Devonshire Characters and Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

On returning from one of his wanderings, he called on Mr. Johns with his portfolio in his hand. Johns asked him how many sketches he had made and what success he had met with. Prout, bursting into tears and wringing his hands with grief, replied: “Oh, Mr. Johns, I shall never make a painter as long as I live.”

Johns then turned over his collection of sketches, and noticing the power shown in the drawing of old cottages and mills, said, “If you won’t make a landscape painter, you will make a painter of architecture, and I recommend you to stick to that.” Encouraged by this, he went away rejoicing that there was still a field open to him in Art.

Whilst still quite a lad, accident made him acquainted with John Britton, who was passing through Plymouth on his way into Cornwall, collecting materials for his Beauties of England and Wales, begun in 1801, and carried on to 1818. Immediately after Prout’s death, Britton published an account of his first acquaintance with him in the Art Journal for 1852. He says that he first saw Samuel Prout, “a pretty, timid boy,” at Dr. Bidlake’s school, and that Prout occasionally accompanied his drawing master, S. Williams, to Bickleigh Vale, and made sketches of the rude cottages and bits of rock scenery he found there.

These Britton saw and liked, and proposed to Prout to take him with himself into Cornwall, paying all his expenses, that the lad might make for him the drawings he required. Samuel gladly consented, and the two started for St. Germans through a heavy fall of snow, and put up at a wretched inn there. “The object of visiting the place,” says Britton, “was to draw and describe the old parish church, which is within the grounds of the seat of Port Eliot, belonging to Lord Eliot. Prout’s first task was to make a sketch of the west end of this building, which is of early Norman architecture, with two towers, one of which is square, the other octagonal. Between these is a large semicircular doorway, with several receding arches, but there is very little of other detail. My young artist was, however, sadly embarrassed, not knowing where to begin, how to settle the perspective or determine the relative proportions of the heights and widths of parts. He continued before the building for four or five hours, and at last his sketch was so inaccurate in proportion and detail that it was unfit for engraving.” In fact, Britton had set the poor lad a task for which he was wholly incompetent. Next morning Prout began another sketch, and persevered in it in spite of the cold and discouragement nearly all the day, but the result was again a failure.

Then Britton travelled on with him to Probus, and set him to draw the wonderful sculptured tower of that church, the richest piece of work of the kind in the west of England. It is built of elvan and is not merely sculptured throughout, but has pinnacled buttresses with crockets and finials. Prout worked hard at this all day, and though Britton accepted the drawing, it was bad. “The poor fellow cried, and was really distressed, and I felt as acutely as he possibly could, for I had calculated on having a pleasing companion upon a dreary journey, and also to obtain some correct and satisfactory sketches. On proceeding further, we had occasion to visit certain druidical monuments, vast rocks, monastic wells, and stone crosses on the moors north of Liskeard. Some of these objects my young friend delineated with smartness and tolerable accuracy. We proceeded on to St. Austell, and thence to Ruan-Lanyhorne, where we found comfortable quarters in the house of the Rev. John Whitaker, the historian of Manchester, and author of several other literary works. Prout, during his stay at Ruan, made five or six pleasing and truly picturesque sketches, one of which included the church, the parsonage, some cottages mixing with trees, the water of the river Fal, the moors in the distance, and a fisherman’s ragged cot in the foreground, raised against and mixing with a mass of rocks; also a broken boat, with net, sails, etc., in the foreground.” The next halting place was Truro, and there Prout made a sketch of the church and the houses about it. But here again he was embarrassed with the mullioned windows and the general perspective, and was particularly troubled with the iron railings that surrounded the church. Here they parted; Britton went forward on his way to Penzance and the Land’s End, and Prout was sent back, a poor disheartened lad, who felt that he had missed his vocation, by coach to Plymouth. But the disappointment did Samuel good. He had learned in what his weakness lay, and he resolved to labour hard to acquire the rudiments of perspective.

In May, 1802, he sent Britton several sketches of Launceston, Tavistock, Okehampton Castle, and other places, showing a considerable advance in his powers, and some of these were engraved. Britton saw enough to convince himself that Prout had exceptional genius for catching the spirit of architectural work, and that all he required was technical training, and he sent for him to London, kindly undertaking to give him a room and food in his house in Wilderness Row, Camberwell, whilst prosecuting his studies in Town. Here he remained for about two years, and was introduced to Northcote and Benjamin West, the latter of whom gave him valuable hints on the management of chiaroscuro, and Prout often recurred to his meeting with West and to the utility his advice had been to him. In 1803 and 1804 Britton sent Prout into Cambridge, Essex, and Wiltshire to make sketches and studies of buildings. Some of these were engraved in his Beauties, and others in Architectural Antiquities, 1835.

In the year 1805, Prout returned to Plymouth mainly on account of his health and his headaches, which unfitted him for prosecuting his studies with ease and energy.

He had in the previous year sent his first picture to the Royal Academy, and he was for the next ten years an occasional exhibitor, his subjects being mainly views in Devonshire and coast scenes. His simple drawings, says Mr. Ruskin, were made for the middle classes, even for the second order of the middle classes.

“The great people always bought Canaletti, not Prout. There was no quality in the bright little water-colours which could look other than pert in ghostly corridors and petty in halls of state; but they gave an unquestionable tone of liberal-mindedness to a suburban villa, and were the cheerfullest possible decoration for a moderate-sized breakfast parlour opening on a nicely-mown lawn. Their liveliness even rose, on occasion, to the charity of beautifying the narrow chambers of those whom business or fixed habit retained in the obscurity of London itself.”