Ruskin, who upholds contempt for poverty as a characteristic of our age which is both “just and wholesome,” complains that we starve our great men for the first half of their lives by way of revenge, because they quarrel with us, and adds,—
“Precisely in the degree in which any painter possesses original genius, is at present the increase of moral certainty that during his early years he will have a hard battle to fight: and that just at the time when his conceptions ought to be full and happy, his temper gentle, and his hopes enthusiastic—just at that most critical period, his heart is full of anxieties and household cares: he is chilled by disappointments, and vexed by injustice, he becomes obstinate in his errors, no less than in his virtues, and the arrows of his aim are blunted, as the reeds of his trust are broken.... You may be fed with the fruit and fulness of his old age, but you were as the nipping blight in his blossoming, and your praise is only as the warm winds of autumn to the dying branches.... You feed him in his tender youth with ashes and dishonour: and then you come to him, obsequious but too late, with your sharp laurel crown, the dew all dried from off its leaves: and you thrust it into his languid hand, and he looks at you wistfully. What shall he do with it? What can he do, but go and lay it on his mother’s grave.”
In another part of the same work from which I have quoted, he says, with exquisite pathos,—
“You cannot consider, for you cannot conceive, the sickness of heart with which a young painter of deep feeling toils through his first obscurity—his sense of the strong voice within him which you will not hear, his vain, fond, wondering witness to the things you will not see—his far-away perception of things that he could accomplish if he had but peace and time, all unapproachable and vanishing from him, because no one will leave him peace or grant him time: all his friends falling back from him: those whom he would most reverently obey rebuking and paralyzing him: and last and worst of all, those who believe in him most faithfully, suffering by him the most bitterly. The wife’s eyes, in their sweet ambition, shining brighter as the cheek wastes away: and the little lips at his side parched and pale, which one day, he knows, although he may never see it, will quiver so proudly when they name his name, calling him ‘Our father.’”
But if these pictures are now drawn from artist life, what must that life have been fifty or a hundred years ago? Art was always a plant of slow growth in England, and the great masters who were cherished in the Old World trade guilds, and flourished so grandly in Italy, Flanders, and Holland, had not a single native representative in this country. And when at last the land that had so long since produced a Shakespeare, could boast its Hogarth, native artists were still few and far between, and their chief means of living was found in painting signs. Neglected and scornfully humiliated by all classes, isolated from refined society—such as it was—they suffered the extremes of poverty, with cheerful bravery, endured with a light heart, paid back scorn with scorn, and were linked together by sympathy and pity in such a bond of brotherly fellowship as is now utterly unknown. The taverns were their clubs, bread and cheese their fare: and if the rent of their garret homes were not forthcoming, they slept in the streets, and, careless Bohemians that they were, laughed together over the strangeness, or the dangers, of their nocturnal exposures. That their lives often found tragic endings may readily be known. Many a terrible story is extant of their heart-sickness and despair, of last awful struggles silently, heroically continued against overwhelming odds, and of lingering sufferings endured with martyr-like patience.
The earliest exhibitions of pictures—they were mainly street signs and portraits—were organized by the artists themselves for charitable purposes, as may be seen by the catalogue of one opened in Spring Gardens, in 1761; which contained a design by Samuel Wale, one of the founders of the Royal Academy, engraved by Charles Grignion, representing “The genius of painting, sculpture, and architecture relieving the distressed;” and these exhibitions were first established in the reign of George II.
The Samuel Wale here mentioned, afterwards R.A., was himself a sign-painter; and for many years a whole-length figure of Shakespeare, painted by him in the zenith of his powers, figured as the sign of a public-house at the north-west corner of Little Russell Street, in Drury Lane: while Charles Grignion, when an old man, suffered the then usual fate of artists old and young; and an appeal made for him by his brethren in 1808, now before me, speaks of him in his ninetieth year in the deepest distress, unable to work, with a wife entirely, and a nearly blind daughter partially, dependent upon him for support, saying, “Behold, reader, the united claims of virtue, old age, and professional merit, and filial and parental suffering.” It also expressed a not unreasonable hope that “the claims of, a man who had done so much, and done so well, would be speedily attended to.” Grignion died four years afterwards, his latest days made smooth by the personal contributions of a few artists and some of their patrons, so that the general appeal quoted from above seems to have fallen flatly; as well it might when the public regarded English artists with contempt, and their brethren were so meanly, miserably poor.
The first native artist whose fame extended beyond his birthplace was William Hogarth; but poverty, the bitter badge of all his tribe, he too wore. His father, a north-country schoolmaster, settled in London as an author and press-reader in the Old Bailey, where on the 10th November, 1697, the great painter to be was born. Everybody knows how the child’s taste for art found its earliest expression in the eagerness with which he watched some poor artist at his work, and not less well known is the fact that he was the apprentice of a “silver plate engraver,” and afterwards devoted himself to engraving on copper coats of arms and ornamental headings for shop bills, creeping upwards from such “small beginnings” to more ambitious efforts, until at last he made a hit by illustrating ‘Hudibras,’ the commission for which, it is said, he owed to that successful caricature of his landlady to which I have previously referred. There were then in all London but two print-shops, and they dealt principally in foreign productions; so that it can be easily understood how, to eke out the shortcomings of his graver, Hogarth taught himself painting. Speaking long afterwards of this portion of his career, he said, “I could do little more than maintain myself till I was near thirty;” and added, “I remember the time when I have gone moping into the city with scarce a shilling, but as soon as I had obtained ten guineas there for a plate, I have returned home, put on my sword, and sallied forth again, with all the confidence of a man who had thousands in his pocket.”
At another time he sold to the print-seller, W. Bowles, some plates he had just finished, by weight at half-a-crown a pound avoirdupois; but even when Hogarth was a famous man, and, compared with his former state, a prosperous one, we find such pictures as “The Harlot’s Progress” and “The Rake’s Progress” selling at from fourteen to twenty-two guineas each picture, and “The Strolling Players” bought by Francis Beckford, Esq., for £27 6s.: but as he afterwards complained of that price as much too high, Hogarth took it back, and resold it for the same amount. “Marriage à la Mode,” after the artist had published engravings from the set of six paintings so called, realised £19 6s. In 1797 they were sold for £1381, and now form part of our national collection through the bequest of Mr. Angerstein. Another of his famous works, “March of the Guards to Finchley,” was more satisfactorily disposed of by lottery, and it was this fact that Hogarth referred to when he said, “A lottery is the only chance a living painter has of being paid for his time.” From that lottery sprang our modern art unions. It was of this picture, in a spirit of bitterness provoked by the poverty of his dear friend, its painter, that David Garrick wrote in a letter to Henry Fielding:—
“Its first and great fault is its being too new, and having too great a resemblance to the objects it represents; if this appears a paradox, you ought to take particular care in confessing it. This picture has too much of the lustre, of that despicable freshness which we discover in nature, and which is never seen in the cabinets of the curious. Time has not obscured it with that venerable smoke, that sacred cloud which will one day conceal it from the profane eye of the vulgar, so that its beauties may only be seen by those who are initiated into the mysteries of art: these are almost its only faults.”