Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  *

  Lear was always attentive, sending money to Mary, helping Sarah settle her affairs, asking about Ellen, worrying that Harriett looked ill. But his world was now with his patrons – like Lady Howard – and with the artists. At the start of 1849 he was in debt, worrying about his future, but in June his immediate problems were solved. Over the past few years, encouraged by Ann, he had become a diligent correspondent of Mrs Courtney Warner, an elderly family friend. When she died that year she left him £500. Most of her fortune of nearly £50,000, said Sarah, went to ‘30 poor widows of the City of Bath – so that each is to have £40 per annum for life’, a bequest that made Lear joke that he had thought of marrying one of the ‘viddies’ himself, until, he said, he realised she would then no longer be a widow.

  The bequest let him pursue an old dream, to enrol in the Royal Academy Schools. It was hardly sensible, given that he was thirty-seven and the RA course lasted ten years, with students only moving to the ‘Preliminary School of Painting’ after three years of copying from the antique and studying anatomy, but this was what his heart was set on. As he had to submit drawings for selection in January, he signed on again at Sass’s school in Bloomsbury, and before the term began he visited friends, old and new, ‘in a constant state of happiness’. Old friends included Lord Derby and Robert Hornby, both now in their early seventies: ‘Immense fun we have had, one has done little but laugh, eat, drink and sleep.’ New acquaintances included the Lushingtons at Park House: far less fun. Edmund, the Glasgow professor, spent half the year here with the children and Cecilia (a true Tennyson, hypochondriac and melancholy), and his sisters Ellen, Emily and Cissy. The household was inward-looking, high-thinking and earnest. The Lushingtons had a habit, as Emily Tennyson said, of treating all outsiders as ‘mere mortals’ and the Frank whom Lear saw here was ominously different from the high-spirited traveller in Greece.

  After these visits, Lear settled into rooms at 17 Stratford Place, off Oxford Street, just opposite Bond Street, decorating them with stuffed birds, sent by Lord Derby, which he displayed in glass cases. He went to Sass’s and in January 1851 he told Fortescue with delight that the Royal Academy had accepted him: ‘I tried with 51 – little boys – & 19 of us were admitted. And now I go with a large book and a piece of chalk to school every day like a good little boy.’ In this letter he sent his drawing of infants buzzing like flies round his easel. He was a probationer until April, when his drawings were examined, but although he was then approved for the full training, he did not stay much longer: he needed to make money. Yet a few years later, drawing two Arabs for a sketch, he thought that his ‘slavy labours at anatomy in 1849–50’ had been worth it, ‘for small progress as I made – I can make something like figures now – & never could before’.

  *

  In the cold early months of 1851 London life was wretched, but in April the publication of Journals of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania brought ‘heaps & loads of compliments & congratulations’, and good reviews in the Athenaeum and Tait’s Magazine. London was en fête for the opening of the Great Exhibition in Joseph Paxton’s amazing glass and iron palace in Hyde Park: the great machines and manufactures in its shining nave proclaiming the triumph of British industry and trade. People poured in, from the wealthy and the famous to cheap day-trippers on special trains. Ann and Sarah went soon after it opened, staying from ten in the morning to seven at night when ‘The Queen and family were there, and 50,000 persons, but no crowding!’

  Lear, however, was more concerned with his painting than with the Exhibition’s excitements, working on a large oil of the road to the Acropolis at dawn and putting in more figures to please Lord Derby. (To his great distress, Derby died in June the following year, just after Lear had finished the painting and was on his way to Knowsley to present it.) As the summer passed he escaped the heat and stench of London, but only for a wet stay in Devon. Determined to paint despite the rain, he found unexpected light relief in the tipsy church clerk reading the psalms, telling Fortescue: ‘He said last Sunday, “As white as an old salmon”, instead of white as snow in Salmon), “A lion to my mother’s children” (for alien) & “they are not guinea pigs”, instead of guiltless!’ He enjoyed the nonsense innocently invented by a real, instead of a clever, fool. He had fun with the local accent too, and sent a transcript in the same letter:

  Enter Mary

  ‘Mary, has the boy come back from the Post with the letters yet?’

  ‘Noa zur, hiss be drewndid!’

  ‘He’s what Mary?’

  ‘Hiss be drewndid zur in the pewerfil rain.’

  ‘Well it certainly does rain Mary but I hope he ain’t drowned, for all that.’ Exit Mary

  Re-enter Mary.

  Here be tew litters zur: – the boy is all queet drewndid zur as ever you see!’

  But at heart, after a joyless week in Cornwall with Frank Lushington, and a return to Devon (it was still raining), Lear felt low. The post cheered him and Fortescue was kind about his painting. ‘I hope to go on’, Lear responded, ‘but only by the same road, i.e., constant study and perseverance.’ He needed a new direction.

  *

  In the coming year he found it. Instead of copying the antique in dusty classrooms he found a teacher who took him into the open air, rain or not: William Holman Hunt. When Lear was making plans to enrol at the Royal Academy Schools in the summer of 1849, John Everett Millais’s Isabella and Hunt’s Rienzi were on show at the Academy, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Girlhood of the Virgin Mary was included in a Free Exhibition in Hyde Park. All these paintings were a novel mix of symbolism and detailed realism and all were signed with the cryptic initials ‘PRB’, the mark of a revolutionary movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

  Millais, Hunt and Rossetti, who had formed the group the previous autumn, were startlingly young: Millais nineteen, Hunt twenty-one and Rossetti twenty. All had been students at the RA Schools. Millais had been enrolled at eleven, the youngest pupil ever; Hunt was accepted on his third attempt in 1844 after enduring a four-year stint in a City office to please his father; Rossetti had studied there from 1845 to 1848. It was Rossetti’s idea to form a secret brotherhood, modelled on the German Nazarine painters. Soon their numbers grew to seven, and in the spring of 1850 they published a magazine, The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art. Rejecting the idealising tenets of Reynolds and the Royal Academy, they were responding to Ruskin’s call in the first volume of Modern Painters – a book that Lear had admired since its publication in 1843 – urging young artists to ‘Go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing, believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.’

  The stated aims of the PRB were to express genuine ideas, to study nature, ‘to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote’, and – simply – to produce good painting and sculpture. They would paint outdoors and use new pigments to create brilliant, glowing effects, and their concern for the ‘pure’ art of the distant past would be combined with modern subjects and a fervent scrutiny of nature – the curl of a leaf, the sheen of a pebble, the oily roughness of a sheep’s wool. To begin with, the critics were merely curious, but after the Academy show in the summer of 1850, the outbursts began. The centre of the storm was Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents, denounced by Dickens in Household Words as both ugly and blasphemous: Christ was a hideous, blubbering boy and ‘Such men as the carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards, in a high state of varicose veins, are received.’ When the attacks continued, Ruskin, in two letters to The Times, leapt to the new painters’ defence, and became a friend.

  Lear’s oil of Claude Lorrain’s House on the Tiber was on show in
that controversial Summer Exhibition of 1850. His style, with its debt to Penry Williams and earlier landscapists, was very different, but he was fascinated by the PRB. Holman Hunt recalled how his pupil Robert Braithwaite Martineau took him to Stratford Place to see Lear’s drawings, ‘which were in outline, with little to indicate light or shade’:

  Lear overflowed with geniality, and, at the same time, betrayed anxiety as we turned over the drawings, avowing that he had not the ability to carry out the subjects in oil: in some parts of them he had written in phonetic spelling the character of the points which the outlines would not explain – ‘Rox’, ‘Korn’, ‘Ski’, indulging his love of these vagaries.

  As he was leaving Lear asked Hunt’s advice: could he make good pictures from these sketches? ‘“For when I set myself to try”, he added, “I often break down in despair.”’ Candidly, Hunt replied that he would not dream of painting from such skeleton outlines in a studio: Lear must work outside. But there was no need to go back to Sicily. Looking at the sketch of Syracuse quarries he suggested that Lear could perfectly well find the rocks and skies he needed in England, and on impulse he invited him down to Fairlight in Sussex, where he was planning to work on the painting that became Strayed Sheep: Our English Coasts, 1852.

  Lear found them lodgings at Clive Vale Farm near Fairlight, then startled Hunt by writing nervously that to avoid friction perhaps they should have separate rooms and meet only at meals. This may have been alarm at needing somewhere to escape to if he felt a fit coming on, but it was also typical of his mixture of gregariousness and private wariness. Hunt wrote later that when he and Rossetti’s brother William Michael arrived, ‘It was curious to see the unexpected guardedness of Lear’s reception of us, but he gradually thawed, and by the end of dinner he was laughing and telling good stories … The proposed separate apartments soon became a joke.’ For the first ten days Lear watched Hunt paint, then began to try himself, making notes on Hunt’s approach, system and pigments and use of colour in Ye Booke of Hunte (now lost). In the early mornings he wrote letters, sometimes thirty before breakfast, said Hunt – probably quick notes to potential subscribers to his Calabria journal. Then they spent the day sketching. In the evenings Lear penned out his drawings, and ‘In the intervals of working, with a good deal of joking he exercised me in Italian and beat out new Nonsense Rhymes which afterwards found a place in his well known volumes.’ Thackeray and John Leach visited, William Rossetti helped Lear correct the proofs of Journals of a Landscape Painter in Calabria and Millais joined them for a while, prompting Lear’s bad pun about bringing in a ‘Millaisneum’ of art, and his query about Millais, ‘Is he disposed to lord it over others?’ Well, thought Hunt, there were some men who were all good nature but still had a knack of getting others to carry their parcels. ‘Oh but I won’t carry his,’ said Lear. ‘Yes you will,’ replied Hunt. The next day, inevitably, Millais cajoled Lear into carrying the cuttlefish shells that littered the beach: ‘“He doesn’t carry his own cuttlefish”, passed into a proverb amongst us.’

  Many of the Brotherhood and their circle became Lear’s friends, including William Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Seddon, Robert Martineau and Augustus Egg. Lear admired Hunt’s dogged sticking to principles, his precision, his brilliant colour, his scrupulous studies of stone, plants and water, his skill in capturing the pearly sheen of the sea beyond the russet downs. Hunt was keen on traditional pigments, Naples yellow, Chinese vermilion, Venetian red, Cologne earth and the beautiful, expensive ultramarine blue, but to gain intensity he would mix in some of the new chemical colours like the artificial cobalt blue and emerald green. Lear took note, and in exchange introduced Hunt to music and literature, as well as teaching him Italian. By the end of their three months together, Hunt found him ‘beyond doubt the most considerately kind, and good natured man alive’. They discussed travelling to Egypt, Palestine and Syria together and their friendship would endure for over thirty years. Although Lear was forty, fifteen years older, they had much in common: both largely self-taught, they understood what it was to long for proper training, to feel isolated, to suffer depression. In January 1853 Hunt wrote Lear a letter that sounds like a brief for a limerick with its misunderstood artist, a whirling acrobat, taunted by ‘they’: ‘I have for the last three weeks been like one of those street tumblers who spinning a wheel of sharp knives, are unable to look to the right or to the left, for fear of dangerous tools coming down upon their bare heads.’ With this he drew a baffled head, dodging knives marked ‘patrons’, ‘models’, ‘critics’ and ‘Ruskin’s charity’.

  The painting Lear was now determined to work on was that of his Syracuse quarries. When the ceiling of his London lodgings collapsed in January, he went back to Hastings, ‘where at least there are fresh air, and muffins’. A month later he moved into new lodgings at 65 Oxford Street, near Hyde Park, paying for the move from the sale of his Mount Parnassus to Sir Richard Bethell, the Solicitor General. There he worked in his new Hunt-influenced style on oils of Reggio, Venosa and Thermopylae, and developed his Syracuse scene on a five-foot canvas: The City of Syracuse from the Ancient Quarries where the Athenians Were Imprisoned BC 413. He carried the PRB use of foreground detail and brilliant colour into all his large-scale paintings of the time, and every now and then in later life he returned to these tones: in 1871, he was working, ‘off & on – at Corfu Citadel, Ventimiglia, Lerici, Megaspelion, Palermo – blue, pink & yellow – a la Holman Hunt’.

  In December 1852, sending Hunt his Nonsense, Lear wrote, ‘I really cannot help again expressing my thanks to you for the progress I have made this autumn … if the Thermopylae turns out right I am a P.R.B. forever – Indeed, in no case, shall I ever return to the old style.’ When The Mountains of Thermopylae was exhibited at the British Institution the following February he told William Rossetti that any praise of its colours was owing to Hunt, ‘Not but that I dare say 99 out of a hundred will blame & not praise the colour – how green! How Blue! How queer!’ But he made the point that these mountains were hard to draw: he had studied them carefully and understood the Mediterranean atmosphere after living there for thirteen years.

  The Mountains of Thermopylae, 1852

  Though Thermopylae was a success he still wanted Hunt’s help with Syracuse. How should the shadows of the ravens fall? How to vary the too-similar colour of the shadows of the rocks?

  Altogether I foresee the possibility of this picture being a failure & remaining unfinished, unless you can help me out of this mess. – It has been so completely impossible even to see nature lately – much more to paint from it, that the poor beast of a painting has not had fair play. This however by no means weakens my faith in the proper way of painting – had I really been able to follow it out.

  Although he felt it was still not completely finished, he submitted it for selection in April 1853 and it was hung in the RA Summer Exhibition, receiving the Art Union Prize. When it sold for £250 to Henry Lygon, heir to the Earl of Beauchamp, his delight made Lear want to hop on one leg all the way to Hastings.

  This success seemed to vindicate his new loyalties. But he found the PRB’s plein air approach maddeningly difficult: to exhibit seriously he had to work on a large scale and found himself lugging huge canvases out of doors in all sorts of weather. That summer, working on another painting of Windsor for Edward Stanley, now the new Lord Derby (he became prime minister in June, with Disraeli at his side), Lear lamented that the beastly blue-black skies made it ‘utterly impossible to do this view on a strictly P.R.B. principle, – for supposing a tree is black one minute – the next it’s yellow, & the 3rd green: so that were I to finish any one part the whole 8 feet would be all spots – a sort of Leopard landscape.’ As for the sheep in the foreground, the first lot were wild and would not be caught, and although his Hastings friend Frederick North bought some Southdown sheep specially, these too would not do. They kept changing, what with shearing and lambs insisting on growing – in the end he decided to put
them all in the distance. (To Hunt, he declared that instead of sheep, ‘I shall put in a drove of Apes from the Zoological Society.’)

  While Lear groaned about the ‘infinite obstacles’ he enjoyed feeling part of the group, joining his new allies in attacking the great and good of the Academy. He was scathing, for instance, about the 1854 Academy exhibition: Maclise ‘wants nature and variety’; Landseer had ‘a canvas full of slosh’; Sir Charles Eastlake, soon the first Director of the National Gallery, showed ‘a “Giorgione & water” female head, – more like a piece of boiled veal than a woman’. Yet although he applauded his Pre-Raphaelite approach, Lear did not always agree with Hunt’s practice. In 1853, for example, he worried that Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience – where the ‘fallen woman’ leaps up from her lover’s knee, stricken by remorse after singing Moore’s ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ – did not have a sufficiently ‘high’ theme. Hunt responded calmly. He saw the painting as a pendant to his The Light of the World, in which Christ knocks at the long-unopened door of the conscience: that was a spiritual scene and this would transfer it to the material world. It was, he said, prompted by a verse in Proverbs, ‘“As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that sings songs to a heavy heart” … my desire was to show how the still small voice speaks to a human soul in the turmoil of life.’ This was in Hunt’s mind when he painted Lear’s setting of Tennyson’s ‘Tears, idle tears’, flung on the carpet.