Samuel Prout was born at Plymouth 17 September, 1783. The Prouts were a respectable Cornish family of St. Stephen’s by Launceston, and an heiress of Grenville had married a Prout, and the sister and coheiress a Cary. The family has laid claim to the arms of Prouse of Gidleigh, but can prove no connexion.
Samuel was educated at the Plymouth Grammar School, under the eccentric, worthy Dr. Bidlake, who had an eye for the picturesque, and delighted in taking out his young pupils, Prout and Benjamin Haydon, on holidays for long walks into the country, and pointing out to them scenes of beauty. Dr. Bidlake was, moreover, a bit of a poet, as poets went in those days. He was a good and kindly man, and endeared himself to his pupils.
Prout’s mother was a daughter of a Mr. Cater, an enterprising Plymouth shipping venturer.
Samuel was a delicate boy. One hot autumn day he was out nutting when he was discovered by a farmer lying moaning under a hedge, with his hands to his head. He had been prostrated by sunstroke, and he was carried home in a state of insensibility. From that day forward he was subject to violent attacks of headache, returning at short intervals, and preventing him from sticking to business. Indeed, a week seldom passed without his being confined to his room for a day or two, unable to raise his head from the pillow, and refusing all food. Speaking in later years of his life-long infirmity, he says: “Up to this hour I have to endure a great fight of afflictions; can I therefore be sufficiently thankful for the merciful gift of a buoyant spirit?”
His father, finding him unsuited for any other profession, allowed him to follow his artistic bent, but he was chiefly self-taught. He made friends with young Opie, who painted his portrait. Another was Ambrose Bowden Johns, born in Plymouth in 1776. He had been a bookseller, but his passion was for landscape art, and he gave up his business to become a painter. Johns had the advantage of age and experience, and he was able to give Prout much good advice. Noticing that his young friend loved chiefly to draw old houses and architectural scraps, he urged him to devote himself especially to that line, and not to cultivate landscape and figure drawing. Boats Samuel ever delighted in, and sketched them excellently.
“Thenceforth,” to quote Ruskin, “Prout devoted himself to ivy-mantled bridges, mossy water-mills, and rock-built cottages.”
But he knew nothing of perspective, and his drawings were sadly inaccurate in this respect. He himself wrote in after years, as the result of his own experience: “Perspective is generally considered a dry and distasteful study, and a prejudice exists with many against everything like geometrical drawings; but without a knowledge of its rules no object can be properly delineated, and their application alone prevents absurdities and secures symmetry and truth.”
The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe took notice of the intelligent, sensitive boy, and detected that there was talent in him. He invited him to Mount Edgcumbe House to see and examine for himself the paintings and pictures there; and the Earl became so interested in the young artist, and would have him so frequently with him, that Samuel at last acquired the nickname of “the Earl’s puppy dog.”
Samuel Prout was also passionately fond of music, and learned to play on the organ, the piano, and the flute. In early days, when not out sketching by himself or with Dr. Bidlake or Haydon, he would steal to St. Andrew’s to play the organ, at that time the only organ in the town.
Meanwhile, on every sunny day, when the soft south wind breathed, Samuel, pencil and sketch-book in hand, strayed about the villages round Plymouth, and made his sketches, not of bold architectural structures, but of cottages and little bits of street scenery. He loved the old wall where the granite blocks were irregularly jointed, and saxifrage, sedum, and wallflower had rooted themselves in the interstices. He loved to stray by the seashore or to wander about Sutton Pool and the Barbican and draw the ships and fishing smacks he saw there. At the time when he was young, Plymouth abounded in quaint old houses that had been inhabited by its great merchants, with overhanging gables and mullioned windows. These are now almost all gone.