'Came the blind Fury with abhorred shears
And slit the thin-spun life—'
the lecturer was silent after the delivery of the foregoing lecture; and his busy pencil at length idle. John Opie died, childless, in the house in Berners Street where he had lived for sixteen years, in the forty-sixth year of his age. He had loving nurses in his devoted wife and a most affectionate sister; he had also the advantage of no less than six medical attendants, who saw him daily—frequently three or four times a day. But the exact nature of his illness seems not to have been quite understood,[126] and all was in vain; he lingered awhile, and died, as he had lived, a painter. His friend and pupil, Henry Thomson, R.A.,[127] had been called in to complete the background and robes of one of Opie's finest portraits, for the forthcoming Exhibition. It was a likeness of the Duke of Gloucester. 'It wants more colour in the background,' said Opie, in the intervals of his deathbed delirium. More was added, but he continued to express himself dissatisfied:—the delirium returned; and he continued (in imagination) at his easel, until he breathed his last on the 9th April, 1807.
And his prophecy as to his place of burial was fulfilled: 'Aye, girl,' he once said to his sister, 'I, too, shall be buried at St. Paul's.' There he was laid on the 20th April (close to Barry), in the crypt, by the side of a yet more illustrious artist from the West-country,—Sir Joshua Reynolds. Benjamin West's remains followed in 1820. Vandyke had long before been buried near the same spot. Fuseli, and Lawrence, and Turner, followed them. Amongst the distinguished men who were his pall-bearers were two eminent Cornishmen, Lord De Dunstanville and Sir John St. Aubyn, his friends, and (the former especially) his patrons.
We have seen something of Opie's career as an artist, and of his grasp as a writer: it remains to say something of his private character. The predominant features of it seem to me to be a lofty, unselfish ambition for excellence, a deep earnestness and stern truthfulness combined with a most affectionate placable disposition, a generous heart, and no inconsiderable sense of humour. He was never idle for a moment, his wife says—he painted all day long, and grudged himself the shortest holiday; but he never made sufficient progress to satisfy himself, and would sometimes exclaim: 'I shall never, never make a painter.' As in his youth, so in his manhood, he was liable to fits of depression, from one of which he especially suffered during a gloomy three months at the end of the year 1802, when commissions for a short while came in slowly. He recovered his spirits, however, at the beginning of the following year, when more work came to him, and from that time to the very last he was full of commissions. The last work he finished was a head of Miranda, and it was one of his best.
His tastes were simple, and his ambition (except as to his art) was moderate. To save 'a certain sum,' Mrs. Opie tells us, in order that he might keep a horse, and collect a good library which he could study at his leisure, was the limit of his desires.
A few words may be expected as to Opie's personal appearance and manners. As to the former, his bold, homely, melancholy features, noble forehead and penetrating eye—the 'index' to his mind—are tolerably familiar to us from the fact of his having several times painted his own portrait—Mr. Rogers catalogues more than twenty. One of the best with which I am acquainted is, I think, that engraved in mezzotint by S. W. Reynolds, and selected by Mrs. Opie to prefix to her edition of her husband's 'Lectures;'[128] but that presented by his widow to the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, Falmouth, is also a very fine one. There is another portrait, painted by himself when a youth, at the National Portrait Gallery; and there is one at Dulwich. And Opie was caricatured, with six other R.A.'s, in Gillray's 'Titianus Redivivus, or the Seven Wise Men consulting the Venetian Oracle.' He was always somewhat careless of his personal appearance, and frugal in his mode of life. For drawing-room society he had no liking or capacity; but, as we have seen, he enjoyed a good dinner-party, where sterling conversation went on, and to which he was able and ready to contribute his quota—sometimes brusquely enough. But on this point his friend Boaden should be heard:
'I know that, to some, his frank open conduct appeared uncalled for; nay, I have even heard it termed coarse; but the coarse man is he who says a thing in bad language, and not he who, with a noble simplicity, comes immediately to the point, and, when he has obtained conviction, in the plainest words delivers his judgment. If I were to attempt to characterize him in one word (I should most certainly use that word to the honour of our species) it would be that he was a genuine Englishman—for affectation he despised, and flattery he abhorred.' It may be added that he regarded with utter indifference any attacks which might be made on his private or professional character.
His sledge-hammer style of expression had doubtless something to do with the cessation of intimate relations which took place between old Wolcot and himself. Opie was not the sort of man to be patronized, even by a 'Peter Pindar.'
Most of his great works live to speak for themselves. Some of the finest examples are at Petworth; and Dr. Waagen pronounces these almost equal to Sir Joshua's. In energy of style, breadth, purity of colour, harmony of tone, and exquisite chiaroscuro, they stand very high. His portraits especially were real and lifelike, but they were not without their defects, and, as we see them now, are much marred by his too copious use of asphaltum: Thackeray, in his 'Four Georges,' even refers to them as 'Opie's pitchy canvases.' His historical works are somewhat deficient in imagination; and his portraits sometimes lack dignity as well as delicacy; whilst his style, partaking too much of his own temperament, and even of his personal appearance, was apt to run in a sombre vein. But a brother R.A., who knew him well—J. Northcote, a friendly rival, and to some extent his imitator—wrote of him: 'The toils and difficulties of his profession were by him considered as matters of honourable and delightful contest; and it might be said of him that he did not so much paint to live, as live to paint.[129] He was studious, yet not severe; he was eminent, yet not vain; his disposition so tranquil and forgiving that it was the reverse of every tincture of sour or vindictive, and what to some might seem roughness of manner, was only the effect of an honest indignation towards that which he conceived to be error.' Northcote would often exclaim to those whom he esteemed, 'How I wish you had known Opie!'
And his friend Sir Martin Archer Shee, a President of the Royal Academy, paid this final tribute to his memory: