After this drastic treatment the Evangeline commission was handed over to Birket Foster. It can be easily imagined with what trepidation he, knowing these facts, approached and carried out his task, and his delight when even the Athenæum could say, “A more lovely book than this has rarely been given to the public.” The success of the work was enormous. His career was apparently henceforth marked out as an illustrator of verse in black and white, for his popularity continued until it was not a question of giving him commissions, but of what book there was for him to illustrate; and he used laughingly to say that finally there was nothing left for him but Young’s Night Thoughts and Pollok’s Course of Time.[15]
Thus we see that Birket Foster’s art work was for long confined to subjects as to which he had no voice, but which certainly influenced his art, and it says much for his temperament that throughout it warranted the term “poetical.” In like manner it is much to Mrs. Allingham’s credit that her prosaic start did not prevent the same quality welling up and being always in evidence in her productions.
If I have not wearied the reader I would like to point out some further coincidences in their careers which are of interest.
Birket Foster became a water-colourist through the chance that he could not sell his oil-paintings, which consequently cumbered his small working-room to such an extent that one night he cut them all from their stretchers, rolled them up, and sneaking out, dropped them over Blackfriars Bridge into the Thames; water-colours cost less to produce and took up less space, so he adopted them. Mrs. Allingham abandoned oils after a year or two’s work in them at the Royal Academy Schools, because she gradually became convinced that she could express herself better in water-colours. But she considered that it was a great advantage to have worked, even for the short time, in the stronger medium. It was this practice in oils that made her for some time (until, indeed, Walker’s lessons to her at the Royal Academy) use a good deal of body-colour.
Both artists aspired to obtain the highest rank which then, as now, is open to the water-colourist, namely, membership of The Royal Water-Colour Society, but whilst Birket Foster only attained it in 1860, in his thirty-fifth year, and at his second attempt, Mrs. Allingham followed him in 1875, when only twenty-six, and at her first essay. Both promptly at once gave up a remunerative income in black and white, and having done so, never had cause to regret their decision.
The coincidences do not end even here, for both within a year or two of their election found themselves, the one on the invitation of Mr. Hook, R.A., the other, twenty years later, for reasons we have mentioned, settled near the same village, Witley, in the heart of the country which they have since identified with their names. Here the selection of subjects from the same neighbourhood naturally brought their work still closer together.
Both of them have been attracted to Venice; Mr. Foster again and again, Mrs. Allingham only within the last year or two.
Lastly, few artists have been indulged with so many smiles and so few frowns from the public for which they have catered. Birket Foster considered that he had been almost pampered by the critics, and Mrs. Allingham has never had the slightest cause to complain of her treatment at their hands.
Having dwelt at such length upon the interesting concurrences in their careers, I now pass on to a comparison of their methods of work; and here there are many resemblances, but these are no doubt due to the times in which they lived. Birket Foster found himself, when he commenced, the pupil of a school which had some merits and more demerits. Composition and drawing were still thought of, and before a landscape artist presumed to pose as such, he had to study the laws which governed the former, and to thoroughly imbue himself with a knowledge of the anatomy of what he was about to depict. Mrs. Allingham, as I have pointed out, was also fortunate enough to commence her tuition before the fashion of undergoing this needful apprenticeship died out. But Birket Foster came at the end of a time when landscape was painted in the studio rather than in the field. He went to Nature for suggestions, which he pencilled into note-books in the most facile and learned manner, but content with this he made his pictures under comfortable conditions at home. The fulness of his career, too, came at a time when Art was booming, and the demand for his work was such that he could not keep pace with it. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the zenith of his fame his pictures were, in the main, studio pictures, worked out with a marvellous facility of invention, but nevertheless just lacking that vitality which always pervades work done in the open air and before Nature.
Mrs. Allingham’s work at the outset was very similar to this. For her subject drawings she made elaborate preliminary studies from Nature in colour, but the drawing itself was thought and carried out in the house. Fortunately this method soon became unpalatable to her, and she gradually came to work more and more directly from Nature, and when, at Witley, she found her subjects at her doors, she discontinued once and for ever her former method. Since then she has painted every drawing on the spot during the months that it is feasible, leaving actual completion for some time, to enable her to view her work with a fresh eye, and to study at leisure the final details, such, for instance, as where the figures shall be grouped, usually posing, for this purpose, her models in the open air in her Hampstead garden. Her figures are, however, sometimes culled from careful studies made in note-books, of which she has an endless supply. Fastidious to a degree as to the completeness of a drawing, she lingers long over the finishing touches, for it is these which she considers make or mar the whole. Every sort of contrivance she considers to be legitimate to bring about an effect, save that of body-colour, which she holds in abhorrence; but the knife, a hard brush, a pointed stick, a paint rag, and a sponge are in constant request.