Memoirs of the Life of William Collins Esq, Ra by Wilkie Collins - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

Wilkie Collins, Delphi Classics

• Publisher: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781788770996
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Clásicos

This eBook features the unabridged text of 'Memoirs of the Life of William Collins Esq, Ra by Wilkie Collins - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)' from the bestselling edition of 'The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins'.

Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Collins includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

eBook features:
* The complete unabridged text of 'Memoirs of the Life of William Collins Esq, Ra by Wilkie Collins - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)'
* Beautifully illustrated with images related to Collins's works
* Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook
* Excellent formatting of the text
Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles

PART I.

CHAPTER I. 1788-1807.

Introductory remarks — Mr. Collins’s parents — Notices of his father’s literary productions, and of “Memoirs of a Picture” especially — Anecdotes of his first attempt to pourtray coast scenery, and of his introduction to George Morland — He adopts the Art as a profession, and commences his studies under his father and Morland — Anecdote of the latter — Letters, etc. — Admission of Mr. Collins to study at the Royal Academy.

To write biography successfully, is to present the truth under its most instructive and agreeable aspect. This undertaking, though in appearance simple, combines among its requirements so much justice in the appreciation of character, and so much discrimination in the selection of examples, that its difficulties have been felt by the greatest as by the humblest intellects that have approached it. A task thus experienced as arduous, by all who have attempted it, must present a double responsibility when the office of biographer is assumed by a son. He is constantly tempted to view as biographical events, occurrences which are only privately important in domestic life; he is perplexed by being called on to delineate a character which it has hitherto been his only ambition to respect; and he is aware throughout the progress of his labours, that where undue partiality is merely suspected in others, it is anticipated from him as an influence naturally inherent in the nature of his undertaking.

Feeling the difficulty and delicacy of the employment on which I am about to venture, and unwilling to attempt a remonstrance, which may be disingenuous, and which must be useless, against any objections of partiality which may meet it when completed, I shall confine myself to communicating my motives for entering on the present work; thereby leading the reader to infer for himself, in what measure my relationship to the subject of this Memoir may be advantageous, instead of asserting from my own convictions, how little it may be prejudicial to the furtherance of my design.

To trace character in a painter through its various processes of formation; to exhibit in the studies by which he is strengthened, in the accidents by which he is directed, in the toils which he suffers, and in the consolations which he derives, what may be termed his adventures in his connection with the world; and further, to display such portions of his professional life, as comprehend his friendly intercourse with his contemporaries, as well as the incidents of his gradual advance towards prosperity, and the powerful influence of rightly-constituted genius in the Art, in exalting and sustaining personal character; are my principal objects, in reference to that part of the present work, which depends more exclusively upon its author, and less upon the journals and letters which are connected with its subject. In thus reviewing my father’s career as a painter, it is my hope to produce that which may interest in some degree the lover of Art, and fortify the student, by the example of reputation honestly acquired, and difficulties successfully overcome; while it tends at the same time to convey a just idea of the welcome, steadily, if not always immediately, accorded to true genius in painting; not only by those whose wealth enables them to become its patrons, but also by the general attention of the public at large.

In what measure my opportunities of gathering biographical knowledge from my father’s conversation, and from my own observation of his habits and studies, may enable me in writing his life, upon the principles above explained, to produce a narrative, in which what may appear curious and true shall compensate for what may be thought partial and trifling, it is now for the reader to judge. The motives with which I enter upon my task are already communicated. To emulate, in the composition of the following Memoirs, the candour and moral courage which formed conspicuous ingredients in the character that they are to delineate, and to preserve them as free from error and as remote from exaggeration as I may, is all that I can further promise to the reader, to give them that claim to his attention which may at least awaken his curiosity, though it may not procure his applause.

WILLIAM COLLINS was born in Great Titchfield-street, London, on the 18th September, 1788. His father was an Irishman, a native of Wicklow; his mother was a Scottish lady, born in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. He was the second of a family of three children, the eldest of whom, a girl, died a month before his birth; the youngest, a boy, lived to see his brother attain high celebrity in the art, but died several years before him. It was a favourite tradition in the family of the painter, that they were descended from the same stock as the great poet whose name they bore. Of his ancestors I am enabled to mention one — Doctor Samuel Collins — who signalized himself in the seventeenth century by his professional skill, and who has found a place in our Biographical Dictionaries as one of the most remarkable anatomists of his time. The family originally came from Chichester, whence, about the time of the Revolution of 1688, a branch of it emigrated to Ireland, and fought on the side of King William, at the battle of the Boyne; settling definitely in Ireland from that period to the birth of Mr. Collins’s father. An imprudent marriage, bringing with it the usual train of domestic privations and disappointments, had so far reduced the pecuniary resources of the family of Mr. Collins’s grandfather, that his father found himself, on arriving at manhood, entirely dependent on his own exertions for support — exertions, which were soon rendered doubly important by his subsequent union with a young and portionless wife.

It will be found that I — shall advert at greater length than may appear immediately necessary to some of my readers, to the character and employments of Mr. Collins’s father. But the pursuits that he chose for himself, as a man of letters and a dealer in pictures, and the remarkable influence that his knowledge of art and artists had in determining his son in following the career in which he was afterwards destined to become eminent, concur to make him an object of no ordinary importance and interest, at this stage of a work devoted to the curiosities of painting, as well as to the biography of a painter.

His poetical abilities, developed, I believe, at an early age, and his social accomplishments as a man of polished manners and ready wit, soon brought Mr. Collins, sen., into contact with most of the painters and authors of his time. In choosing, therefore, as a dealer in pictures, a pursuit that might swell his precarious profits as a man of letters, the company he frequented may reasonably be imagined to have had no small influence in urging such a selection. But his choice was an unfortunate one; too honourable to descend to the rapacities, and too independent to stoop to the humiliations, attaching to picture-dealing in those days, neither by principles, nor disposition, was he in any way fitted for the uncongenial character he had assumed; and, though he continued throughout his life to force his attention to the pursuit in which he had engaged, he remained to the last a poet in his inward predilections, and a poor man in his outward circumstances.

His “Memoirs of a Picture” — to which I shall presently refer at length — his “Life of George Morland,” and his “Poem on the Slave Trade,” — illustrated by two of Morland’s most successful pictures, subsequently engraved by J. R. Smith — were his principal works; but they brought him more popularity than profit. In those days, when literary genius was yet unemancipated from the fetters of patronage, the numbers of the reading and book-buying public were comparatively small; and the fine old race of genuine garret authors still existed, to fire the ingenuity of rapacious bailiffs, and point the sarcasms of indignant biographers. Articles in the public journals, songs, fugitive pieces, and all the other miscellanies of the literary brain, flowed plentifully from Mr. Collins’s pen; gaining for him the reputation of a smart public writer, and procuring for him an immediate, but scanty support. No literary occupations were too various for the thoroughly Irish universality of his capacity. He wrote sermons for a cathedral dignitary, who was possessed of more spiritual grace than intellectual power; and, during the administration of Mr. Wyndham, composed a political pamphlet, to further the views of a friend; which procured that fortunate individual a Government situation of four hundred a year, but left the builder of his fortunes in the same condition of pecuniary embarrassment in which he had produced the pamphlet, and in which, to the last day of his life, he was fated to remain.

But no severity of disappointment and misfortune was powerful enough to sour the temper or depress the disposition of this warm-hearted and honourable man. All the little money he received was cheerfully and instinctively devoted to the pleasures and advantages of his family: and in spite of the embarrassment of his circumstances, he contrived to give his sons, William and Francis, as sound and as liberal an education as could possibly be desired. Surrounded from their earliest infancy by pictures of all ages and subjects, accustomed to hear no conversation so frequently as conversation on Art, thrown daily into the society of artists of all orders, from the penniless and dissipated Morland, to the prosperous and respectable West, nothing was more natural than that the two boys should begin to draw at an early age. In overlooking their ravages among old palettes, their predatory investigations among effete colour-bladders, and their industrious pictorial embellishment of strips of old canvas and scraps of forgotten paper, it was not difficult for the practised eye of the elder Mr. Collins, to discover in William, — who took the lead, on evenings and half-holidays, in all ebullitions of graphic enthusiasm, — some promise of the capacity that was lying dormant in the first rude essays of his childish pencil. Year by year the father watched and treasured up the son’s drawings, until the boy’s spontaneous intimation of his bias towards the painter’s life enabled him to encourage his ambition to begin the serious direction of his studies, and to predict with delight and triumph that he might perhaps live long enough “to see poor Bill an R.A.”

Before, however, I proceed to occupy myself with the incidents of Mr. Collins’s boyhood, I would offer a few remarks on the principal work which his father produced, — the “Memoirs of a Picture.” I have been told that this book enjoyed, in its day, no inconsiderable share of popularity. It is so novel in arrangement, it belongs so completely, both in style and matter, to a school of fiction now abandoned by modern writers, it is so thoroughly devoted to painters and painting, and so amusingly characteristic of the manners and customs of the patrons and picture-dealers of the day, (and I might add, of the hardihood of the author himself, in venturing to expose the secret politics of the pursuit to which he was attached,) that a short analysis of its characters and story, whether it be considered as a family curiosity, a literary antiquity, or an illustration of the condition of the Art and the position of the artists of a bygone age, can hardly be condemned as an intrusion on the purposes, or an obstacle to the progress of the present biography.

The work is contained in three volumes, and comprises a curious combination of the serious purpose of biography with the gay license of fiction. The first and the third volumes are occupied by the history of the picture. The second volume is episodically devoted to a memoir of George Morland, so filled with characteristic anecdotes, told with such genuine Irish raciness of style and good-natured drollery of reflection, that this pleasant biography is by no means improperly placed between the two volumes of fiction by which it is supported on either side.

The story opens with an account of the sudden disappearance from its place in the royal collection of France, of the subject of the memoirs, “an unique and inestimable jewel, painted by the immortal Guido.” The perpetrator of this pictorial abduction is an accomplished scamp, named the Chevalier Vanderwigtie, whose adventures before the period of the theft, and whose safe arrival on the frontiers with his prize, advance us considerably through the preparatory divisions of volume the first.

All is not success, however, with the Chevalier. After he and his picture have run several perilous risks, both are finally threatened with ruin by a party of Prussian cavalry, who, utterly ignorant of the existence of Guido, begin paying their devotions at the shrine of his genius by scratching his production (which is painted on copper) on its back with their knives, to ascertain whether any precious metal lurks beneath. Finding themselves disappointed in the search, they resign “the gem” with contempt, but take care to make use of its possessor by enlisting him in a regiment of dragoons. Unseated, like many an honester man, in the course of his martial exercises, by his new Bucephalus, the Chevalier is placed, for the injury thereby contracted, in the hands of a surgeon, who robs him of his divine picture, probably from a natural anxiety to secure his medical fees, and sells it, after all its adventures, to a Dutch picture-dealer at Rotterdam for a hundred guilders.

At this point the narrative, true to its end, leaves the ill-fated Vanderwigtie inconsolable for his loss in the hut of a peasant, to follow the fortunes of the stolen Guido, which has become contaminated for the first time by the touch of a professed dealer.

And now has this charming picture — shamefully stolen by the shameless Vanderwigtie, outrageously lacerated on its sacred back by the knives of illiterate Prussians, treacherously ravished from its unscrupulous possessor by a larcenous Hippocrates, and unworthily sold for a paltry remuneration to a Dutch Maecenas with commercial views — fallen into hands that will treasure it with befitting respect? Alas, our virtuoso of the Dykes is darkly ignorant of the value of the Vanderwigtian jewel! he immures it contemptuously amid the gross materialism of oil, candles, and the miscellaneous and household rubbish of his upper shop. The cheek of the Virgin (who is the subject of the picture) is pressed, perhaps, by an old shoe-brush, and the fleecy clouds supporting her attendant cherubs are deepened to stormy tints by the agency of an unconscious blacking-ball! Does this profanation speedily end? — far from it. Two English dealers purchase “the show-pictures” in the burgomaster’s collection, but think not of diving for concealed gems into the dirtiest recesses of his kitchen floor, — the shoe-brush and the blacking-ball remain undisputed masters of the sentiment they profane, and the atmosphere they cloud! But a day of glory is approaching for the insulted Guido: a Flemish artist discovers it, appreciates it, purchases it, carries it home, washes it, wonders over it, worships it! The professors of picture-dealing (ingenuous souls!) see it and depreciate it, but artists and connoisseurs arrive in crowds to honour it. A whole twelvemonth does it remain in the possession of the fortunate artist; who at the expiration of that period suddenly proves himself to be a man of genius by falling into pecuniary difficulties, and is compelled by “dire necessity” to part with the inestimable gem, — of which, however, he takes care to make two copies, reproducing the original exactly, down to the very scratches on its back from the knives of the Prussians. Scarcely has he completed these fraudulent materials for future profit before the story of the original theft of “Guido’s matchless offspring” has penetrated throughout the length and breadth of artistic Europe. Among the dealers who now cluster round the Flemish artist are two, commissioned by an English nobleman to buy the Guido. After a scene of hard bargaining, these penetrating gentlemen relieve their professional friend of one of his copies, at an expense of seven hundred and fifty ducats, and start for England with their fancied prize; while the Flemish artist, having palmed off one counterfeit successfully in Holland, departs, like a shrewd man of business, to disembarrass himself of the other mock original in the contrary direction of Spain.

But the copy is destined to no better fortune in its perambulations than the original. The dealers are robbed of the counterfeit Guido, on English ground. In vain, on their arrival in London, do they advertise their loss of their “unique original” — it has passed into the possession of a broken-down dandy, the captain of the robbers; who, in a fit of generosity, has given it to a broken-down painter — a member of his gang — who, desirous of ready money, sells it to a broken-down lady of quality, who is the captain’s “chereamie,” and who leaving the mock Guido in the care of her servants at her house in London, shortly after purchasing it, starts with the captain on a tour of pleasure on the Continent. The poor painter is generously included in their travelling arrangements; and, to improve him in his art, the party visit the different collections of pictures on their route. While examining one of these, its owner, in consideration of the presence of the painter, volunteers the exhibition of a hidden and priceless gem; and, unlocking a drawer, displays to their astonished eyes the indubitable original Guido, which, under the seal of strict secrecy, he has purchased from the Flemish painter in his season of destitution and distress.

Meanwhile the story returns to the counterfeit picture, which the captain’s lovely companion has left in the custody of her servants in London. These faithful retainers, finding their time in their mistress’s absence hanging heavily on their hands, determine, like their betters, to employ it in seeing society. The rooms are lighted up; the company invited; the supper is prepared; the cellar is opened. Each courteous footman sits manfully down to his bottle; each skittish Abigail sips enchantingly from her partner’s brimming glass. The evening begins with social hilarity, proceeds with easy intoxication, ends with utter drunkenness. On the field of Bacchanalian battle, sleep and snore profoundly the men of the mighty calf and gaudy shoulder-knot. The hours pass, candles burn down, sparks drop unheeded, linen catches light, no one is awake, the house is on fire! Then, “the summoned firemen wake at call;” the house is saved, but the furniture is burnt; and the counterfeit picture, among other valuables, is actually lost. Time wends onward, the lady and her companions return, and prove their patriotism by falling into debt as soon as they touch their native shores. An execution is put into the house, and ma...