1853.
London again.--Accurate habits in employment of time.--Studies with Mr.
Pettitt.--Some account of my new master.--His method of technical
teaching.--Simplicity of his philosophy of art.--Incidents of his
life.--Rapid progress under Pettitt's direction.
On August 8, 1853, the writer of this book, who had promised and vowed
never to visit London again, went there to see the Royal Academy
Exhibition, and of course found it closed. If any one could have seen me
before the closed doors, knowing that I had come all the way from
Lancashire in the expectation of finding them open, he might have
derived some innocent mirth from my disappointment.
The Royal Academy being no longer accessible, I turned into the National
Gallery, and at once began to take notes in a pocket-book. This seems to
have been my habit at that time. I took notes about everything--about
painting, architecture, and even the Royal Mews. The notes are copious
and wordy. Though destitute of literary merit, they certainly serve
their purpose, for they recall things vividly enough, even in detail.
Nothing of any importance is omitted.
Although notes of that kind are unreadable, they are very useful
afterwards for reference, and my time could scarcely have been better
spent. I find I gave five hundred words to the description of Turner's
"Building of Carthage," and other pictures are treated with equal
liberality. I carried the same laborious system of note-making even into
exhibitions. In later life one learns the art of doing such work more
briefly.
Having purchased a few prints for study, I returned to Lancashire and
resumed my strict division of time. Four hours a day were given to
practical drawing, but not invariably the entry is sometimes three or
two only. When art lost an hour, literature gained it, either in study
or practical writing. I was curiously accurate in my accounts of time,
and knew to half-an-hour what was spent on this pursuit or that. Here is
an extract in evidence of this tendency:--
"Thursday, August 13, 1853. Determined to-day to study the copper Albert
Dürer 80 hours, having given 83 to the wood-cuts. I have already given
the copper 101/2 hours, so that I have 691/2 to devote to it yet. I
shall also give 40 hours to Kreutzer's violin studies, and have already
practised them 24, which leaves 16. I shall now commence a course of
poetical reading, beginning with 50 hours of Chaucer, and as I gave him
11/2 last night it leaves me exactly 481/2."
This is carrying exactness to excess, and it is not given as an example
to be followed, but it had the advantage of letting me know how my time
expenditure was running. In this way it became clear that if I intended
to be an artist the time given to practical work was insufficient. As no
painter of eminence would take a pupil I bethought me of Mr. Pettitt,
who had given me lessons at Keswick. He consented to take me, but said
that he had left the north of England for London. In the Lake District
he had been earning a small income; in London he earned twice as much,
but his expenses increased in proportion. The change, however, was a
disappointment to me, as it would have been more profitable to study
from nature under my master's direction, than to copy pictures in a
London studio.
My new London life began at the end of December, 1853. It has always
been, in my case, an effort little short of heroic to go and stay in a
town at all. My dislike to towns increases in exact mathematical
proportion to their size. The notion of going to London to study
landscape-painting seemed against nature. The negotiations with Mr.
Pettitt had been begun with the hope of a return to Derwentwater.
However, one dark and drizzly evening in December I found myself seeking
the number my new master had given me, in Percy Street. He was not
there, that was his studio only; the house was in the suburbs. We met on
the following morning in the studio, where stood an enormous picture of
Nebuchadnezzar and the Golden Image. This was conceived on the
principles of John Martin, with prodigious perspectives of impossible
architecture, and the price was a thousand pounds. The labor involved
was endless, but the whole enterprise was vain and futile from beginning
to end. Pettitt could work honestly and laboriously from
nature,--indeed, he never stinted labor in anything,--but such a large
undertaking as this piece of mingled archaeology and art was alike
beyond his knowledge and outside the range of his imagination. He was
not to blame, except for an error of judgment. The demand for his work
was feeble and uncertain, so he thought it necessary to attract
attention by a sensation picture. To finish the history of this work
without recurring to it, I have only to add that it proved in all ways,
financially and otherwise, a failure.
Mr. Pettitt was a most devoted student of nature, and his best pictures
had the character of faithful studies. He would sit down in some rocky
dell by the side of a stream in Wales, and paint rocks and trees month
after month with indefatigable perseverance; but he had no education,
either literary or artistic, and very little imaginative power. His only
safety was in that work from nature, and he would have stuck to it most
resolutely had there been any regularity in the encouragement he
received; but his income, like that of all painters who are not
celebrated, was very uncertain, and he could not quietly settle down to
the tranquil studies that he loved. Anxiety had made him imprudent; it
had driven him to try for notoriety. The Nebuchadnezzar picture, and
other mistakes of a like magnitude, were the struggles of a disquieted
mind. Pettitt had a very large family to maintain, and did nothing but
paint, paint from morning till night, except for half-an-hour after his
light lunch, when he read the "Times." As the great picture did not
advance very rapidly, he worked by gaslight after the short London
winter day, and often pursued his terrible task till the early hours of
the morning, when exhausted nature could resist no longer, and be fell
asleep on a little iron bed in the studio. There were days when he told
me he had worked twenty hours out of the twenty-four. All this was a
perfectly gratuitous expenditure of time and health that could not
possibly lead to any advantage whatever.
Pettitt was a very kind and attentive teacher, and his method was this:
He would begin a picture in my presence, give me two white canvases
exactly the same size, and then tell me to copy his hour's work twice
over. Whilst he painted I watched; whilst I painted he did not look over
me, but went on with his own work. He was always ready to answer any
question and to help me over any difficulty. In this way he soon
initiated me into the processes of oil-painting so far as I required any
initiation, for most of them were familiar to me already. Unfortunately,
Pettitt had no conception of art. This needs a short explanation, as the
reader may allowably ask how a man without any conception of art could
be even a moderately successful artist.
The answer is that men like Mr. Pettitt regard painting simply as a
representation of nature, and their pictures are really nothing but
large and laborious studies. Pettitt was a most sincere lover of nature,
but that was all; he knew little or nothing of those necessities and
conditions that make art a different thing from nature. The tendency of
his teaching was, therefore, to lead me to nature instead of leading me
to art, and this was a great misfortune for me, as my instincts were
only too much in the same direction already. I could get nature in the
country, and that in endless abundance; what I needed at that time was
some guidance into the realm of art.
Pettitt taught me to draw in a hard, clear, scientific manner. He
himself knew a little geology, and one of his sons was a well-informed
geologist. I copied studies of cliffs that were entirely conceived and
executed in the scientific spirit.
The ideas of artistic synthesis, of seeing a subject as a whole, of
subordination of parts, of concentration of vision, of obtaining results
by opposition in form, light and shade, and color, all those ideas were
foreign to my master's simple philosophy of art. In his view the artist
had nothing to do but sit down to a natural subject and copy with the
utmost diligence what was before him, first one part and then another,
till the whole was done. My master, therefore, only confirmed me in my
own tendencies, which were to turn my back on art and go to nature as
the sole authority. Mr. Ruskin's influence had impelled me in the same
direction. Every one is the product of his time and of his teachers. It
is not my fault if the essentially artistic elements in art were hidden
from me in my youth. Had I perceived them at that time they would only
have seemed a kind of dishonesty.
If Mr. Pettitt had written an autobiography it would have been extremely
interesting. He was the twenty-fifth child of his father, and five were
born after him. He began by being apprenticed to a cabinet-maker, but
did not take to the work, and was put into a printing-office. Then he
served an apprenticeship to a japanner, and married very early on
incredibly small earnings, which, however, he increased by his rapidity
in work and his incessant industry. Before the expiration of his
apprenticeship he had a shop of his own, and sold japanned tea-trays and
bellows. When he was able to rent a house, he made all the furniture
with his own hands, and took a pride in having it very good, either
solid mahogany or veneered. He saved money in the japanning business,
and then on these savings undertook to teach himself painting. His
earliest works were sold for anything they would fetch. Whilst I was in
London he recognized one of them, a small picture that he immediately
bought back for sixpence. There had been a fall in its market value,
alas! for the original price was ninepence. Pettitt had a fancy for
collecting his early daubs, as they confirmed his sense of progress.
Having acquired some knowledge of painting, he engaged himself on weekly
wages as a decorator of steamboat panels. His employers wanted quantity
rather than finish, but Pettitt liked to finish as well as he could, and
recommended his fellow-workmen to study from nature. This led to his
dismissal.
During the time of his poverty, Pettitt made an excursion into France,
and being at Paris with a companion as penniless as himself, he had to
devise means for reaching England without money. The pair had nothing of
any value but a flute, and the flute had silver keys, so it was a
precious article. With the proceeds in their pockets the friends tramped
to Boulogne on foot, and there they arrived in the last stage of
poverty. They cleaned themselves as well as they could before showing
their faces at the hotel they had patronized when richer, and there they
stayed for some days in the hope of a remittance from an uncle. That
relative was of opinion that a little hardship would surely bring the
travellers back to England, and so he sent them nothing. What was to be
done? They avowed the whole case to the hotel-keeper, who not only made
no attempt to detain them, but filled their empty purses. The story
concludes prettily, for the obdurate uncle relented on their arrival,
and at once repaid the Frenchman.
Pettitt long preceded Mr. Louis Stevenson in the idea of travelling in
France with a donkey. He, too, explored some mountainous districts in
the centre or south of France with a donkey to carry his luggage, and
the two companions slept out at nights, as Mr. Stevenson did afterwards.
At last Pettitt met with an old woman whose lot seemed to him
particularly hard. She had to walk from a hill-village down to the
valley every day, nearly twenty miles going and returning; so Pettitt
made her a present of his donkey, and she prayed for him most fervently.
Another of my master's pedestrian rambles extended for fifteen hundred
miles along the coast of Great Britain. During this excursion he
accumulated a vast quantity of sketches, truthful memoranda, almost as
accurate as the photographs which have now superseded studies of that
kind.
Pettitt had made astonishing progress considering the humble position he
started from; but unfortunately for me he was not a man of culture, even
in art. One of his friends, a journalist, who often called at the
studio, and who saw a little deeper than most people, said to me one day
that the art of painting, as practised by many fairly successful men
(and he referred tacitly to my master), might be most accurately
described as "a high-class industry."
For my part I worked very steadily when in London, and made rapid
progress. It was not quite in the right direction, unfortunately.
No reader of these pages will be able to imagine what a sacrifice that
stay in London was for me. The studio was never cleaned, and very badly
ventilated. My master did not perceive this amidst the clouds of his own
tobacco smoke, but for me, who had come from perfect cleanliness and the
pure air of our northern hills, it was almost unbearable.