OPIE,
THE PAINTER.
'A wondrous Cornishman, who is carrying all before him! He is Caravaggio and Velasquez in one!'—Sir Joshua Reynolds to Northcote. (Redgrave's 'Century of Painters.')
Cornwall—so far as I am aware—has contributed only two members to the Royal Academy of Arts, since its foundation on 10th December, 1768.[112] Henry Bone, of Truro, and John Opie,[113] born in May, 1761, at Harmony Cot (once known as Blowing House[114]), near the hamlet of Mithian, in the out-of-the-way parish of St. Agnes. The bleak desolate moors, saturated by frequent hissing rain-storms, and scarred with mine-heaps, the jagged cliff-coast, and the dark rolling Atlantic waves of the neighbouring sea, have a savage grandeur of their own which cannot have been without its effect on the youthful mind of the future professor of painting. For, though he rose to the high position of a Royal Academician when only about twenty-seven years of age, we shall seek, I think, in vain amongst his works for that delicate, airy grace of many of his more courtly contemporaries, which no one admired more than himself; and we shall find instead an original, broad, and manly, though somewhat grim and sombre style, which may well have been inspired by the wildness and gloom of his surroundings when a child on this remote 'bench of the world-school.' Allan Cunningham says well of him that he was not 'the servile follower of any man, or of any school;' and, as a matter of fact, his self-reliance early showed itself. On seeing a butterfly painted by one Mark Oates, an officer of Marines, an amateur artist of some merit (whose portrait Opie afterwards painted),—Jan Oppie (as his name was sometimes pronounced) exclaimed: 'I can paint it as well as Mark Oates.'
Opie's father, Edward Opie, who died while John was quite young, and his grandfather were both of them carpenters and builders, though a writer in the Fine Arts Magazine has striven to show that the family was really of old and gentle descent. Tonkin (who, as a St. Agnes man, ought to have known) says the Opies came from Ennis, or De Insula, in St. Erme.
Jno. Opie, sr. (lived here temp. Eliz.).
|
Robt. Opie=Jane, daur. of Agnes Jago.
|
Robt. (sold the Barton to Jago).
(? descended from the Opies of Pawton, in St. Breock.)
Arms: Sa. on a chev. between three garbs or, as many hurtleberries proper.
Other authorities also say the Opies originally came from St. Breock. One thing, at least, from the genealogical point of view, is clear: namely, that the genius for painting still remains in the family of Opie: for 'the great nephew of a great uncle'—as Mr. Edward Opie is pleasantly called in the recently published memoirs of Caroline Fox—has for many years past been a highly successful portrait and genre-painter in the West-country, and a constant exhibitor at the Royal Academy for more than a quarter of a century.