Angelo tells how a friend of Dr. Johnson’s, hearing of Wilson’s distress, said to Mr. Taylor, the artist, “I wish I knew how to send him ten pounds in some delicate way which could not give him offence. Do you think he has some very trifling sketch I could buy for that sum? I have no taste for pictures, but I would give him a commission if my income were not too slender. I am so distressed that so great a genius should be entirely without means.” Taylor told this story delicately to Wilson, who was much touched by it, and said, “I have no scrap such as your friend desires to have, but if the thing were not bruited about I would be happy to send him one of my easel pictures, which you know I never sell for less than sixteen guineas.” The result was that Wilson received the ten pounds, Dr. Johnson’s friend the sixteen-guinea picture, which it is said he gave away the same evening to one of the waiters at Vauxhall.
At the close of his life, when worn out by indifference and neglect, he was reduced to solicit the office of librarian to the Royal Academy, of which he was acknowledged to be one of the brightest ornaments. He died in May 1782, his death accelerated, if not produced, by want; and, sad to state, just previous to his decease, help came to him, when it was, alas, too late!
As is well known, William Hazlitt, the critic, began life as an artist, and was indeed an artist in taste, judgment, and knowledge, all his life. He speaks of his painter’s experience with enthusiasm in one of his papers, saying, “One of the most delightful parts of my life was one fine summer, when I used to walk out of an evening to catch the last light of the sun, gemming the green slopes of the russet lawns, and gilding tower or tree, while the blue sky, gradually turning to purple and gold, or skirted with dusky grey, flung its broad mantle over all, as we see it in the great master of Italian landscape.” Hazlitt abandoned the brush for the pen when he found that he could not realize his own conceptions, nor satisfy his own critical judgment; but it is evident from the following extract that his early art-life was not free from the imputation of being impecunious. He says, after receiving the money for a portrait he had finished in great haste for the sake of getting the cash, “I went to market myself and dined on sausages and mashed potatoes; and, while they were getting ready, and I could hear them frying in the pan, read a volume of ‘Gil Blas’ containing the account of the fair Aurora. This was in the days of my youth. Do not smile, gentle reader. Neither M. de Verry nor Louis XVIII. over an oyster pâte, nor Apicius himself, ever understood the meaning of the word luxury better than I did at that moment.”
Daniel Maclise—the son of a Scotch cobbler, who had been a soldier and had settled in Ireland—was sent adrift in the world at a very early age, and became a bank clerk. In 1828 he came to London, where he succeeded in getting a studentship in the Royal Academy. The money which enabled him to do this was earned by a portrait-sketch he made stealthily from Sir Walter Scott, while the great Wizard of the North was in the shop of a bookseller, named Bolster. Bolster afterwards saw the sketch, and showed it to Sir Walter, who, pleased with the lad’s talent, attached his autograph to it. The drawing was lithographed, sold in Bolster’s shop, and with his share of the profit Maclise started himself in his art career.
Poor Benjamin Haydon—odd compound of greatness and littleness, bravery and cowardice, genius and folly, now patient, now despairing, now bitterly envious and jealous, and anon sympathetically gleeful over a brother’s triumph—sipped many a cup of bitterness through his constant state of impecuniosity; which chronic condition, he sorrowfully admits in his diary, was the result of borrowing, as shown by this extract. “Here began debt and obligation, out of which I have never been, and never shall be, extricated as long as I live.” Haydon, as I said, was a strange mixture, and though possessed of a nature truly poetical, he was in some things wondrously practical; for the bailiffs put into his house he utilized as models. One sat, he tells us in his diary, “for Cassandra’s head, and put on a Persian bracelet. When the broker came for his money, he burst out laughing. There was the fellow, an old soldier, pointing in the attitude of Cassandra, upright, and steady as if on guard. Lazarus’s head was painted just after an arrest: Eucles finished from a man in possession: the beautiful face in Xenophon in the afternoon after a morning spent in begging mercy of lawyers: and Cassandra’s head was finished in agony not to be described, and her hand completed from a broker’s man.”
Sculptors, like artists, have frequently found art a very hard school; and amongst others of whom this is true may be mentioned Peter Scheemakers, the master Nollekens studied under. When a youth, so fervent was his desire to study in Rome, that he actually endured the fatigue of travelling from Antwerp into Italy on foot. Unfortunately in Denmark he fell sick, and when again fit for the road, he was compelled to sell his shirts from his knapsack to procure food; but he was none the less joyous when, footsore, haggard, and hungry, he at last entered the Eternal City. This was in 1700. The fine figure of King Edward VI., which used to stand in the courtyard of St. Thomas’s Hospital, was the production of Scheemakers.
Another sculptor whose history furnishes something curious in connection with impecuniosity is John Bacon, who, born in 1740, commenced life as an ordinary workman in a Lambeth pottery, where he taught himself to paint on china. Afterwards he went as modeller to Mrs. Coade’s artificial stone manufactory, and when he began to display remarkable talent as a sculptor, Johnson, who built Berners Street, was very kind to him. He took premises for him in Newman Street, and told him to start at once in business for himself. Young Bacon was astonished, and frightened. “How could you do so?” he exclaimed. “I am not fit for anything of the kind. How can I ever hope to pay you the money back?” Johnson, however, insisted upon the trial being made, and said he was quite willing to lose the money if Bacon were never able to repay him. The result was that Bacon flourished so well that when his first great benefactor had become a banker in Bond Street, and feared a serious run upon his house, the sculptor came forward eagerly to his aid with a loan of forty thousand pounds!
This was truly a freak of fortune, and as a companion picture may be mentioned a freak of misfortune, which is attributed to Capitsoldi, a talented sculptor, who came from Italy to this country in the last century. It is asserted that when he was living in a garret in Warwick Street, Golden Square, he had no furniture beyond a table and two chairs; but he painted on the walls a suite of furniture with window curtains, pictures, and statuary in such excellent perspective, and with such an aspect of relief and solidity, that the mean apartment actually appeared to be most handsomely and completely furnished.
To return to our subject—the impecuniosity of artists. The experience of John Zoffany, R.A., may be cited. He came to England from Frankfort in 1735, and about that time there was a celebrated maker of musical clocks, named Rimbault, living in Great St. Andrew’s Street, who was asked one day by some one he employed if he could find work for a poor starving artist who occupied a garret in the same house. Rimbault desired the man to send him, and Zoffany was ultimately engaged to paint clock faces. A portrait he painted of Rimbault won him a better engagement of £40 a year as assistant to a portrait painter named Benjamin Wilson, who was employed by Garrick, the actor. Garrick, being struck by the sudden and remarkable improvement which immediately ensued, suspected the truth, and, causing enquiries to be made, discovered Zoffany, employed him direct, introduced him to his wealthy friends, and gave him that new start in life which brought him fame and honour, and made Sir Joshua Reynolds his friend. Zoffany is now chiefly known in connection with his excellent character-portraits of famous old actors and actresses.
The last, but by no means the least celebrated of the artists I shall mention, whose fortunes, or the reverse, have been curiously associated with lack of means, is James Barry—at whose state funeral in St. Paul’s Churchyard poor Wilkie cut such a queer figure in Haydon’s coat. Barry was as eccentric as he was poor. Unlike Richard Wilson, to display his poverty was a matter of pride rather than pain; open reproach to those who neglected his talent, and embittered his life, rather than shame to him. His house at 36, Castle Street, Oxford Market, was a standing disgrace to the thoroughfare, every window in it was either cracked or broken, and part of the roof had fallen in. The iron railing before it was rusty for want of paint, broken, and sloping partly inward and partly outward; the doorsteps were cracked and broken, the door thickly coated with mud and dirt. The room in which he painted had been a carpenter’s shop, and the dust-covered shavings were still in it, while cobwebs hung like thick dust-coloured drapery from beams and rafter, and were suspended in festoons from every corner, while here and there the daylight shot long rays into its dingy, dust-laden atmosphere, through holes where the tiles had been broken, or had slipped aside. It had a small fireplace just large enough for the glue-pot it was constructed for, and boasted one three-legged old deal table, hardly large enough to eat a meal from. Here he painted, and etched, and printed his own proofs from a little old printing press; and here he received the Right Honourable Edmund Burke on that memorable occasion when he was, at his own particular request, invited to dine with the painter, and take “pot luck.”