SPECTATOR'S LIBRAR Y.

BIOGRAPHY,

Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. With Selections from his Jour- nails and Correspondence. By his Son, W. Wilkie Collins. In two volumes.

ANNUALS. Longman and Lto. The Keepsake, 1819. Edited by the Countess of Ble.sington. With beautifully finished Engravings from Drawings by the first Artists, engraved under the super- intendence of Mr. Charles Beath.

The Book of Beauty ; or Regal Gallery, 1849. With beautifully finished Engravings from Drawings by the first artists. Edited by the Countess of Blessington. Bogus.

MEMOIRS OF WILLIAM COLLINS.

Tire life of an artist, if he happens to be a respectable man, is rarely one of much biographical interest. During his early struggles little attention is paid to his circumstances, or his modes of study ; possibly he may not himself be disposed to recall the tale of his poverty and privations when eminence is attained, and from not having the habit of writing he may be unwilling, or indeed unable, to record the methods by which he attained it. A. scamp like Morland, or some of the villain-artists of Italy, may fur• nish anecdotes and incidents enough; but journies, sketching in the open air, and working in the studio, with the gradual increase of the painter's fame and profit, form about the staple of many artists' biographies, varied by such anecdotes as may have been preserved of them.

To this general rule William Collins is an exception ; chiefly because at some of the most remarkable periods of his career he kept a journal or commonplace-book, and carried on a pretty full correspondence with his family and friends. This habit, however, was rather a sign of some-

thing deeper. William Collins had an inquiring mind, which prompted him to examine nature and art with a view to draw from them laws con- ducive to his own improvement; and he found by experience that this

was beat done by reducing his ideas to writing. If he trusted to his memory, he lost time in criticism, by looking at works from which he had already extracted all that was valuable ; or he forgot the criticisms, made upon his own productions, and the rules he deduced from his owa reflections ; or they were not realized in his mind. Hence his journals, and sometimes his letters, contain remarks on the general principles of art, wnich are not only useful as criticisms, but, coupled with the anecdotes collected by his son, furnish a history of the artist's mind, and of the methods by which his natural aptitude was gradually and perse- veringly trained to the excellence he at last reached.

William Collins was also a religious-minded man; a disposition which, beginning at first in regular conduct, ended in a habit of referring-every-

thing to the immediate superintendence of Providence. This religions

feeling stimulated his self-examination, and raised him, at least in theory, above the artificial distinctions of life; so that, what with his own re-

cording and the materials possessed by his son, a full account is presented

of his youthful studies, the distresses of his early years, and the pecuniary difficulties that beset him even after he had attained celebrity. With this essential matter is mixed a good deal of dry correspondence, and -a • flowery description of pictures and scenery on the part ,of his son.; which extend the work rather needlessly, as is usual in modern memoirs.

As Mr. Wilkie Collins treats the career of his father in the manner of annals, the Exhibitions and the pictures painted for them forming the artiatical epoch of the year, any great condensation would have involved an entire change of plan. William Collins was born and bred in an atmosphere of art. His father was an Irishman, with the geniality, vivacity, wit, and thoughtless-

ness of his countrymen ; though with a (theoretical) sense of pecuniary

obligations, which they do not always possess. Mr. Collins senior was a poet, picture-dealer, and man of letters; but the proverbial ill success of too many trades attended hini. He produced a poem on the Slave-trade ; articles and essays for the press, when that vocation was less certain and less remunerative than now.; and a biography of his friend Morland, in the middle of a satirical novel called _Memoirs of a Picture, designed to expose the arts of dealers. As those were arts that Mr. Collins senior disdained to practise, and his house moreover would

seem to have been open for men of merit, his circumstances were always

embarrassed ; and he died insolvent, in 1812. In such a position the natural bias of young Collins to art received every encourage- ment. Morland undertook to teach him ; though the painter in after life never attached much value to the lessons of that eccentric "genius," but ascribed more influence to T. Smith, who taught him how to "set a palette." His father appears to have had sufficient knowledge of art to

give him lessons in drawing, superintend his artistical education, and employhim, as soon as the pupil was competent, in copying and repairing the pictures in the shop. Collins himself ascribed his proper -education in art to the Royal Academy, of which he became a student in 1806 or 1807 ; but in reality he had no education beyond the merest mecham'calip,

and that very important habit and practical dexterity which -are f by constant presence in a business. Nature was his prompter and big guide even from the earliest period. " Whatever natural object he perceived, he endeavoured to imitate upon paper: even a group of old blacking-bottles, picturesquely arranged by hisfriend Linnet], (then a student like himself,) supplied him with a fund of material too precious to be disdained.

"Ere, however, I proceed to track the progress of his mind in his youth, an anecdote of his boyish days may not appear too uninteresting to claim it place at this portion of the narrative. His first sight of the sea-coast was at Brighton, whither be was taken by his father. As soon as they gained the beach, the boy took out his little sketch-book, and began instantly to -attempt to draw the sea.

He made six separate endeavours to trace the forms of the waves as they rolled

at his feet, and express the misty uniformity of the distant horizon hue, but every fresh effort was equally unsuccessful; and he burst into tears as he closed the book and gave up the attempt in despair. Such was the first study of coast scenery by the painter who was afterwards destined to found his highest claims to original genius and public approbation on his representations of the various beauties of his native shores."

At a somewhat later date, but while very young in 'his teens, his old schoolfellow Mr. Sidon thus describes him from memory.

"His father, himself, his brother Frank, and I, made long peregrinations in the Melds between Highgate and Wilsden. He always had his sketch-book with him, and generally came home well stored. He was then very quick with his pencil. He had great respect for the talents of Morland. When we were by ourselves, more than once we went to the public-house for which Morland had painted the sign, to eat bread and cheese and drink porter, merely because he had lived there for some time. The room where he had painted the sign was once, at his request, shown to us by the landlady; at which he was much pleased. Another time we went over ditches and brick-fields near Somers Town, to look at the yard where Morland used to keep his pigs, rabbits, &c., and where he said Morland had given him lessons: he even pointed out their respective places, and the window where i

be used to sit. When Frank and myself were in the van, during a walk—he being behind, sketching—and we saw anything we thought would suit him, we called to him to come on, saying, ' Bill, here's another sketch for Morland.'"

The epochs of Collins's life are not very numerous. He was born in Great Titchfield Street, in 1788 ; in 1806-7 he became a student of the Academy, and began to contribute to the Exhibition. In 1809 he gained the silver medal for a drawing from the life; in 1813 he was elected an Associate, and in 1820 a Royal Academician. In the autumn of 1822 he married Miss Harriet Geddes, after a long and secret attach- ment on both sides, which has a touch of romance or destiny : old Mrs. Collins (a Scotchwoman) wished it delayed, but wished in vain. Every year he paid visits and made professional excursions during the fine wea- ther; several times he took a short Continental trip—to Boulogne or Belgium; but it was not till 1836, when he was approaching the mature age of fifty, that Collins set out on the grand tour of art, and visited Italy ; where he remained for some two years, revelling, but not blindly, in its treasures of art, and carefully studying its scenery and its people. This tour was in a measure undertaken through the persuasions of his friend Wilkie; who urged upon Collins the adoption of a more ambitious style, after his own example. In some degree Collins gave in to the counsels of his friend ; though he never imagined that there was a run- ning road to high art, and that history pieces could be hit off slapdash. The studies of Collins in Italy were as careful, as numerous, and as varied as in England; but after nearly fifty years have been passed in studying one kind of Nature, the art of seeing her in another mode, so as essentially to represent her in composition, is not acquired by a mere exercise of will. If the Italian tour did not, as some think, contribute to the painter's reputation in the Italian figure-pieces he produced, or the Scriptural subjects he was once or twice tempted to venture upon, it enlarged his ideas of nature and enriched his perceptions of art. These remarks of his son, followed by an extract from one of the painter's letters to Wilkie, contain ideas which are worth consideration.

"His first sight of Raphael and Michael Angelo, at the Vatican and the Sis- tine Chapel, had impressed on him, among other convictions, a decided opinion that no artist ought to come to Rome until he had gone through a long course of severe study in his own country, and had arrived at an age when his judgment was matured; as the great works there were of a nature either to bewilder a young Unpractised student, or to possess him with the dangerous idea, that from seeing such pictures only he had become at once the superior of his fellow labourers at home. Another impression produced in the painter about this period, from deep and patient study of the classics of Italian art, was, that Raphael and Michael Angelo had acquired their triumphant mastery over attitude and composition from close observation of the aspect of ordinary humanity around them. Conscious that he was now in a country where art sus still the missionary of religion, and where the population associated their hoUrs of devotion with the contemplation of all that was most beautiful and universal in painting, insensibly deriving from this very habit a peculiar grace in attitude and variety in action, he looked for his new theories of pictorial arrangement and form where he believed that the great masters had looked before him—in the casual attitudes of the idlers in the streets. In their carelessness of repose, in their unconscious sublimity of action, in their natural graces of line and composition, the groups he saw formed acci- dentally in the roadway seemed the continuation—sometimes almost the reflection .--of the glorious groups on the walls of the Vatican, or in the altar pictures of the churches of Rome."

"You will think all this contrivance," the painter writes to Wilkie from Venice, "ought to be followed up by the production of something worth looking at: but this is no easy matter; for every place, and indeed everything in Italy, has been BO besketched, that little remains, unless the old way of doing things be resorted to by way of novelty. One thing I am more convinced of every day,—namely, that the fine pictures of the schools I sin surrounded by are built upon what is called common nature; the inhabitants of the streets furnishing the guest-table, and there playing their parts with a dignity to be found only amongst the people. But if this introduction of the model be too literal, that common look which be- longs to modern Continental pictures, and which is certain degradation, is an inevitable consequence. " So much with respect to figures. In the case of landscape, the same thing, to a much greater extent, is sure to follow. Views, mere views, are detestable. What can be more like Nature than the landscape of Titian ? I was yesterday looking at the ' Peter Martyr,' at San Giovanni, —I got up to it, on the altar. The painting is truth itself; and yet how far removed from anything common or unclean'! (if one might venture on such an expression)—sober, solemn truth, coming from one aware of the real dignity of his pursuit. What a creature he *as l"

During this Italian tour, the health of Collins first began to fail. He persisted against all remonstrance in exposing himself to the extreme afternoon heat of the sun : a violent attack of rheumatism ensued, which ended, as it often does, in disease of the heart, though not suspected at the time. But perhaps the truth is that his constitution was giving way slowly. His labours had been incessant ; his early life full of trouble, anxiety, and privation ; and his habit of sketching in the open air, without regard to weather, was likely to tell upon a man who was confined half the year to the house. About two years after his return to England, he was troubled with inflammation of the eyes; in 1842 the disease of the heart was discovered by his medical attendant. Hence- forth, till the time of his decease in February 1847, in his fifty-ninth year, his life was almost a wrestling with disease : but he stood up manfully.

On his return, to the astonishment of all who saw him, he again entered his painting-room, again ranged his sketches and canvasses round him, and again commenced the composition of new pictures as ambitiously and industriously as ever. Saving on those days when he was unable to leave his bed, or when utter exhaustion disabled him from moving hand or foot, he now sat regularly before his easel, eager and aspiring as in his student days. It was an impressive testimony to the superiority of mind over body to watch him as he now worked. His heart was at this time fearfully deranged in its action, appearing not to beat, but to heave with a rushing, irregular, watery sound. His breathing was oppressed, as in the last stages of asthma, and prevented his ever attaining an entirely recum- bent position for any length of time, night or day. His cough assailed him with paroxysms so violent and so constantly recurring, as to create apprehension that he might rupture a blood-vessel while under their influence. It was in spite of this combination of maladies, with all their accustomed consequences of sleepless nights, constant weakness, and nervous anxiety, that be disposed himself to labour in a pursuit exacting the most watchful and minute atterition of head and hand, and that he succeeded in successfully accomplishing everything that he set him- self to do. Sometimes the brush dropped from his hand from sheer weakness; sometimes it was laid down while he gasped for breath like one half suffocated, or while a sudden attack of coughing disabled him from placing another touch upon the canvass; but these paroxysms subdued, his occupation was resolutely resumed. His mind revived, his eve brightened, his hand became steady again, as if by magic. Sky, ocean, earth, assumed on his canvass their beauties of hue and va- rieties of form, readily and truthfully as of old. No touch was omitted from the objects of the picture in detail, no harmony of tint forgotten in the rendering of the general effect. The strong mind bent the reluctant body triumphantly to its will, in every part of the pictures, on which, already a dying man, he now worked. They were the last he produced."

When unable to take exercise except in a carriage, or to sketch di- rectly from nature, the dying artist acquired the knack of impressing scenes or effects upon his memory and drawing them on his return. Even when confined to his deathbed, the " ruling passion " was un- conquerable.

" Happening—through much the same caprice of imagination which often dis- poses the eye to see old crags and castles imaged in the embers of a smoulder- ing fire—to observe in the accidental arrangement of some writing and drawing- materials placed in and about a small wooden tray at the foot of his bed, certain shades and outlines which resolved themselves to his fancy into the representation of an old ferry-boat lying at a deserted quay, he asked for some drawing-mate- rials, and, being propped up with pillows, proceeded to make a small water-colour sketch of the objects which his caprice of thought had called up before him in the manner described. The weary head drooped, and the weak hand flagged often at its old familiar task, as he slowly pursued his occupation; but the sketch was steadily continued. Slight as it was, perhaps comprehensible to the eye of a painter alone, it displayed in its narrow limits his wonted mastery over colour and light and shade. With its conclusion, his long and happy labours in the art ceased; from that moment his pencil, which had never been raised but usefully to instruct and innocently to amuse, was laid aside for ever!"

The advance of Collins in art and in life was steadily progressive. Up to his nineteenth year he may be considered as in a 'prentice state; what he did in painting was done for his father's shop. At nineteen (1807) he began to exhibit at the Academy, but he sold nothing. In 1808, a " Study from Nature on the Thames," exhibited at the British Institu- tion, fetched four guineas ; lie got thirty guineas for a portrait of the Honourable Mrs. Hare, and fifteen for one of Mr. A. Lee; which, con- sidering the painter's standing, seem good prices. Next year, " Boys with a Bird's Nest," exhibited at the Academy, brought twenty-five guineas ; and his prices for the more elaborate pieces. went on increasing to thirty-five, fifty, and eighty guineas, till 1812, when " May Day" sold for one hundred and fifty guineas. In 1813 Collins made 637 guineas, according to the useful tabular list by his biographer, printed in the appendix. It was not, however, till 1818, when the Regent and Lord Liverpool competed for his " Scene on the Coast of Norfolk,"—the Premier of course yielding to the Prince,—that his reputation was esta- blished as a fashionable artist, whom the " quality" mob might safely praise. Nor was it till about the same period, when the painter had reached his thirtieth year, that his circumstances were free from embarrassments, frequently so distressing that few artists have encountered greater, though their own imprudence and despondency may have extended them further and carried them to a gloomier end. While his father lived, Col- lins was tied to a needy household, living in an outward condition above its means ; the pressure of circumstances being probably aggravated by an open-handed improvidence, more praised in those days than in ours. On his father's death, everything was seized by the creditors; who made such a "clean sweep," that when a friend called upon the family (con- sisting of the painter, his brother, and their mother) soon after the sale, they were found taking their humble meal upon an old box, as a substi- tute for a table. Ambition—a regard to the ideas of patrons and people of rank, which seems to have been a weakness of Collins—induced him, when prosperity began to dawn, to remove from Great Portland Street into a large house in New Cavendish Street. The expenses con- nected with this affair soon grew into a debt of seven hundred pounds; which he had no money to meet, though his own valuation estimated his "property" at an equal sum. He was relieved from the threat of an execution for rent, and the pressure of a bill over-due in the hands of a stranger, by an advance from his patron Sir Thomas Heatlicote. His involvement, however, continued till after the date we have mentioned; and at times induced despondency, against which he had recourse to prayer. The following passage in his diary was penned while he was preparing the Scene on the Coast of Norfolk. " January 20th, 1818.—From this day until Monday 26th a series of miserable feelings and disappointments. Pecuniary difficulties, debilitating idleness, waging war upon me; dreading what, to my poor and finite capacity, appear in- surmountable embarrassments. Notwithstanding my conviction that my troubles are real, and their number great, yet I feel that my desultory habits are adding to the list, (which is voluntarily and criminally incapacitating me for the perform- ance of my numerous duties,) and that my prayers for power cannot be from the heart, when the talents I already possess are suffered to lie idle until their whole strength shall be exerted against me; as the sweetest water becomes, under the same circumstances, first stagnant and then poisonous. Fearing consequences, which God of his infinite mercy avert, I once more implore his assistance."

To his first pecuniary difficulties in the " great house " his biographer attributes the new and thorough English style which Collins struck out in his coast scenes ; as he went down to Hastings for a while, and em- ployed himself in an earnest study of the shore landscapes, the sea, and the fishermen. Perhaps " 'twere considering too curiously to consider thus." We have seen how early his worship was paid to Nature, not only in the common sense of the word, but to the nature of man's crafts and callings. When he painted "The Bird-catchers," exhibited in 1814, he paid a man to teach him the art and mystery, so that the minutest technical detail should be true. This plan he observed on all occasions; mastering the differences between English and foreign "rigs," and so forth ; while his journals show how early he began to investigate the principles on which he ought to proceed. The pressure of necessity might stimulate his close and incessant labours at Hastings ; but we sus- pect so national a feature in British landscape as the coast was generally present to the mind of Collins since his childish failure to delineate its character and motion at Brighton, and would have turned up in his pic- tures at some time or other.

The outline we have traced of Collins's career as a painter will indicate the value of this book to the artist, the critic, or the student of the hu- man mind. The entire view of the painter's remarks on art must be sought in the volumes, where they are mixed up with many miscellaneous matters ; but we will extract a few as examples. They extend, it will be seen, beyond painting, to physics and metaphysics.

" Two days since, Constable compared a picture to a sum; for it is wrong if you can take away or add a figure to it.

" I feel the necessity of looking at generals, as I conceive I have only arrived at the power of painting particulars. But, although I am not quite sure which I ought to have done first, yet I am inclined to think that, knowing what I do of particulars, I shall not make my generals too indefinite—and, in addition to this, I know more exactly what I want, as well as more how to value it when I get it. " Those who never particularize, are apt to build entirely upon their general knowledge (which, after all, is only a slight knowledge of particulars); and those who never look to the generals, are not aware of their consequence. Both are wrong; and each from pure vanity ridicules the other.

" A painter should choose those subjects with which most people associate plea-

sant circumstances. It is not sufficient that a scene pleases him. * . "Sentiment in pictures can only be produced by a constant attention to the food given to the painter's mind. A proper dignity and respect for onesself is the only shield against the loathsomeness of vulgarity. * "Suppose the mind (vital principle, director of the body, or whatever else it may be called) obliged to pass through, or make use of certain organs, to the end that it may attain some purpose—suppose these organs in a morbid state, will the operations be sound ? Certainly not. No more so than the attempt will be suc- cessful of a man who wishes to go a journey on foot and breaks one of his legs by the way. Then, how clearly does the necessity appear of doing as much as is in our power to keep these organs in the most perfect state. What excuse has the man to offer who suffers them, or occasions them to be in an unfit condition for the use of the mind? • * " To study in the country for future figures and groupings, with the ac- companying backgrounds, and to make the most accurate painting and drawing studies of anything in itself a sulect : sketches of anything I have too many. To be always looking for what constitutes the beauty of natural groups, and why they please in pictures."

After all, it may be doubted whether some of these rules go further than technical or mechanical excellence—whether they are more than means. They are necessary, no doubt, since without them no one can be a painter; but they do not create the excellences which constitute a great painter. The merit and popular attraction of Collins were not in his handling, or his harmony, or his skilful representation of natural effects, but in his coinpusition,—the power by which the selected beauties of nature were reproduced through his own mind ; the art by which his figures made part of the landscape and told an intelligible tale; the dramatic power of humour or pathos exhibited in their expression, their action, or even their repose ; the manner in which movement was given or indicated ; and the mode in which all these were combined into a whole—according to Reynolds, the test of genius in a painter.