GILCHRIST'S LIFE OF ETTY..

Ewes was an extremely uneventful life, yet not without interest, even apart from the man's eminence as an artist, owing to the sin- gleness of his aim, and his unalterable resolution in pursuing it. Born at York in 1787, the son of a miller and gingerbread-maker, receiving little school-education beyond reading and writing, and apprenticed at the age of eleven to a printer at Hull, he was an innate artist from the very beginning, scrawling and scratching with any available material on every available space. In the printing-office, his longing to devote himself to painting became a passion ; but the strong sense of practical businesslike duty, which

accompanied him through life, made him work out the seven years of the hated indentures scrupulously to the last day. He then, in

his nineteenth year, under the patronage of his uncle, a gold-lace merchant, came to London to study the art ; entered as a student of the Royal Academy ; and there, as the main and solid occupa- tion of his life, continued to draw and paint, night after night, in all seasons, and through all vicissitudes of obscurity and fame, in- digence and affluence, up to his sixty-third .year, in which, ex- hausted by asthma and congestion of the lungs, he died.

The interval is a quiet record of the life of an artist who rose to honour very slowly—still more slowly to fortune—without pa- trous, and without any subservience of natural bent to fashion. There is scarcely a single incident that can be called an adventure, except the occurrences of July 1830, when Etty happened to be in Paris, and whose "glorious three days" did not deter him from going to his methodical study at the Louvre. He was a pupil of Lawrence ; for whom he entertained to the last the exaggerated admiration of his early days. Indeed, a born conservative and believer in authorities, his opinions, even in matters of art, generally went with the stream. At home, the public favour- ites and dislikes seem to have been his : abroad, his chief sym- pathies are naturally with the Venetian painters ; next to whom he admires Michael Angelo, and then the other world- wide oelebrities, Raffael, Correggio, Salvator, Rubens, &c.; not discovering for himself any of those great men whom others have now exalted to their proper place. He is in opposition only when it becomes more conservative to be so than to con- cur with the many ; fights valiantly for the preservation of threatened portions of York Minster, for which he entertained a love and reverence of almost personal intensity ; makes this and other similar objects a consistent purpose of life inferior only to his art ; tends towards Roman Catholicism in pure predilection for the old times ; persists, even in asthmatic age, in travelling to York outside the stage-coach rather than by railway ; hates Re- form ; and has an unreasoning prejudice against "the people," al- though by no means ashamed of his own humble origin. His holy horror of the destruction or "improvement" of old monuments does not itself, however, extend beyond the notions current on the subject at the time : he is as happy in aiding the "restoration" of St. Saviour's as vehement in battling against the removal of the organ-screen of York Minster. His perfect faith in the Royal Academy, in like manner, is not a case of servility or self-interest, but of real sentiment, arising from early habit and association; and so again the almost childlike delight with which, at the age of forty-one, he receives his own election into the body. His home life is soon summed up : often in love, and proposing more than once, he died a bachelor, having for many years had a niece do- mesticated with him.

The great lesson taught by Etty's artistic career is that of per- severance, or we may rather say persistency, as he united a steady adherence to clearly-marked aims with unswerving diligence in the means used for attaining them. No man has been more in- debted for success to his own determination to succeed. At the same time, he is not to be considered as an instance of the mere power of industry in rising superior to repeated failures and conducting an artist to eminence at last. The industry is remark- able, but the real undeniable vocation is quite as much so. The first constituent of success in Ettv was downright genius and nothing less ; and his peculiar excellence was a gift for colour— extraordinary in degree, and quite unteachable in kind. The stu- dent may be encouraged by Etty's example to resolute perseve- rance such as will carry him through difficulties, shortcomings, and disappointments, to some worthy result; but he must never hope for the enduring name of an Etty unless there be something with- in him far more rare than perseverance. As regards Etty himself, we become so accustomed at the present day to think of him as one of the painters for whom painting has been a worldly success, that • Life of William Etty, B.A. By Alexander Gilchrist, of the Middle Tempe, Bar- rister-at-law. In two volumes. Published by Bogue. it is difficult to believe that he got such small prices for his pictures as he really did up to even the last four or five years of his life. In 1839, he realized for the first time in a year as much as 9001. Still the prices of individual works were strictly modest : 250 guineas in 1841 for the Prodigal's Return ; 360 in 1842 for the Dance, instead of the 5001."at which it was sent in to the Exhi- bition ; in 1843, only two sold for as much as 200 guineas each ; 301. each was accepted for the Backbiter and Eve at the Fountain, in 1844. Earlier years had witnessed a systematic succession of prices which now appear ridiculously small: the Coral-finders for 30/.; the colossal central Judith for 300/., and its two pendants for 100/. each ; the colossal Benaiah, with the frame included, for 1301. ; the also colossal Sirens, together with Samson and Delilah, for 2501. ; and this as late as 1837. In his youth, Etty had been emphatically an unlucky student and painter. He failed to gain the Academic prizes ; had his pictures totally rejected for two or three years—unnoticed for others yet ; did not attain anything to be called a success till he was thirty-three years old. Through all he worked on without whining and without envy. However, it must be remembered, though by no means in detraction from the credit due to the painter's sturdy determination, that, with all his early ill-success, he had not to contend against actual poverty or privation. His uncle, and afterwards his brother Walter, sup- plied him with all that was needful, whether for meeting his im- mediate exigencies or for prosecuting his profession commodiously. The character of William Etty is a transparent one. The style of subjects to which he so systematically addicted himself led the ordinary public to suppose him, as he himself phrased it, "a shocking. and immoral man." His own autobiographical sketch, communicated in 1849 to the Art Journal, did something to re- move the impression ; the direct denial which it contained of the imputation being confirmed by the strong tone of good faith per- vading the production. Still, it was only the defendant's plea of Not Guilty. No further doubt, we think, can remain on the mind of Mr. Gilchrist's reader. Whatever may be thought of his pictures, the life of Etty was more than commonly free from what is specially understood by " immorality." Art was truly his mis- tress. His affections were steady and solid—with time growing deep; his habits of life uniformly and peculiarly simple, his kind- liness of disposition and capacity of deriving pleasure from small things great. He was a reliable man ; acting strictly up to his obligations. Self-centred he may probably be considered ; so in- tent upon his own pursuits and sympathies as to be unlikely to perform any great act of self-denial for another's sake ; yet far from hard or indifferent to those around him. He was in a marked degree the creature of habit. The associations of his childhood, the first method and form of his pictorial studentship, stuck to him and dominated him through life. To break through one of his habits was to destroy his happiness. Perhaps the most unamiable position into which this feeling betrayed him was when, in 1837, he exerted, and with eventual success, his every influence and effort to dissuade his niece from a marriage, whose only dis- advantage, for anything that appears in the narrative, lay in the pain which the loss of her society, then long familiar, would have been to himself; and there is a hint elsewhere of his having acted upon the same feeling in all cases threatening a similar result. His naive pleasure in tea-drinking, his adherence to old friends, down even to an old umbrella, love of his native place, and kind- ness to domestic pets, show habit in its pleasant aspect. The bonhomie of the man shines through the following slight detail.

"His cottage on the Mount [in York, when he was forty-seven years of age] had its sobriquet of Frog Hall,'—originating in a favoured frog de• nisen of the little back garden, towards whom he had extended his mer- ciful protection. He had assigned the frog a trough wherein it had con- sented to abide, cheerfully accepting the hospitality of the painter ; who, besides providing free quarters, supplied his protege means of communica- tion with his friends,—a stick slanting from said trough to the ground, up which moveable ladder, as the host was fond of relating, another frog, an old acquaintance he supposed, did crawl every evening to associate with the solitary. Thus there's friendship between frogs,' concluded Etty. During the residence at the Wood House,' a whole budget of letters to a fair neigh- bour is written in the name and character of its inmate, 'Felix Frog,' in Etty's laborious style of drollery."

Etty's position in art is one respecting which views differ, while the opinion of each disputant is positive. Mr. Gilchrist, who shows throughout a cultivated understanding of art matters, and a supreme contempt for review critics, naturally rates high the powers, aims, and achievements of his hero. He repudiates the notion that there was anything objectionable in Etty's choice or treatment of the nude : a deliberate choice to which the book shows that he adhered in the teeth of friendly hints repeatedly urged. That Etty's subjects are not directly immoral, must, we think, be conceded ; that he painted without impure feeling we are disposed, on the evidence of his personal character, to admit. But we can- not allow that it is mere prudery and cant which take exception to the works. A large section of them are, if not sensual, at any rate frivolous or obvious in subject, with no purpose such as could correct anything needing correction,—as, for instance, Baocha- nalians, Candaules showing his wife by stealth to Gyges as she goes to bed, Cymochles and Phiedria, Nymph and Faun dancing, Mars, Venus, and Cupid, a Bacchante and Boy dancing, Mars, Venus, and attendant disrobing her, sleeping Nymphs and Satyrs. Others, very numerous, are mere studies of the nude model chris- tened with a fancy name; fine in colour and pictorial method, but totally destitute of expressional sentiment; things which really and truly are studies, indispensable for the artist, but chal- lenging, when brought before the public as subjects, a quest for the qualities which would justify their indiscriminate ex- hibition, and which are not to be found. Mr. Gilohrist's ad- miration for Etty may preclude him from admitting the premises; but if he does, it is no answer to say that nude form is in itself pure, and has frequently been treated with the purity of a Vesta. True ; but we do not live in the garden of Eden before the fall; and, since the day of original sin, it has been usual, in civilized communities, to demand something beyond its beauty, or the pre- ference of its delineator, as a justification of nudity whether in life or in art. That something, in nine cases out of ten, Etty does not supply. To pass to questions where morals are not so much concerned as art,—Etty was one of the world's great colourists, and among them distinguished as the discerner of the glory of colour, as others for its dignity, or beauty, or happiness. In con- ception, he was capable of the directness and energy of imagina- tion, and of as much breadth as enabled his work to appeal to the unsophisticated feeling of the great body of men. He wanted subtilty and intellectual weight ; so that, while a few specimens exist to prove him equal to great things, the majority are flimsy, and as deficient in grasp or elaboration of the subject as they are in sentiment. Ruskin's verdict—" a lost mind " sunk in dancing nymphs,—sounds harsh when we remember only Etty's best works, the Tudith, the Sirens, the Prodigal's Return, the Be- naiah ; but when these are contrasted with the mass of his performances—meaningless nymphs at best, or generalized Aca- demy models—we can by no means so easily dissent from it as Mr. Gilchrist does. The eye, however, was not "lost" which saw for sterity so much God-given splendour of colour. r. Gilchrist has performed his task well. His model has evi- dently been Carlyle's Cromwell. After that example he not only moulds his own style to a considerable extent, but makes his hero's proper words the staple of his volume, connected and com- mented on by narrative and exposition. He has a heartfelt but still not a blind admiration for the painter; a real and rightly- placed sympathy, as we have already implied, with art; and copious diligence and accuracy in the collection and arrangement of his materials. Conscientious and competent as an editor, he is individual as a writer; only that he does not sufficiently distin- guish between peculiarity of style and verbal conceits, or between what ought to be said on his subject and what can be.

A large portion of the book—probably a full half—consists of the words of Etty himself, extracted from diaries, letters, the au- tobiographical sketch, &c.; and inwoven, sometimes in mere words or phrases, sometimes in whole pages, with the text. Etty was a lively, impulsive writer; clear, often rapid and picturesque ; but loose, and infected with conventional verbiage and quotations. The editor professes that he-has never added-to the original words, though he has retrenched—doubtless to the benefit of such readers as do not value indifferent writing for the sake of its author's me- morable painting.

Here is a technical extract, written at the age of twenty-nine.

" I should think the best way in future would be—First night, correctly draw and outline the figure only ; Second night, carefully paint-in the figure (with black and white, and Indian red, for instance) ; the next— having secured it with copal—glaze, and then acumble on the bloom ; glaze in the shadows, and touch on the lights carefully—and it is done. " It is a mortifying proof how vast is art, how narrow human wit,' to reflect how long I have painted, and that I should have neglected this very essential part of good colouring so long. But now, having my eyes open, I trust I shall ever be alive to its importance ; not go on painting over and over again, every time getting deeper and deeper in error,—but endeavour to make every part of my work tell, nor do over tonight what I did last night. " 0 Father of every good and perfect gift ! do Thou be pleased to assist my blindness ; and grant that in this and all other advances to knowledge I may be ever conscious of Thy goodness, and use them to the advantage and good of society. For Christ's sake. Amen."

The following is interesting to admirers of the grand picture to which it relates, and expresses Etty's adherence to a principle which has lately done not a little for art.

" 'In the second picture from Judith,' writes Etty, when explaining the intention of all three—' that of her escaping, or endeavouring to elude the vigilance of the guards, and get out of the camp with the head to her own city,—I have thought it right to make Judith looking towards these guards themselves ; conceiving she would, as a matter of course, do so. I under- stand I have been censured for so doing, because it turns the face of the he- roine away from the spectator. It is a principle with me, as far as lies in my power, to endeavour to make my heroes or heroines act as they would do if placed in similar circumstances in reality, without thinking or caring which way they turn their faces; endeavouring to forget all consciousness of art. I am not anxious to imitate those second-rate actors who, when they are performing, are more desirous to play to boxes, pit, and galleries, than to absorb themselves in the passions and natural interests of the scene. I have a strong feeling, that, under the dangerous part she was then playing, her first feeling and anxious care would be, how far the guards were insen- sible of what she had done. And I am the more reconciled to this mode of treatment, knowing how much may sometimes be gained by leaving some- thing to the spectator's imagination. It seemed to me the natural and spontaneous mode of feeling and telling the story.' A judgment which those who have seen the picture, and felt its dramatic force, will be slow to dis- pute; and the point one as to which the creative producer of such a work was far more competent to pronounce than any 'critic.'

Etty's style of description appears in this picture of a storm im- mediately succeeding the Paris revolution of 1830.

" An hour past midnight, we were awakened from our first slumbers by a mighty wind. Then, an awful silence, and flashes of lightning every half or quarter minute ; without rain, without thunder. Again, a wind that seemed to tear everything before it, sent glass, tiles, stones, tingling and rattling down. A dead and awful silence for a few seconds; a distant roar of long- drawn thunder, like the far-distant roll of artillery. 'It is the King's army and the cannon of Marmont,' was the first thought. Then, lightning every second, flash after flash, blue, vivid, and ghastly ; till the heavens were one blaze of lurid light. Again the mighty wind, and a nearer roar of artillery, as we thought. " The French jumped out of bed, and got together in groups of terror.

The voices of females and children were heard in distress and agitation, thinking their last hour was come. It seemed as the elements were warring and leagued against us. Fortunately, it proved Heaven's artillery only.

"Such a night I never heard or saw. It was what the imagination may conceive as the prelude to the Last Day, and that awful tribunal where all flesh must appear. The hurricane, the dead silence, the incessant flash, the distant awful roll—till, nearer and nearer, it burst in peals over our heads —was a something sublime ; mixed with the expectancy of a storming army, the terror of the people, the smothering heat, the roar of the wind, banging of doors, of windows, smashing of glasses, breaking chimneys, tossing trees.

"The deluge of rain now came, and one almost continuous flash of fire. By degrees, the wind grew calmer, the lightning less vivid and frequent, the thunder rolling more afar ; till the grey morn stepped forth, and all was still."

We add a triad of anecdotes. The first relates to the born painter's apprentice days with the printer at Hull; the second to his period of established fame. The third forms part of the de- plorable story of how Etty's fresco in the Buckingham Palaee summer-house was treated by Royal patrons, and how his muni- ficent offer of a second fresco in substitution—the commission for the work being exactly 401. !—was received.

"At some odd moments, furtively dashing on the wall a striking likeness of a printer's bodkin, he would innocently ask a companion to reach him that bodkin from the mantel' ; who, on putting up his ineffectual hand, was wroth at the hoax. Occasional complaints would be lodged with the master by a printer that the apprentice had been drawing his likeness' (said printer's)—unfavourably, it is to be presumed."

"Young painters were continually teasing Etty about his medium;— that all-important point with a certain class of students. 'Tell them,' Etty would say, a good deal bothered by the subject—' tell them the only medium I use is brains.' " " Notwithstanding the verbal compliment of Prince Albert at the Academy dinner, Etty's second fresco, Hesperus, was never put up. The sketch, when shown to Royalty, had been accorded a glance, and the request to take it away.' Poor man, he doesn't know what we want; are the words reported to have been used on that occasion."

The work commences with a portrait of Etty after a daguerreo- type taken in the year of his death, and terminates with a list of

his 246 exhibited pictures; nnexhibited, including studies, copies, &c., being estimated raise the tale to not much less than a couple of thousands. The portrait—spite of what the book says of a short ungainly person and unprepossessing aspect—concurs with private report in indicating a face deserving to be called handsome ; strong, able, well-chiselled, and expressive.