, by degrees, the profession itself was beginning to be awake to his merits; but as for the British public, it knew nothing of the painter, except that up to this moment he had been hung down on the floor, or up at the roof, in the Academy’s exhibition, and sneered at in the ‘Sword.’ This was what came of high art.
Mr. Welby paid Laurie a visit in his rooms, to enforce the lesson upon him. ‘If we had room and space for that sort of thing, it would be all very well, sir,’ said the R.A., ‘but in a private collection what can you do with it? The best thing Suffolk could hope for would be to have his picture hung in some Manchester man’s dining-room;—best patrons we have now-a-days. But it would fill up the whole wall, and naturally the Manchester man would rather have two or three Maclises, and a Mulready, and a Webster, and even a Welby, my dear fellow,—not to speak of Millais, and the young ones. There’s how it is. A dozen pictures are better than one in our patrons’ eyes,—more use, and more variety, and by far more valuable if anything should happen to the mills. Though it’s a work of genius, Renton,—I don’t deny it’s a work of genius,—whereas this——’