Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/304
only the knowledge obtained from the house-painters in the manufactory. It is true I had learnt drawing at school for a year or two, and watercolour painting such as it was at that early day, and as taught by one who was originally an engraver. But this instruction threw little light upon the technical part of oil-painting; and when I say that I painted my first landscape in oil with long Japanese brushes such as house-painters make lines with, it may be supposed that my ignorance was great, and that I had everything to learn. Some time after this I had six lessons in oil from a miniature-painter—a man whom I soon found to be as ignorant as myself.”
In his twentieth year the young man began to study from the marbles in the British Museum; at twenty-two he was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy. “From this time,” he says, “my means of study were all I could wish, and observation of those around me was alone sufficient instruction.” How he was able to take advantage of this instruction, however, was as follows. He soon separated himself from his father’s crowded household, and began the battle of life alone:—
“I had to work hard, and for a time my life was a struggle; but I always managed to save a little and to help others. It is true I was for many years a real slave to teaching, being employed many hours of every day, and devoting my evenings, after my two hours in the Academy schools, to preparing examples and other labours incident to teaching. I never, however, gave way, and I was gradually able to devote first one whole day and then two days in each week to painting. This trial to my health, however, was very great. I often left home at nine in the morning, walking always to my work; for, be it remembered, my teaching time was long before the town was threaded by omnibuses or the suburbs and villages reached by railways; and consequently, in addition to my lessons, I sometimes walked fifteen miles a day to give them. Soon after I became a student at the Academy and commenced teaching for my livelihood, I began to make myself acquainted with the villages and commons round London, and in my summer holidays I practised sketching in water-colours. Year by year I worked in that medium until, on my marriage trip, I took to sketching in oil, and then after a year or two to landscape-painting in oil, which practice stood me in good stead when other commissions were scarce or ill-paid.”
Nothing could be more admirable, in a moral point of view, than this most praiseworthy struggle; but as a training for art, and especially for the position of one of the representative painters of England, it is curious. Genius triumphs over everything, but Mr Redgrave was not a man of genius any more than many other meritorious painters who were his contemporaries. Yet he had a picture well placed in the Academy exhibition when he was twenty-seven, and in 1840, at thirty-six, he was elected an Associate. It is, we believe, by his landscapes that Mr Redgrave is now chiefly known; but his success was not gained by that tranquil and beautiful art for which English painters, with the national love of nature, have always had a tradition of excellence, but by pictures entitled “Fashion’s Slaves,” “The Poor Teacher,” “The Reduced Gentleman’s Daughter,” and so forth, in what we now call the British public style. “All could feel touched,” says the editor of the memoir, by the representation of a young and pretty girl, just at the time when she would naturally rejoice in gaiety and merriment, immured in a vacant schoolroom to take her solitary tea.” Another was the “Sempstress,” which, he declares cheer-