Artists work from various motives. Witness Sir Robert Strange the engraver. He fell ardently in love with Isabella Lumsden, whose brother acted as secretary to Prince Charles Edward Stuart. The lady was an extreme Jacobite, and insisted that Strange should throw in his lot with the old stock. He was present in the great battles of the ’45, and at Inverness engraved a plate for bank-notes for the Stuart Government. He had soon other things to think of. When the cause collapsed at Culloden, he was in hiding in Edinburgh for some time, and existed by selling portraits of the exiled family at small cost. Once when visiting his Isabella the Government soldiers nearly caught him; probably they had a shrewd suspicion he was like to be in the house, which they unexpectedly entered. The lady was equal to this or any other occasion. She wore one of the enormous hoops of the period, and under this her lover lay hid, she the while defiantly carolling a Jacobite air whilst the soldiers were looking up the chimney, and under the table, and searching all other orthodox places of refuge. The pair were shortly afterwards married. Strange had various and, finally, prosperous fortunes, and in 1787 was knighted. “If,” as George III. said with a grin, for he knew his history, “he would accept that honour from an Elector of Hanover.” But the King’s great favourite among Scots artists was Allan Ramsay, the son of the poet and possibly of like Jacobite proclivities, although about that we hear nothing. He had studied “at the seat of the Beast,” as his father said, in jest you may be sure, for our old friend was no highflyer.
ALLAN RAMSAY, PAINTER
From a Mezzotint after Artist’s own painting
Young Ramsay became an accomplished man of the world, and had more than a double share, like his father before him, of the pawkiness attributed, though not always truthfully, to his countrymen. He was soon in London and painting Lord Bute most diligently. He did it so well that he made Reynolds, in emulation, carefully elaborate a full-length that he was doing at the time. “I wish to show legs with Ramsay’s Lord Bute,” quoth he. The King preferred Ramsay; he talked German, an accomplishment rare with Englishmen at the period, and he fell in, so to say, with the King’s homely ways. When His Majesty had dined plentifully on his favourite boiled mutton and turnips he would say: “Now, Ramsay, sit down in my place and take your dinner.” He was a curled darling of great folk and was appointed Court painter in 1767. A universal favourite, even Johnson had a good word for him. All this has nothing to do with art, and nobody puts him beside Reynolds, but he was highly prosperous. The King was wont to present the portrait of himself and his consort to all sorts of great people, so Ramsay and his assistants were kept busy. Once he went on a long visit to Rome, partly on account of his health. He left directions with his most able assistant, Philip Reinagle, to get ready fifty pairs of Kings and Queens at ten guineas apiece. Now Reinagle had learned to paint so like Ramsay that no mortal man could tell the difference, but as he painted over and over again the commonplace features of their Majesties, he got heartily sick of the business. He struck for more pay and got thirty instead of ten guineas, so after the end of six years he managed to get through with it, somehow or other, but ever afterwards he looked back upon the period as a horrid nightmare. Ramsay was a scholar, a wit, and a gentleman. In a coarse age he was delicate and choice. He was fond of tea, but wine was too much for his queasy stomach. Art was certainly not the all in all for him, and his pictures are feeble. Possibly he did not much care; he had his reward. Some critics have thought that he might have been a great painter if his heart had been entirely in his work.
It has been said of a greater than he, of the incomparable Sir Henry Raeburn, that the one thing wanting to raise his genius into the highest possible sphere was the chastening of a great sorrow or the excitement of a great passion. I cannot myself conceive anything better than his Braxfield among men or his Mrs. James Campbell among women, but I have no right to speak. At least his prosperity enabled him to paint a whole generation, though from that generation as we have it on his canvas, a strange malice of fate makes the figure of Robert Burns, the greatest of them all, most conspicuous by its absence. His prosperity and contentment were the result of the simple life and plain living of old Edinburgh. He was a great friend of John Clerk, afterwards Lord Eldin. In very early days Clerk asked him to dinner. The landlady uncovered two dishes, one held three herrings and the other three potatoes. “Did I not tell you, wuman,” said John with that accent which was to make “a’ the Fifteen” tremble, “that a gentleman was to dine wi’ me, and that ye were to get sax herrings and sax potatoes?”
These were his salad days, and ere they were fled a wealthy young widow saw and loved Raeburn. She was not personally known to him, but her wit easily devised a method. She asked to have her portrait painted, and the rest was plain sailing. It was then the fixed tradition of all the northern painters that you must study at Rome if you would be an artist. Raeburn set off for Italy. The story is that he had an introduction to Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom he visited as he passed through London. Reynolds was much impressed with the youth from the north, and at the end took him aside, and in the most delicate manner suggested that if money was necessary for his studies abroad he was prepared to advance it. Raeburn gratefully declined. When he returned from Rome he settled in Edinburgh, from which he scarcely stirred. His old master, Martin, jealously declared that the lad in George Street painted better before he went to Rome, but the rest of Scotland did not agree. It became a matter of course that everybody who was anybody should get himself painted by Raeburn. He seemed to see at once into the character of the face he had before him, and so his pictures have that remarkable characteristic of great artists, they tell us more of the man than the actual sight of the man himself does; but again I go beyond my province.
The early life of many Scots artists (and doctors) is connected with Edinburgh, but the most important part is given to London. Thus Sir David Wilkie belongs first of all to Fife, for he was born at Cults, where his father was parish minister. His mother saw him drawing something with chalk on the floor. The child said he was making “bonnie Lady Gonie,” referring to Lady Balgonie, who lived near. Obviously this same story might have been told of many people, not afterwards eminent. In fact, Wilkie’s development was not rapid. In 1799, when he was fourteen, he went to the Trustees Academy at Edinburgh. George Thomson, the Secretary, after examining his drawings declared that they had not sufficient merit to procure his admission. The Earl of Leven, however, insisted he must be admitted, and admitted he was. He proceeded to draw from the antique, not at first triumphantly. His father showed one of his studies to one of his elders. “What was it?” queried the douce man. “A foot,” was the answer. “A fute! a fute! it’s mair like a fluke than a fute.” In 1804 he returned to Cults where he employed himself painting Pitlessie Fair. At church he saw an ideal character study nodding in one of the pews. He soon had it transferred to the flyleaf of the Bible. He had not escaped attention, and was promptly taken to task. He stoutly asserted that in the sketch the eye and the hand alone were engaged, he could hear the sermon all the time. The ingenuity or matchless impudence of this assertion fairly astounded his accusers, and the matter dropped. I do not tell here how he went to London and became famous. How famous let this anecdote show. In 1817 he was at Abbotsford making a group of the Scott family: he went with William Laidlaw to Altrive to see Hogg. “Laidlaw,” said the shepherd, “this is not the great Mr. Wilkie?” “It’s just the great Mr. Wilkie, Hogg.” The poet turned to the painter: “I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you in my house and how glad I am to see you are so young a man.”
REV. JOHN THOMSON OF DUDDINGSTON
From the Engraving by Croll
This curious greeting is explained thus: Hogg had taken Wilkie for a horse-couper. What Wilkie would have taken Hogg for we are not told, possibly for something of the same.