Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/305
fully, I painted on an entirely new principle, and one which I think is pleasant in the working, and likely to be very lasting.” The “glazing with megylp, dark drying oil and mastic,” will make the painters of the new school open their eyes.
Mr Redgrave received an appointment in 1852 in the “Department of Practical Art,” which was the beginning of the important movement connected with the South Kensington Museum, and the result of the stimulus given to all kinds of art manufactures and the accompanying necessity for schools of design, and an enlarged system of technical art-education, by the great Exhibition of 1851. Thenceforward his time was much occupied by that great and ever-increasing undertaking, and his appearances in the Exhibition became more and more rare. He was thus delivered from many of the anxieties of a painter’s life, and retired more or less (though he continued to paint until the very end of his life) upon his modest laurels, enkoying the honours and festivities of the Academy, and sharing in the grim labours and responsibilities of the Hanging Committee until the end of his life, which came peacefully in 1888, when the painter was eighty-four. Dr Smiles could not have better subjects than in this good man and many of his contemporaries. As for the future Vasari of the age of Victoria, if there should ever be such a person—But Messer Giorgio himself has many a moderate good workman in his lists, and painter who, but for that graphic narrative, would scarcely have been known to fame.
Mr Redgrave’s biography vindicates its right to a place in the chronicles of the age—a place allotted by the easiest standard of merit (!)—by recording various pleasant stories of his brother Academicians, from that of Constable’s rejected picture, which the Hanging Committee, not seeing his name, “crossed”—awful fate!—and which he carried off under his arm in dudgeon, notwithstanding their apologies; and Turner’s bearishness on various occasions; and Webster’s adventures in the parish stocks; and the wonderful escapes and minauderies of J. R. Herbert, R.A.—to more modern saws and instances. Here is a strictly professional anecdote, illustrative not only of the individual, but of the very remarkable height of morality and respectability in Art, existing at the time:—
“The first varnishing days I spent at the Academy, I was trying to spoil my ‘Castle Builder,’ when Howard came up and said in his frigid way that some of the members considered the dress indelicately low. Then Turner appeared and mumbled, ‘What a-doing?’ I told him of my rebuke, and that I was endeavouring to paint the dress up higher. ‘Paint it lower,’ said he; ‘you want white,’ and wandered off. I immediately saw that the coloured dress came up rather harshly against the flesh, so I painted at once over a portion of the dress a band of white, Howard came round soon after and said with a little more warmth, ‘Ah! you have covered it up; it is better now.’ It was no higher, however, but the sense of nakedness and display was gone. Turner again drew near, and gave a gratified grunt at my docility and apprehension, which he often rewarded after by little hints.”
It is delightful to find the Academicians so prim. We wonder did they turn back any of the ladies whose dresses transgressed decorum on the night of the Soirée? Mr Horsley and the British