Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/303

Redgrave’s day, indeed, this was not the case: his was the time when monarchs or heroes first met their brides on every canvas, when the political martyr was led forth to execution in the correctest of costumes, when Moses came home with his green spectacles, and Oliver Goldsmith was rescued from his creditors a dozen times in one exhibition. This made it all the cheerier, however, for the merry painter: and the record of the jokes, grim and otherwise, at hanging committees and Academy dinners, sometimes at the expense of the unhappy who were shut out, but often at that of the cheerful brethren themselves, is, if perhaps it may sometimes pall upon the reader to whom life is painted in graver colours, always lively, and sometimes amusing. It was more picturesque when the actors were clad in velvet and brocade, and wore all the colours in which they worked; but Titian, we know, was quite as merry, and the Dutch painters jolly dogs, ready for any frolic. Persons who have to fight out their effects with the less engaging tools of pen and ink, have not such a genial time of it.

Mr Redgrave, like so many painters of his day, had a hard struggle in his youth, and worked his way into the exhibitions and the Academy by means of such a very irregular course of study as perhaps affords an explanation of the temporary character of the success achieved by himself and his compeers, and the partial discredit into which the early Victorian epoch has fallen, The limited training, the hard work in other directions with which it was accompanied, the energetic struggle by means which were sometimes heroic into the production of pictures, while yet the painter was much at sea on many vital principles of his art, were all greatly to be deplored in their influence upon the national school, although they might give occasion for the exercise of some of the noblest moral faculties, and in that point of view were as much to be commended as their results were to be deprecated. According to the theory of self-help, nothing could be more admirable. It is the theory which used to be the admiration of the world in the Scotland of a past generation, when the admirable self-denial of the ploughman’s son, who cultivated the Muses on a little oatmeal, and struggled through a university course so as to fit himself for the position of a minister of the Church, could not be sufficiently held up to admiration: though indeed it resulted in a limitation of learning in the Church of Scotland, and of the educated sense which perceives deficiencies and smooths down roughnesses, from which that Church has much suffered. It may be said that the training was still less exact in the early days of art; but this is doubtful, for the early schools were workshops in which a boy served his apprenticeship, not struggling independently through work of other kinds to pay his way, but wholly occupied in one manner or another with the art which was to be his life, seeing it everywhere around, setting the master’s palette whose works he was one day to emulate, and getting himself saturated with the very atmosphere of painting.

Very different were the experiences of Mr Redgrave. He began “to study drawing at night and at all spare hours,” while still acting the part of boy-clerk, collector of debts, and receiver of orders, during the chief part of his time.