I forget the precise date, but I think it was about 1898, when Butler was searching in real landscape for the original of the castle which appears in the background of one of the Giovanni Bellini pictures of the Madonna and Child in the National Gallery, the one
with the bird on the tree and the man ploughing. It may now be attributed to some other Venetian painter. He would have been pleased if he could have found the original of the background of any picture by one of his favourite painters. This copy was made to fix in his mind the castle on the hill, which he hoped afterwards to identify with some real place. But he never succeeded.
HENRY FESTING JONES
65. Water-colour: Jones’s chambers in Staple Inn, Holborn. 1899.
66. Water-colour: another view in the same room. 1899.
In these rooms Butler nearly always spent his evenings from 1893, when I moved into them, until the end of his life. The frames of these pictures are veneered with oak from the Hall of Staple Inn, and into each are inserted two buttons showing the wool-pack, the badge of the Inn, which is said to be named from the Wool-Staplers.
When Butler and I were on the Rigi-Scheidegg with Hans Faesch in 1900 I had these two sketches with me, and was showing them to the landlord, who spoke English. He looked at them and considered them carefully for some moments. Then he said gravely “Ah I see; much things. That means dustings; and then breakings; and then hangriness.”
SAMUEL BUTLER
67. Water-colour: Meien near Wassen on the S. Gottardo. 1896.
We went often to Meien to sketch when we were staying at Wassen on the S. Gottardo. We took our lunch with us, and ate it at the fountain in the village. “The old priest also came to the fountain to wash his shutters, which had been taken down for the summer, and it was now time to bring them out again and replace them for the winter” (Memoir, II. 236). The house on the left is the priest’s house, and the shutters are already up at one of his windows.