Part 9
“On the right of the table sits an old Scheldt fisherman with a dilapidated high crowned hat on his head, a decided countenance, which is shaded by an ample beard; his well used pipe of brown clay together with its accompanying bag of tobacco are stuck in his girdle like weapons of war. This man is called by the others Jan van Bierlich. On the other side of the table sits the son of the old boatman, a powerful looking fellow about thirty years old, with an open cast of countenance. He wears the old Flemish jacket without arms, and an old-fashioned head dress: this man’s name is Willen.
“In vain has the son importuned the father to permit him to marry the prettiest, but poorest, maiden of the village. The father of the bride, Mynheer Taaks, has taken his place opposite to the boatman; he is a mild looking man, with long brown hair. The fourth guest is Izak, a bearded son of Israel, and the negociator of the present affair.
“He has promised the bride Katerina to advance the necessary dowry, on condition the bridegroom will take the debt on himself. All three have consequently combined to persuade the boatman to take their view of the case. ‘I will give my Katerina two thousand golden florins!’ cries Taaks. ‘But I have not said Ja,’ replies the boatman. ‘Have you anything to say against the maiden?’ ‘Nothing at all,’ replies the boatman; ‘I like her very well if she has got money. But I object to you, Mynheer Taaks, because you are not able to drink a proper quantity of beer: do you think I am going to have a relation that will annoy me all the days of my life instead of being a comfort to me?’ Izak winked at Taaks. ‘As for that,’ said Taaks, ‘I believe I can drink more than you, Mynheer!’
“‘I should like to see you do that,’ said the boatman, drily. ‘But I will only drink on a proper understanding,--Is my daughter to marry your son, if I prove to be a good toper?’ ‘How can I tell what you call a good toper?’ cried Jan, ‘but I am willing to have one bout with you; and if you can drink a single glass more than I, I shall say you are a good fellow, and you may bring your daughter to my house to-morrow.’ He, however, whispered to Izak--‘Taaks will soon be under the table, and that alone will be well worth a hundred florins.’ The landlord brought beer and chalk; the topers emptied the glasses in good earnest, and scored each glass on the table beside them. At length the old boatman beckoned to Taaks, who was laughing heartily, but had for some time left off drinking, and was regarding him with an air that showed he was confident of victory. ‘The battle is over!’ cried Jan, ‘I can drink no more; we will not count the glasses.’ ‘Oh! Mynheer,’ cried Taaks, ‘I have got the most scores!’ Jan sprang on his feet, bent over the table, and compared his score carefully with that of his opponent. ‘What witchcraft is this?’ roared the boatman, clenching his fists, ‘you have not scored too much, because I have watched you the whole time, and I have as surely not scored too little, and yet you have drunk two more glasses than I? I who was never beaten at beer-drinking before!’ Willen, his son, reckoned the score after him, while the old servant, who saw the joke, glanced slily over his shoulder at the scene, while old Izak observed the comical fury of the old boatman with a very knowing look. The fact was, that Izak had secretly contrived to rub out part of old Jan’s score as soon as he had marked it down.
“Jan called the host as a witness; the host took the chalk, went to the doorpost, and began to reckon; but the rogue had been drawn into the plot, and he completed the joke, by making his reckoning agree with that of the others. Jan van Bierlich was compelled, as a man of his word, to strike his colours. Five minutes afterwards, Willen and the pretty Katerina were betrothed, and a few moments later David Teniers, the younger, returned to Antwerp, carrying in his pocket the sketch of this charming picture.”
[Illustration]
_WEST (BENJAMIN), P.R.A._
Benjamin West was born in America, in the year 1738. It is said that his grandfather was one of those who accompanied the celebrated Penn to the young country. Like most of those who make their way in the art of painting, he very early displayed a strong inclination for drawing. After considerable difficulty in pecuniary matters, he was enabled, chiefly through his own industry, to visit Italy. He suffered several severe attacks of illness while in Italy, notwithstanding which his progress in the art was very rapid. He visited London in 1763. His pictures exhibited in Spring Gardens meeting with much favour, he resolved to fix his residence here in the country of his ancestors. The amount of professional work--chiefly historical--produced by this great artist is beyond all precedent. Of his many compositions the best are generally admitted to be those taken from Sacred History. And generally as an historical painter, it would be difficult to name his superior in the amount of his productions and artistic merit. He died in 1820, at the age of 82.
_LEIGH HUNT._
Among the large circle of the friends of Mr. West was the late Leigh Hunt, who thus expresses his warm attachment on the sale of the celebrated artist’s pictures:--
“It is a villainous thing to those who have known a man for years, and been intimate with the quiet inside of his house, privileged from intrusion, to see a sale of his goods going on upon the premises. It is often not to be helped, and what he himself wishes and enjoins; but still it is a villainous necessity,--a hard cut to some of one’s oldest and tenderest recollections. There is a sale of this kind now going on in the house we spoke of last week. We spoke of it then under an impulse not easy to be restrained, and not difficult to be allowed us; and we speak of it now under another. We were returning the day before yesterday from a house where we had been entertained with lively accounts of foreign countries and the present features of the time, when we saw the door in Newman Street standing wide open, and disclosing to every passenger a part of the gallery at the end of the hall. All our boyhood came over us, with the recollection of those who had accompanied us into that house. We hesitated whether we should go in, and see an auction taking place of the old quiet abstraction; but we do not easily suffer an unpleasant and vulgar association to overcome a greater one; and besides, how could we pass? Having passed the threshold, without the ceremony of the smiling old porter, we found a worthy person sitting at the door of the gallery, who, on hearing our name, seemed to have old times come upon him as much as ourselves, and was very warm in his services. We entered the gallery, which we had entered hundreds of times in childhood, by the side of a mother, who used to speak of the great persons and transactions in the pictures on each side of her with a hushing reverence, as if they were really present. But the pictures were not there--neither Cupid with his doves, nor Agrippina with the ashes of Germanicus, nor the Angel slaying the army of Sennacherib, nor Death on the Pale Horse, nor Jesus healing the Sick, nor the Deluge, nor Moses on the Mount, nor King Richard pardoning his brother John, nor the installation of the old Knights of the Garter, nor Greek and Italian stories, nor the landscapes of Windsor Forest, nor Sir Philip Sidney, mortally wounded, giving up the water to the dying Soldier. They used to cover the wall; but now there were only a few engravings. The busts and statues also were gone. But there was the graceful little piece of garden as usual, with its grass-plat and its clumps of lilac. They could not move the grass plat, even to sell it. Turning to the left, there was the privileged study which we used to enter between the Venus de Medicis and the Apollo of the Vatican. They were gone, like their mythology. Beauty and intellect were no longer waiting on each side of the door. Turning again, we found the longer part of the gallery like the other; and in the vista through another room, the auction was going on. We saw a throng of faces of business with their hats on, and heard the hard-hearted knocks of the hammer, in a room which used to hold the mild and solitary artist at his work, and which had never been entered but with quiet steps and a face of consideration. We did not stop a minute. In the room between this and the gallery, huddled up in a corner, were the busts and statues which had given us a hundred thoughts. Since the days when we first saw them, we have seen numbers like them, and many of more valuable materials; for though good of their kind, and of old standing, they are but common plaster. But the thoughts and the recollections belonged to no others, and it appeared sacrilege to see them in that state.
‘Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine: * * * * And each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat.’
“Into the parlour, which opens out of the hall and into the garden, we did not look. We scarcely know why; but we did not. In that parlour, we used to hear of our maternal ancestors, stout yet kind-hearted Englishmen, who set up their tents with Penn in the wilderness. And there we learnt to unite the love of freedom with that of the graces of life; for our host, though born a Quaker, and appointed a royal painter, and not so warm in his feelings as those about him, had all the natural amenity belonging to those graces, and never truly lost sight of that love of freedom. There we grew up acquainted with the divine humanities of Raphael. There we remember a large coloured print of the old Lion-Hunt of Rubens, in which the boldness of the action and the glow of colouring overcome the horror of the struggle. And there, long before we knew anything of Ariosto, we were as familiar as young playmates with the beautiful Angelica and Medoro, who helped to fill our life with love.
“May a blessing be upon that house, and upon all who know how to value the genius of it!”
_JOHN CONSTABLE._
Constable used to relate:--“Under some disappointment, I think it was the rejection at the Academy of a view of Flatford Mill, I carried a picture to Mr. West, who said: ‘Don’t be disheartened, young man, we shall hear of you again; you must have loved nature very much before you could have painted this.’ He then took a piece of chalk and showed me how I might improve the chiaroscuro by some additional touches of light between the stems and branches of the trees, saying; ‘Always remember, sir, that light and shadow _never stand still_,”--and added: ‘Whatever object you are painting, keep in mind its accidental appearance (unless in the subject there is some peculiar reason for the latter), and never be content until you have transferred that to canvas. In your skies, for instance, always aim at _brightness_, although there are states of the atmosphere in which the sky itself is not bright. I do not mean that you are not to paint solemn or lowering skies, but even in the darkest effects there should be brightness. Your darks should look like the darks of silver, not of lead or of slate.’”
_WILLIAM WOOLLET._
The following amusing anecdote is told of the engraver’s unexpected alterations in a plate. On bringing to Mr. West what he conceived to be a finished impression of one of his prints from an historical picture by the great painter, he inquired, with his usual mild deference, “If Mr. West thought that there was anything more to be done to the plate?” The painter, with a tone of affability and a smile of pleasure, while he surveyed the print, exclaimed: “More! Anything more, Mr. Woollet! No, sir, nothing,--nothing. It is excellent! admirable! only just suppose we take down these shadows, in the middle distance; a nothing,--a mere nothing!”--at the same time touching upon that part of the print with grey chalk, to lower it to the requisite tint;--“Nothing, Mr. Woollet! nothing at all! It is fine, very fine!--but perhaps we may throw a little more force into these near figures,”--heightening the shadows with black chalk,--“then, I think, all will be done!--Yes, all! nothing will remain; _only_, if we can contrive to keep those parts together:”--adding a faint wash of India ink. “There--there, now take it: Mr. Woollet take it; it would be overdoing it to hazard a single touch more! But stop!--stay! this reflection in the water;--a few touches, just to keep it quiet;--and the edges of these clouds a little more,--that is, I mean, a little less edgy,--more kept down. Good, very good!--There, now, Mr. Woollet, you shall not persuade me to give it another touch; you can make these few little alterations, any time at your leisure.” Woollet, who justly looked up to West as the father of the British School of Historical Painting, heard and saw all with thankful good humour, while West spoke and worked, and worked and spoke upon the proof; although the engraver was conscious that the suggested alterations would occupy a long time, and they actually delayed the publication some months, though with great advantage to the effect of the engraving.
_JAMES NORTHCOTE, R.A._
“I remember once being at the Academy, when Sir Joshua wished to propose a monument to Dr. Johnson in St. Paul’s, and West got up and said that the King, he knew, was averse to anything of the kind, for he had been proposing a similar monument in Westminster Abbey for a man of the greatest genius and celebrity,--one whose works were in all the cabinets of the curious throughout Europe,--one whose name they would all hear with the greatest respect; and then it came out, after a long preamble, that he meant Woollet, who had engraved his ‘Death of Wolfe.’ I was provoked, and could not help exclaiming: ‘My God! What! do you put him upon a footing with such a man as Dr. Johnson,--one of the greatest philosophers and moralists that ever lived? We have thousands of engravers at any time!’ And there was such a burst of laughter at this,--Dance, who was a grave gentleman, laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks; and Farrington, the painter, used afterwards to say to me, ‘Why don’t you speak in the Academy, and begin with “My God!” as you do sometimes?’”
_YOUTHFUL AMBITION._
West entertained very grand notions of Art and of its professors. He was about to ride with a school-fellow to a neighbouring plantation. “Here is the horse,” said the boy, “bridled and saddled, so come, get up behind me.” “Behind you!” said West; “I will ride behind nobody!” “Oh, very well,” said the other, “I will ride behind you; so mount.” He mounted, and away they rode. “This is the last ride I shall have for some time,” said the boy; “for I am, to-morrow, to be apprenticed to a tailor.” “A tailor!” exclaimed West; “you will surely never be a tailor!” “Indeed, but I shall,” returned the other; “it is a good trade. What do you intend to be, Ben?” “A painter!” “A painter!--Why, what sort of a trade is painter? I have never heard o’ it before.” “A painter,” said West, grandly, “is the companion of kings and emperors.” “You are surely mad,” said the other; “Why, they don’t have kings nor emperors in ’Merriky!” “Ah! but there are plenty in other parts of the world. But do you really mean to be a tailor?” “Indeed I do; there’s nothing more certain.” “Then you may ride alone,” said West, leaping down; “I will not ride with one who would be a tailor.”
_PERSEVERANCE IN ART._
Being subject to the gout, it attacked his right hand while he was painting his great picture of “Death on the Pale Horse;” but this did not check his ardour, for he proceeded with his left hand, and the whole was finished by himself without any assistance.
[Illustration]
_WILKIE (SIR DAVID), R.A._
David Wilkie, the son of a Scotch minister, was born in 1785. His genius for the art in which he was destined to become so famous, was displayed even in his infancy, and led to his being sent to study in the Edinburgh Academy, where he had for his fellow-students Sir William Allen and John Burnet. At the age of nineteen his performances had attracted so much notice that he was confirmed in his professional career. He started for London, studied at the Academy, became an exhibitor, and so paved the way for his bright success of after-years. Among his intimate companions was Haydon,--another equally celebrated painter, though not equally successful, who relates the following:--
“When the Academy opened, Wilkie, who had gained admission as a probationer by means of a drawing from the Niobe, took his seat with his class. Something of his Edinburgh fame had preceded him: Jackson, at that time a student, seems to have seen as well as heard of him, for he wrote to me, then young and ardent, to hasten from Devonshire, for that a tall, pale, thin Scotsman had just come to study at the Academy, who had done something from Macbeth, of which report spoke highly. Touched with this, I came at once to London and went to the Academy. Wilkie, the most punctual of mankind, was there before me. We sat and drew in silence for some time; at length Wilkie rose, came and looked over my shoulder, said nothing, and resumed his seat. I rose, went and looked over his shoulder, said nothing, and resumed my seat. We saw enough to satisfy us of each other’s skill, and when the class broke up we went and dined together.”
The acquaintance thus begun ripened into a warm friendship, notwithstanding occasional disputes arising from a dissimilarity in taste of the two artists.
Haydon also relates the following:--
“Wilkie, who was always hospitable in his nature, invited me one morning to breakfast, soon after his arrival in London, I went accordingly to 8, Norton Street, and knocked at the door of his apartments; a voice said, ‘Come in.’ I opened the door and found, instead of the breakfast which I expected, the painter sitting partly naked and drawing from his left knee for a figure which he had on his easel. He was not at all moved, for nought moved Wilkie; and when I expressed some surprise at what he was about, he replied with a smile, ‘It’s capital practice, let me tell you.’”
About this time (1805), in a letter written by Wilkie to a fellow-student, occurs the following characteristic passage: “And I am convinced now that no picture can possess real merit unless it is a just representation of nature.”
On the sale of his first commission picture, “The Village Politicians,” he thus buoyantly concludes a letter to his father, “My ambition is got beyond all bounds, and I have the vanity to hope that Scotland will one day be proud to boast of your affectionate son,
“DAVID WILKIE.”
On the death of his father, he invited his mother and sister over from Scotland to live with him in London. In after-years, writing to a friend, he adds, “If I were desired to name the happiest hour of my life, I should say it was when I first saw my honoured mother and much loved sister sitting beside me while I was painting.”
Another scene, of a different description, at Wilkie’s house is worthy of insertion. Mr. Collins’s brother, Francis, possessed a remarkably retentive memory, which he was accustomed to use for the amusement of himself and others, in the following way. He learnt by heart a whole number of one of Dr. Johnson’s “Ramblers,” and used to cause considerable diversion to those in the secret, by repeating it all through to a new company in a conversational tone, as if it were the accidental product of his own fancy,--now addressing his flow of moral eloquence to one astonished auditor, and now to another. One day, when the two brothers were dining at Wilkie’s, it was determined to try the experiment upon their host. After dinner, accordingly, Mr. Collins paved the way for the coming speech, by leading the conversation imperceptibly to the subject of the paper in the “Rambler.” At the right moment Francis Collins began. As the first grand Johnsonian sentences struck upon his ear (uttered, it should be remembered, in the most elaborately careless and conversational manner,) Wilkie started at the high tone that the conversation had suddenly assumed, and looked vainly to his friend Collins for explanation, who, on _his_ part sat with his eyes respectfully fixed on his brother, all rapt attention to the eloquence that was dropping from his lips. Once or twice, with perfect mimicry of the conversational character he had assumed, Francis Collins hesitated, stammered, and paused, as if collecting his thronging ideas. At one or two of these intervals, Wilkie endeavoured to speak, to ask a moment for consideration; but the torrent of his guest’s eloquence was not to be delayed,--“it was too rapid to stay for any man,--away it went” like Mr. Shandy’s oratory before “My Uncle Toby,”--until at last it reached its destined close; and then Wilkie, who, as host, thought it his duty to break silence by the first compliment, exclaimed with the most perfect unconsciousness of the trick that had been played him, “Ay, ay, Mr. Francis; verra clever (though I did not understand it _all_),--verra clever!”
His friends relate of him (Wilkie) that he could draw before he could write. He recollected this himself, and spoke to me of an old woman who had in her cottage near his father’s manse a clean scoured wooden stool, on which she used to allow him to draw with a coarse carpenter’s pencil, and then scrub it out to be ready for another day.
Collins relates the following of Wilkie with whom he lived on terms of the closest intimacy.
“When Lord Mulgrave’s pictures were sold at Christie’s, Wilkie waited in the neighbourhood whilst I attended the sale. It was quite refreshing to see his joy when I returned with a list of the prices. The sketches produced more than five hundred per cent., the pictures three hundred. I recollect one,--a small, early picture, called ‘Sunday Morning’--I asked Wilkie what he thought of its fetching, as it did, a hundred and ten pounds, and whether Lord Mulgrave had not got it cheap enough?--‘Why, he gave me fifteen pounds for it!’ When I expressed my surprise that he should have given so small a sum for so clever a work, Wilkie, defending him, said:--‘Ah, but consider, as I was not known at that time, _it was a great risk_!’”
Dr. Chalmers was asked by Wilkie whether Principal Baird would preach before the King. (Now, Principal Baird had a sad way of crying in the pulpit.) “Why,” replied Chalmers, “if he does, it will be George Baird to George Rex, _greeting_!”