The men whose works are the heirlooms of all time have said, or written, their great words, and thought their wonderful thoughts, when they have been wanting bread; so tradition says it was with HOMER, so it was with the wandering DANTE. It is so in the history of music, and the name of HAYDN, and especially the name of BEETHOVEN, will rise instantly to the reader's recollection. The story of the last mentioned great master is especially pathetic; his early struggles from his low obscure origin and helpless poverty, and through all his life, his fortune, if it surrounded him, seemed to give to his matchless genius additional strength, a more subtle power of harmony, seemed to give some expression of its own painful complications to the often strange and weird relations of the linked sweetness and terror of his notes. Thus, in fact, it is that as we look round the volumes of a large library, the peers of scholarship or of genius, the masters of criticism or of poetry, seem to have attained their place by taking their degree in the great university of poverty.

A writer in the Eclectic Review remarks: "In the history of English painting we have been greatly interested in noticing, how the successive monarchs of the art exhibit the power of genius to lift itself above the difficulties of surrounding circumstances. Nearly all of them were born in positions in life bearing no proportion to the eminence to which they attained; many of them surrounded by poverty-born in poor men's homes; and most of them set apart, by the necessities of their birth and education and apprenticeship to widely different occupations; they represent no particular latitude or range of English counties, but every part of England yields some representative name; we do not remember one who could be said fairly to be born to wealth or social position."

ROMNEY, that masterly and magical English portrait painter, was born at Dalton-in-Furness, where his father was something of a farmer and something of a builder, and the painter was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker.

ILLUSTRIOUS PAINTERS.

II

WILLIAM HOGARTH passed honestly through his seven years' apprenticeship as an engraver on silver plate.

JAMES BARRY, the Royal Academician, and classic, and heroic painter, was born in a small publichouse in Cork, kept by his father, who supplemented that not very dignified profession to his small occupation as a coast trader.

JAMES NORTHCOTE, also a Royal Academician, who is said by our writers to be, "assuredly a pattern of perseverance," was apprenticed to his father, a watchmaker in Plymouth. During the seven years in which he was learning to make watches, he was also acquiring that other knowledge which was to place him in the very foremost rank of English historical painters.

JOHN JACKSON was the son of a village tailor in the North Riding of Yorkshire. In a little obscure village he began by sketching the portraits of his fellow villagers, improvising his tools and his colours, till discovered by Lord Mulgrave, who advised him to go to London. He found the means of travelling on the continent, to study in the different schools, and when he returned he soon attained great eminence as a portrait painter; he also became a R.A., and Leslie said, "that in the subdued richness of his colour, Lawrence certainly never approached him."

It is natural to attempt to make out a dignified ancestry for SIR TIIOMAS LAWRENCE, but, as a matter of fact, he was the son of a publichouse keeper, the White Lion Inn, in Bristol, whence, his father failing in business, he removed, with the little future eminence of the easel, to the more obscure town of Devizes, to become the host of the Black Bear.

Who could have thought the matchless wizard of colour and canvas could have been born in a small barber's and hair-dresser's house in Maiden Lane? Yet in such a place the great TURNER first saw the light in the London of 1775. It is true that Maiden Lane then represents to the imagin

ation a different Maiden Lane to that of which we have any knowledge now, yet the intricate lanes, and alleys, and dry ditches seem a strange study for that marvellously spiritual eye. Glimpses of the trees in St. James' Park; glimpses of the broad river he so tenderly loved, then unspanned by its many bridges, or cumbered by its many steam-boats; quaint relics of architecture too, now long gone; the unstudied irregularity of old streets; Holborn, with its bars ; the Strand with its churches; all fostered within him that love of cities and architecture which is so manifest in the multitudinous productions of his omnipotent pencil. It is said his first sketches were exhibited in his father's shopwindow; and very early he seems to have felt his way with that mixture of marvellous genius and prescience, and dogged, speechless obstinacy, and tenacity of purpose, which blend so remarkably in his character. And there is mentioned a singular, but illustrative, anecdote of his early days: "Turner was from the beginning diligent in the pursuit of his profession, and soon began to turn it to profitable account; it is said that he exhibited his juvenile performances for sale in the windows of his father's shop in Maiden Lane; that he was employed to colour prints by Raphael Smith, the engraver, and to wash in the backgrounds for the architects, a practice more resorted to half a century ago than in our own day. Even at this early time, and under such unpromising circumstances, there was an originality in his work. We are told that he was employed by a Mr. Dobson, an architect, to colour the perspective front of a mansion, and that in putting in the windows, Turner showed the effect of reflected light from the sky, contrasting with the inner dark of the room on the uneven surface of the panes. This was a new treatment, and his employer objected to it, declaring that the work must be coloured as was usual; that is, the panes an unvarying dark grey, the bars white. 'It will spoil my drawing,' 'Rather that than my work,' answered the architect, I must have it done as I wish.' Turner

said the artist.

PAINTERS: OLD CROME.

13

doggedly obeyed, and when he had completed the work, left his employer altogether. The sequel of the story is curious sometime after it occurred to the architect to try a drawing on the principle he had disapproved, and remembering Turner's work, he coloured it nearly the same. It was sent to the Royal Academy and accepted, and was so much admired by Smirke that he sought the acquaintance of Dobson, which led to a union between the families. So much for genius in the mere colouring of a window.

OLD CROME, so called to distinguish him from his son, who also became an artist, was himself the child of a poor journeyman weaver only, in Norwich, and he first saw the light in a mean publichouse in that city. Poverty seems to have scowled upon him through all his early years, but by some good hap he rose to the dignity of apprenticeship to a house-painter, and soon became a sign-painter; studied, watched, and waited upon the steps of nature, whom he loved so passionately, and wooed so successfully. The usual stories are told of his manufacturing his own brushes, and stealing his mother's aprons to use as canvases for his first efforts. Careful study and observation crowned him at last with distinguished eminence; from the most insignificant things and objects he would produce a canvas fascinating by his treatment. This is evidenced in his well-known picture in the National Gallery, "Mousehold Heath;" it is universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of English art; but it is only a barren heath stretching into the far distance, and a bank in the foreground with a few weeds, over all a luminous sky with rolling clouds; but from this combination he has given a fine and interesting painting. Its history has something of the marvellous in it too: it was purchased by some wretched and villanous canvas-monger and murderer, who cut it down the middle that he might sell it as two paintings: it was sold in this state. Some reverential art-lover repurchased and reunited them, and this beautiful picture of the old Norwich weaver-boy and sign-painter has now

found its final resting-place in our national treasury of art. Crome's pupil, James Stark, was the son of a Norwich dyer.

WILLIAM HUNT, that great master, who has only just left us, was the son of a poor tin-plate worker, and was born in old Belton Street, turning out of Long Acre. There -a poor sickly little lad, in the midst of the poisoned air of the crowded old churchyard of St. Martin's, far from the breath of may-flower or apple-blossom, of field or orchard -dwelt the future painter of those strong lines of humour and nature, which have made his works so precious, and even the engravings of them so illuminating and refreshing to the parlour.

DAVID ROBERTS, born near Edinburgh, belonged therefore to a race whose aim it is always to help its children to rise; but his parents were unable to carry their ambition for their boy beyond a house-painter and decorator; he became a house-painter, indeed, but of a wonderfully different rank, of those masterly delineations of continental and oriental towns and cities; of churches and cathedrals, with their fascinating, but, one sometimes thinks, a little too histrionic, effects of priestly hagioscopes, or military processions, too much reminding the eye of the early struggles and transformations of the young house-painter to the scene-painter.

It is the same, turn whatever page we will in the history of English painting; every chapter reveals the struggle of genius with the encumbering influences of circumstance, or the obstacles of poverty; scarce a name seems to be associated with the ideas of early happiness and ease; Reynolds and Constable were comparatively easy in their origins and first efforts, but such names formed the marked exceptions.

WILLIAM ETTY, that great colourist, was the son of a baker in York; was bound apprentice, wholly against his will, to a printer in Hull, but he released himself from the shackles of so uncongenial a pursuit. He was greatly self