Page:Once a Week Dec 1860 to June 61.pdf/385

 374 London sounding through the county—became conscious that the good folks of the shire took pride in the son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, Master of Plympton Grammar School. Why should not he, the apprentice, become as great, or nearly so, a credit to Devonport, his birthplace, as was Sir Joshua to Plympton, his birthplace? Could one man only have art, abilities, and ambitions, and make for himself the opportunity to employ and gratify them? So the apprentice asked himself. And he must have been a clever fellow, that apprentice! He soon convinced himself—that was easy; but he convinced his family. He convinced several of his townsmen—difficult task, decidedly—that the best thing they could do with him was to send him up to town to study under his countryman, Sir Joshua, and to become, like him, a great painter. He had his way at last. In his twenty-fifth year he was painting in the studio of Reynolds, living under his roof.

After all, his dearest wishes gratified, perhaps the pupil was little better off. If cleverness, like fever, were contagious, it had been all very well. But the master was but an indifferent master. He could not, or would not, instruct. He was himself deficient in education—had few rules—only a marvellous love and perception of the beautiful, and an instinctive talent for its reproduction on his canvas. It was as certain as it was innate, but not to be expressed in words, or communicated or reasoned upon in any way. The deeds of genius are things done, as of course, for no why or wherefore, but simply because there is no help for it but to do them. So the pupils painted in the studio of their supposed preceptor for a certain number of years, copying his works; or, when sufficiently advanced, perhaps working at his back-grounds, brushing away at draperies, or such conventional fillings in of pictures, and then went their ways to do what they listed, and for the most part to be heard of no more in art chronicles. They had probably been of more use to the painter than he had been to them. Certainly our friend the clock maker’s apprentice was. For when there arose a cry of “Who wrote Sir Joshua’s discourses, if not Burke?” this pupil could give satisfactory evidence in reply. He had heard the great man, his master, walking up and down in the library, as in the intervals of writing, at one and two o’clock in the morning. A few hours later, and he had the results in his hands. He was employed to make a fair copy of the lecturer’s rough manuscript for the reading to the public. He had noted Dr. Johnson’s handwriting, for he had revised the draft, sometimes altering to a wrong meaning, from his total ignorance of the subject and of art: but never a stroke of Burke’s pen was there to be seen. The pupil, it must be said for him, never lost faith in his master. Vandyke, Reynolds, Titian—he deemed these the great triumvirate of portraiture. Comparing them, he would say, that Vandyke’s portraits were like pictures, Sir Joshua’s like the reflections in a looking-glass, and Titian’s like the real people. And he was useful to the great painter in another way, for he sat for one of the children in the Count Ugolino picture (the one in profile with the hand to the face): while posed for this, he was introduced as a pupil of Sir Joshua’s to Mr. Edmund Burke, and turned to look at that statesman. “He is not only an artist, but has a head that would do for Titian to paint,” said Mr. Burke. He served, too, another celebrated man. With Ralph, Sir Joshua’s servant, he went to the gallery of Covent Garden Theatre, to support Dr. Goldsmith’s new comedy, “She Stoops to Conquer,” on the first night of its performance. While his friends are trooping to the theatre, the poor author is found sick and shivering with nervousness, wandering up and down the Mall in St. James’s Park. He can hardly be induced to witness the production of his own play. Johnson’s lusty laugh from the front row of a side box gives the signal to the worthy claque, who applaud to an almost dangerous extent, in their zeal for their friend, because there runs a rumour that Cumberland and Ossian Macpherson and Kelly are getting up a hiss in the pit.

“How did you like the play?” asked Goldsmith of the young painter, who had been clapping his hands until they ached, in the gallery by the side of good Mr. Ralph.

“I wouldn’t presume to be a judge in such a matter,” the art-student answered.

“But did it make you laugh?”

“Oh, exceedingly.”

“That’s all I require,” said Goldsmith, and sent him box tickets for the author’s benefit night, that he might go and laugh again.

Sir Joshua’s pupil was James Northcote, a long-lived man, born at Devonport in 1746, and dying at his London house, in Argyll Place, Regent Street, in 1831. If he had a Titianesque look in his youth, he possessed it still more in his age. Brilliant eyes, deeply set; grand projecting nose; thin, compressed lips; a shrewd, cat-like, penetrating look; fine, high, bald forehead, yellow and polished, though he often hid this with a fantastic green velvet painting cap, and straggling bunches of quite white hair behind his ears. A little, meagre man, not more than five feet high, in a shabby, patched dressing-gown, almost as old as himself, leading a quiet, cold, penurious life. He never married. He had never even been in love. He had never had the time, or he had never had the passion necessary for such pursuits, or he was too deeply devoted to his profession. He was always brush in hand, perched up on a temporary stage, painting earnestly, fiercely, “With the inveterate diligence of a little devil stuccoing a mud wall!” cried flaming Mr. Fuseli.

He received many visitors in his studio. He was constantly at home, and liked to talk over his work, for he never paused on account of the callers. He never let go his palette even. He went to the door with a “Gude God!” his fanouritefavourite [sic] exclamation in his west country dialect, “what, is it you? Come in:” and then climbed his way back to his canvas, asking and answering in his cool, self-possessed way, all about the news of the day. Yet he was violent and angry, and outspoken sometimes, was Sir Joshua’s loyal pupil.

“Look at the feeling of Raphael!” said some one to him.

“Bah!” cried the little man. “Look at