THE LIFE OF WILLIAM MULLER.* SOLLY'S book on William Muller
is compiled on the same- system, or, to speak more correctly, with as great an absence of system, as his life of David Cox. He has brought together an amount of material which might have furnished both an interest- ing connected memoir of the artist's career and a valuable work of reference respecting his pictures. But he proceeds on no definite plan. He interrupts his narrative with dull inventories, after the manner of a catalogue raisonne, and interlards it with accounts by other writers of events which he has himself already described. Much that is contained in the body of the work should have been reserved for the appendix, and some of the supplementary matter now placed there would have materially en- riched the previous pages. Nor does the meagre table of contents at all make up for the unpardonable want of an index. Instead of giving us a straightforward narrative, Mr. Solly is perpetually apologising for slight digressions, hoping that his remarks will prove interesting and his information acceptable, fearing lest his anecdotes should be deemed too trivial, and telling us beforehand what he proposes to do in some subsequent chapter. But notwithstanding this patch- work method of compiling, the book contains material enough to enable the reader to form for himself a picture of the man and an estimate of his genius. The outline of Miiller's career may be simply drawn. He was born in 1812. His father, a man of considerable attainments in natural history, was a German refugee, who left his native Dantzig at the beginning of the century to escape French exactions, and settled in Bristol, where he married
• Memoir of the Life of William James Muller. By N. Neal Sully. London : Chapman and Hall. an English lady, and became curator of the museum. His son soon showed a taste for drawing, copied shells and skeletons, drew diagrams for the lecturers, helped to illustrate his father's book on the Crinoidea, made a study of a mummy-case for Prichard, the ethnologist, sketched assiduously from nature, and was allowed to follow the bent of his genius and become an artist. On his father's death in 1830 he set up as a landscape painter, and he soon acquired a local reputation which enabled him to support himself. In 1839, six years after the death of his mother, he established his studio in London, and resided there when at home until his own premature death in 1845. But he was anything but a mere studio-painter. The materials for his work at home were collected far and wide. Besides in- numerable sketching excursions in England and Wales, he made four tours abroad ; the first, one of eight months in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, in 1834-35, with his brother artist, Mr. George Fripp, also a native of Bristol ; the second, one of six months in 1838-39, to Greece and Egypt, by himself, or with travellers picked up on the way ; the third, one of three months in the autumn of 1840, in northern and central France, on a commission from Messrs. Graves and Co. to make sketches for a .series of lithographic illustrations of the age of Francis L, pub- lished by that firm in the following year, in which tour he was accompanied by his pupil, Edward Dighton, a highly promising .artist, who also died young ; and the fourth, a final one of seven or eight months in 1844-45, with another pupil, Mr. Harry John- son, now of the Water-Colour Institute, to Asia Minor, among the ruined cities of Lycia, at that time being re-explored by a Covernment expedition under their discoverer, Mr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Fellows, whose representations to Muller of the picturesque resources of the country had induced him to turn his steps thither. Of the first of these journeys a pleasant account is given from the narration of Mr. Fripp ; some light is thrown on the third by Miiller's letters, and the short notes in his diary ; and respecting the fourth, we have a succinct narrative by Mr. Johnson, some interesting letters by Muller to friends at home, and best of all, a reprint of some singularly graphic and interesting papers of his which were published at the time in the Art Union. There is nothing in the book which tells us more of the character of the man than this spirited and unaffected account of his adventures. One can read therein a self-reliant frankness which won him the rough affection of the native tribes, and enabled him to rise superior to the jealousies of his own country- men. Very pleasant also are the memoranda of his various sketching rambles about his native town with Mr. Skinner Prout, the Rev. John Eagles (well known as the author of the Sketcher), and Mr. John Harrison, who contributes a most interesting paper ; to the mouth of ate Thames, in a hatched boat, with Mr. J. Chisholm Gooden, Dighton, and others ; and to North Wales, with Jackson, Bentley, Baxter, Wilson, and Evans.
Miller's old associates combine to describe him as a man of distinct character ; of great energy and independence, with a strong spirit of enterprise and no lack of ambition, somewhat self-asserting and overbearing at times, but of a warm heart, an open, generous, and straightforward nature, and a peculiarly sociable disposition. He was a jovial companion, with a fine flow of animal spirits, and a quaint wit which, though sometimes finding vent in practical jokes, was seldom exercised in an offen- sive manner, except when directed against meanness, weakness, or arrogance, which qualities he held in undisguised scorn. A likeness of him, from the pencil of Mr. Branwhite, and a photograph of a posthumous bust made from a cast of his face, accord with these reported characteristics ; and divers entertaining anecdotes respecting him which are registered in the present volume have the same broadly-marked character. ills vigorous style of painting, and the appearances of nature and humanity which he loved to portray, are also in harmony with the manly decision and broad consistency of his conduct in life. Miller's career was pre-eminently that of an artist devoted to his .art. It guided and governed the course of his actions and the disposition of his time, it regulated his choice of friends, and it was in the ardour of its pursuit that he expended his strength I and dropped into an early grave. His energy and perseverance seem never to have been relaxed, until in the last few weeks of his life he became physically unequal to the work be had still the will to do. When busy at Bristol on the first picture he exhibited in London, one of the destruction of old London Bridge, he found that he wanted some details. No one knew better how to sacri- fice detail when it waa not wanted, but he was not the man to scamp his work ; and off he set by the night coach, sketched all day in London, and travelled home again the next night with the needful memoranda. This was in 1832, when he was twenty. After he came to reside in London, he would still travel back to his native town, and after spending twelve hours outside the mail, be ready, as soon as he had swallowed his breakfast, to start for a day's sketching in the Leigh Woods or the Nightingale Valley. "lie let no opportunity pass," says one of his sketching companions ; "he kept his ap- pointments punctually, and seemed never tired. It was delight- ful to work with one so totally free from a certain languor that now and then pervades the artistic mind. Our friend was never out of sorts, at least, I never saw him so. Summer or winter, he was always ready to sketch." His routine of studio life was one of the same industrious activity. After seven or eight hours' painting in his room at Charlotte Street, he would work hard at the figure regularly for two hours in the evening at the Life School in Clipstone Street, and often after that join the students' draw- ing society, and be the life and soul of the party till eleven or twelve o'clock at night. In an earlier sketching club at Bristol he would often do two sketches to his companions' one, and the whole book teems with testimony to his extraordinarily rapid workman- ship. After a year's close application in the painting-room at his Egyptian pictures, his mode of refreshing himself for "renewed exertions for the Academy" (that cared so little for him) was, as he expressed it, "to seek change and amusement in the solitary grandeur of North Wales under its winter aspect," which meant a Christmas visit of three weeks to a little inn near Tal-y-Bont, whence he went out sketching every day, knee-deep in snow. And when, on his way back from Lycia, he was detained for nine days in the lazaretto at Smyrna, he employed his time and the rem- nants of his colours in covering the large wall of his prison with cartoons in distemper, some of them five feet long, of the adven- tures of his journey.
It is a relief from the present speculative scrambling of the sale-room over Miiller's works to read of the way in which he valued them himself, and of an estimate of art so different from that of the money-grubbing spirit of our time. A few months before his death, when he could have commanded his own prices, he wrote thus :—" I have of late had so many kind friends de- siring me to paint, that in justice to my reputation, and perhaps more so my health, 1 have, unpleasantly to myself, been forced to increase my prices, for I should truly like nothing better than painting and giving away, so that the unpoetical word money was never to be used. Yet we all must know that in the nineteenth century such would be truly laughable, and to be laughed at." But Mfiller's circumstances in life were such as to favour his in- dependence, and entitle him in a great measure to disregard the shop element of his profession. He had no family to support, and his facility in painting enabled him, while keeping his prices low by rapid production, to secure an income enough for his re- quirements, free-handed as he was, and unsparing of expense where his progress in art was in question. He had neither need nor inclination to curry favour with picture-buyers, or to accommo- date his painting to popular taste or to the demands of fashion. He one day went so far as to refuse a well-known dealer's invitation to dinner, saying, for the reason, "I don't like your wine drunk out of artists' skulls." But he had ambition,—the ambition not only of success in his own eyes, but also of public approval. He felt keenly and bitterly the persistent refusal of the Royal Academy to recognise his merit, and often thought of settling in St. Petersburg, as a place where an artist was sure of encouragement. The only instance which Mr. Solly records of his spirits having fairly broken down under a sense of failure or wrong was when a set of pictures, the result of his arduous labours in Lycia, and one of which has since been sold for £1,200, were skied and floored in Trafalgar Square. lie had never been well hung there in his life, but he had this year been encouraged by the favourable hanging of three of the same series at the British Institution,—" the only bit," he said, "of good luck he had met with ;" and when his ill-treatment at the Academy was made known it quite prostrated him for the moment, produced pro- longed dejection, and is believed to have contributed to the haste with which a fatal disease, induced already by over-exertion, carried him off in the same year. Miiller's style of painting and the choice and treatment of his subject were the natural result and reflection of strongly marked tastes and powers of mind and body. It is impossible to say how far he was influenced by other painters or their schools. A short and abortive apprenticeship when a lad of fifteen to J. B. Pyne, the landscape painter, was all the direct instruction he ever had from technical professors. Before that time he had practised himself in oil-painting by copying from old masters in the British Philosophical Institution. Some drawings of Cotman's which fell in his way a few years afterwards taught him much that he was willing to learn about the sacrifice of detail to the breadth of effect, anda two months' visit, possibly consequent there- on, to Norfolk and Suffolk seems to have given him a deep apprecia- tion of the school of Crome and the meaning of Constable. In his early interiors he is said to have evinced a keen admiration of the Dutch school, particularly of Ostade and Rembrandt ; and the impression of Titian and Tintoret, received during a visit to Venice in his that foreign tour, is believed to have exerted a strong after-influence on his manner of painting. But there can be no -doubt that he looked upon nature with his own eyes, and not through spectacles furnished him by any of these masters. What delighted him in their works were the means they furnished him with. of strengthening his own interpretation of the class of phenomena he most loved in nature. There was a singularly happy adaptation of his natural power of hand and eye to the appearances he desired to depict. His very defects were in his favour. A shortness of sight helped him to blend the colours and generalise the masses of his subject, and the impetuosity with which he would sacrifice a sketch which did not satisfy his first impression was but the complement of the masterly rapidity and strength of grasp which were essential to his success. He had an extraordinary knack of seizing the picturesque side of a scene, and arranging with facility the most difficult subject, putting his principal light at once in the right place, and grouping his forms and objects into a composition of perfect unity. He was reckoned the prince of sketchers. But his art was chiefly picturesque. It had little in common with the topographic school of Turner and Girth, and their predecessors, although he was once employed to draw French architecture for a publisher of prints. He was largely impressed, no doubt, with the poetry of the Nile and the classic associations of Athens ; but it was the pictorial effect, rather than the interest, human or other, of the objects before him, that he endeavoured to carry away ; and it seems ridiculous enough now that the "marvel-hunters," as the sailors called them, of Sir Charles Fellows's. expedition, should have been afraid that their antiquarian draughtzman would be robbed of his glory by a man to whom "cyclopean walls with Roman ones built upon them" appeared unsketchable, and who called making careful outline-drawings of their tombs and temples, with all their details, "taking medicine." "I wish," he said of Creswick, "he would not niggle quite so much, as it makes nature look as if seen through a diminishing -glass." But Miller's own view of nature was defective, for the want of greater penetration into the mystery of nature's detail. It was limited to the amount of sug- gestion which could be conveyed in the rapid washes of colour and decisive blocking-out of form possible in a sketch. That ex- pression of space and distance and the largeness of nature, which is dependent on the indication of miles of far-off objects in the same angle as a mere foot of foreground, did not come within the scope of his art. To give the idea of atmosphere, he had recourse to technical devices which in the hands of mere imitators of his manner may easily degenerate into trick. He would granulate the distance with chalk and ground-glass, and give a solid smoothness .t.,0 the foreground by means of the palette-knife ; and in water- colour sketching be would burnish the paper at the top and bottom of the sheet, using its natural roughness to give air in the centre. On the back of one of his most dashing landscapes he wrote, "Left for some fool to finish." But he did not undervalue the importance of careful drawing. "First," he said, "we study nature's forms and details to learn her grammar," and his own eye had been so informed and educated quite early in life. "How strange it is," he wrote, that "most amateurs will always go the long road, rather than take the little hill ! One carefully drawn fragment with colour—be it of what it may—is worth all, I believe, many men do in their six weeks' excursions. Genius is one thing, but the greatest must have observed the forms of a willow, of an elm, of an oak, else with all genius he may make them like some unknown forms." But broad massive cohtrasts and rich colour springing out of and set off by depth of shadow were what, at least in the maturity of his style, he chiefly looked for, and found everywhere, in nature. He was fond also of lighting up night scenes and cavernous places with artificial fire. The riots in his native town in 1831 give him subjects for some clever early sketches,—two years afterwards he and some young companions were sending up rockets among the Cheddar cliffs ; the hall of the temple at Denderah "should be seen," he says, "properly to appreciate it, by firelight ;" and some of his favourite figure-sketching in Lycia was by night, in the tents of the wandering tribes.
In his later works, Muller takes no mean position as a painter of the figure, much of his knowledge of which was acquired in
London, at the above-mentioned academy in Clipstone Street, a society which will often be referred to in future memoirs of art and artists. The present volume contains a valuable sketch of its origin and early days, from the pen of Mr. Jenkins, of the Water-Colour Society, who was for some years its secretary, and who introduced William Muller to it as a member in 1840. Some interesting technical notes of Miiller's method of work and some amusing anecdotes of his wit and practical joking will also be found interspersed among these pages, together with some photo- graphs of Aliiller's pictures and sketches, which are, of course, only a partial reflection of the originals.
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