Illustrations
SAMUEL BUTLER. ABOUT 1866 . . . Frontispiece
From a photograph taken by his sister, Mrs. Bridges, in the garden at Langar soon after his return from New Zealand.
FACSIMILE OF POST-CARD FROM S. BUTLER TO H. F. JONES, FLORENCE, SEPT. 3, 1892 . . . face p. 23
Butler was staying in Florence on his way home from his first visit to Sicily. The old Greek painting referred to is reproduced as the frontispiece to The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897). Mlle. V. is Mlle. Vaillant, as to whom see the Memoir. The “nose” belonged to the editor of a Swiss paper whom I had met at Fusio.
SAMUEL BUTLER WHEN AN UNDERGRADUATE AT CAMBRIDGE. ABOUT 1858 . . . face p. 52
This is taken from a photographic group of Butler and three friends. The friends are omitted, as I have failed to identify them.
I. PICTURES, SKETCHES AND DRAWINGS
BY OR RELATING TO SAMUEL BUTLER
By his will Butler bequeathed his pictures, sketches, and studies to his executors to be destroyed or otherwise disposed of as they might think best, the proceeds (if any) to fall into residue. They were not sold: some were given to Shrewsbury School; some to the British Museum; one, an unfinished sketch of the back of the house in which Keats died on the Piazza di Spagna, Rome, to the Keats and Shelley Memorial there; many were distributed among his friends, Alfred Cathie taking fifteen and I taking all that were left over. Alfred lives in Canal Road, Mile End, and, this being on the route of the German air-raids, he was anxious to put his pictures in a place of safety. Accordingly it was arranged between us in 1917 that I should buy them from him. When he heard that I was giving them to St. John’s, he desired that I should not buy all, because he wished to give two of them himself to the College. Accordingly, I bought only thirteen, and the remaining two, viz. no. 28, Leatherhead Church, and no. 59, Chiavenna, 1887, were given to St. John’s College by Alfred.
There are but few sketches or pictures by Butler between 1888 and 1896. This is because his sketching was interrupted by his having to take up photography for the preparation of Ex Voto. Almost before this book was published (1888) he had plunged into The Life and Letters of Dr. Butler, and in 1892 he added to his absorbing occupations the problem of the Odyssey. Thus he had little leisure or energy for the labour of painting; and this labour was always great. He could not leave his outline until he had got it right, and there was a perpetual chase after the changing shadows. And when he had got the outline it was so constantly disappearing under the colour that he took to making “a careful outline on a separate sheet of paper”; this was to be kept, after he had traced the drawing on to the paper which was to receive the colour, and to be referred to continually while he proceeded. When he met