My first connection with artists came through my cousin, David Wilkie Wynfield, who was the nephew and godson of the great Sir David Wilkie. He was a popular artist in both senses of the word, for engravers used to multiply his pictures like “The New Curate,” and there was no more popular figure at the Arts’ Club or in the homes of his brother artists. A repartee of his was the origin of the picture in Punch, where a painter who wants to know why he does not get into the Royal Academy is told that he should not wear such thick boots. He and some brother artists, of whom I think Marcus Stone and G. A. Storey are the only survivors, took Ann Boleyn’s castle of Hever (when, if not abandoned to the owls and bats, it had not yet become the home of the Astors), as a summer sketching-box, and I have a picture of them grouped round the entrance arch, which he painted.
So that he might have a better opportunity of introducing me to all his friends, he put me up for “The Arts,” of which I remained a member till his death. In those days it was located in a delightful old house in Hanover Square, which had belonged to and been frescoed by Angelica Kauffmann. There I made the acquaintance of the most famous artists of the day, both painters and sculptors, for your artist, unlike your author, loves to go to the club at night to relieve his mind after his long day’s work, by playing pool or demolishing the claims of his rivals to be considered artists in long technical conversations through clouds of smoke. The art of blowing smoke-rings is a speciality of artists. I have heard a famous R.A. recommend a young painter, who was complaining that he could never get his pictures into the Royal Academy, to paint small grey pictures. “Why?” asked the disappointed aspirant. “Because they are the pictures which Leighton needs to show off his own pictures properly, and he always picks them out first.”
Another time, at the committee meeting when Herbert Schmaltz was up for election, the chairman asked, “Does anybody know anything about Mr. Schmaltz?” and the most popular landscape painter of the day replied, “Mr. Schmaltz is a man who has taken the illustration of the Bible into his own hands.”
It was Wynfield who introduced me to Joe Jopling. There have been few at-homes more popular than Mrs. Jopling-Rowe’s. Jopling, who was a great rifle-shot—he won the Queen’s Prize at Wimbledon—as well as a regular exhibitor in the Academy, died a few years after I came to know them, and his widow married George Rowe. Mrs. Jopling-Rowe, who is a popular and admirable portrait-painter, and a constant exhibitor at all the principal picture-shows, like the Academy and the Salon, when first I knew her lived at Beaufort Street, Chelsea, but an epidemic of burglars drove her from there to Pembroke Road, Earl’s Court, and from thence to an old house in Pembroke Gardens. It made no difference to her at-homes, which have always been crowded with really distinguished people, for she has known all the leading artists, most of the leading authors and actors, and not a few of the leading public men and women of her time. Millais painted her portrait in her youthful prime, and if one sees her standing near it, where it hangs in her house, one notices how little she has altered in those intervening years, which have been so full of painting triumphs and brilliant society.
Many artists used to come to Addison Mansions. West Kensington is not like St. John’s Wood or Chelsea; there was no West Kensington Arts’ Club, and artists had not many meeting-places except Phil May’s studio and our flat. Solomon, already nearing his zenith, used often to come with his brother Albert, and so did Arthur Hacker, though they both lived some way off. We were asked to Solomon’s wedding—we and Henry Arthur Jones, I think, were the only Gentiles present at this splendid ceremony, carried out with all the historical rites. Albert Solomon very good-naturedly sat with us to tell us the significance of everything. It was as interesting as an Easter service in a Sicilian cathedral.
It was easier for J. J. Shannon, for he lived quite close, in Holland Park Road, in an old farmhouse, which he gradually transformed into a charming mansion, where one used to meet most interesting people.
David Murray, the famous landscape painter, was another frequent visitor among the Academicians, very popular for his wit and camaraderie, very ready to help any one who needed a push in high quarters.
He has altered surprisingly little—only last summer I met him at a ball at Sir St. Clair Thompson’s, the eminent throat specialist’s, whom I knew as far back as 1886 when he was honorary secretary of the Club at Florence. David was dancing as much as most of the young men, and not looking perceptibly older than when I met him a quarter of a century ago. He is another of the intellectual artists who read deeply, and he is much interested in Japan. He very good-naturedly came to advise me about my pictures when I was selling the contents of Phillimore Lodge, but we had already parted with the celebrated Nattier of Louis XV dressed as Hercules—a Burke heirloom—my father sold that to Colnaghi for £1500.
Alfred Drury, that delightfully poetical sculptor, was another Academician who came often. Drury has a beautiful voice.
It was only in our last days at Addison Mansions, after we had given up those large evening at-homes, that William Nicholson, not an Academician, but one of the greatest artists of them all, came. Nicholson was not only one of the finest painters of the day in inspiration and technique, but was the pioneer of a new movement, being the first painter to have an artificial reproduction of daylight installed in his studio—a costly and highly scientific combination of various lights. By means of this painting is rendered independent of the weather and the time. He has painted all night before now. Mark Barr, a scientific friend of ours, who devised the apparatus for this, the most brilliant man I ever met, brought him.