An Autobiography - Elizabeth Butler

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forgive ourselves if we did not take our last look at her. He said we were very young for looking on death, but “go, my children,” he said, “it is right.” I cannot read those heartbroken words with which I fill page after page of my Diary even now without tears. She had at first intended to remain at home at Lausanne when my parents were leaving for England, shortly after my birth, but as she was going I smiled at her from my cradle. “Ah! Mademoiselle Mimi, ce sourire!” brought her back irresistibly, and with us she remained to the end.

      As we girls grew apace we had a Parisian mistress to try and parisianise our Swiss French and an Italian master to try and tuscanise our Genoese Italian, and every Saturday a certain Mr. Standish gave me two hours’ drill in oil painting. How grand I felt! He gave me his own copies of Landseer’s horses’ heads and dogs as models. This wasn’t very much, but it was a beginning. My lessons in the elementary class at the S. Kensington School of Art are not worth mentioning. The masters gave me hateful scrolls and patterns to copy, and I relieved my feelings by ornamenting the margins of my drawing paper with angry scribblings of horses and soldiers in every variety of fury. That did not last long. This entry in the Diary speaks for itself: —

      “Sunday, March 16th, 1862.– We went to Mr. Lane’s house preparatory to going to see Millais in his studio. Mr. Richard Lane is an old friend of papa’s. The middle Miss Lane is a favourite model of Millais’ and very pretty. We entered his studio, which is hung with rich pre-Raphaelite tapestry and pre-Raphaelite everything. The smell of cigar smoke prepared me for what was to come. Millais, a tall, strapping, careless, blunt, frank, young Englishman, was smoking with two villainous friends, both with beards – red, of course. Instead of coming to be introduced they sat looking at Millais’ graceful drawings calling them ‘jolly’ and ‘stunning,’ the creatures! Millais would be handsome but for his eyes, which are too small, and his hair is colourless and stands up in curls over his large head but not encroaching upon his splendid forehead. He seems to know what a universal favourite he is.” I naturally did not record in this precious piece of writing a rather humiliating little detail. I wanted the company to see that I was a bit of a judge of painting, ahem! In fact, a painter myself, and, approaching very near to the wet picture of “The Ransom” (I think), I began to scrutinise. Mr. Lane took me gently, but firmly, by the shoulders and placed me in a distant chair. Had I been told by a seer that in 1875 – the year I painted “Quatre Bras” – this same Millais, after entertaining me at dinner in that very house, would escort me down those very steps, and, in shaking hands, was to say, “Good night, Miss Thompson, I shall soon have the pleasure of congratulating you on your election to the Academy, an honour which you will t’oroughly deserve” – had I been told this!

      Our next halt was in the Isle of Wight, at Ventnor, and then at Bonchurch, and our house was “The Dell.” Bonchurch was a beautiful dwelling-place. But, alas! for what I may call the Oxford primness of the society! It took long to get ourselves attuned to it. However, we got to be fond of this society when the ice thawed. The Miss Sewells were especially charming, sisters of the then Warden of New College. Each family took a pride in the beauty of its house and gardens, the result being a rivalry in loveliness, enriching Bonchurch with flowers, woods and ornamental waters that filled us with delight. Mamma had “The Dell” further beautified to come up to the high level of the others. She made a little garden herself at the highest point of the grounds, with grass steps, bordered with tall white lilies, and called it “the Celestial Garden.” The cherry trees she planted up there for the use of the blackbirds came to nothing. The water-colours she painted at “The Dell” are amongst her loveliest.

      Ventnor was fond of dances, At Homes, and diversions generally, but I shall never forget my poor mother’s initial trials at the musical parties where the conversation raged during her playing, rising and sinking with the crescendos and diminuendos (and this after the worship of her playing in Italy!), and once she actually stopped dead in the middle of a Mozart and silence reigned. She then tried the catching “Saltarello,” with the same result exactly. “The English appreciate painting with their ears and music with their eyes,” said Benjamin West (if I am not mistaken), the American painter, who became President of our Royal Academy. This hard saying had much truth in it, at least in his day. Even in ours they had to be told of the merits of a picture, and the sight of a pianist crossing his hands when performing was the signal for exchanges of knowing smiles and nods amongst the audience, who, talking, hadn’t heard a note. For vocal music, however, silence was the convention. How we used inwardly to laugh when, after a song piped by some timid damsel, the music was handed round so that the words and music might be seen in black and white by the guests assembled. I thankfully record the fact that as time went on my mother’s playing seemed at last to command attention, and it being whispered that silence was better suited to such music, it became quite the thing to stop talking.

      Though Bonchurch was inclined to a moderate High Church tone, its rector was of a pungent Low-Churchism, and he wrote us and the other girls who sang in his choir a very severe letter one day ordering us to discontinue turning to the east in the Creed. We all liked the much more genial and very beautiful services at Holy Trinity Church, midway to Ventnor, where we used to go for evensong. The Rev. Mr. G., of Bonchurch, gave us very long sermons in the mornings, prophesying dismal and alarming things to come, and we took refuge finally in the Rev. A. L. B. Peile’s more heartening discourses.

      The Ventnor dances were thoroughly enjoyable, and the croquet parties and the rides with friends, and all the rest of it. Yes, it was a nice life, but the morning lessons never broke off. No doubt we were precocious, but we like to dwell on the fact of the shortness of our childhood and the consequent length of our youth. I now and then come upon funny juvenile sketch books where I find my Ventnor partners at these dances clashing with charges of Garibaldian cavalry. There they are, the desirable ones and the undesirable; the drawling “heavy swell” and the raw stripling; the handsome and the ugly. The girls, too, are there; the flirt and the wallflower. They all went in.

      These festive Ventnor doings were all very well, but it became more and more borne in upon me that, if I intended to be a “great artist” (oh! seductive words), my young ’teens were the right time for study. “Very well, then – attention! – miss!” No sooner did my father perceive that I meant business than he got me books on anatomy, architecture, costume, arms and armour, Ruskin’s inspiring writings, and everything he thought the most appropriate for my training. But I longed for regular training in some academy. I chafed, as my Diaries show. For some time yet I was to learn in this irregular way, petitioning for real severe study till my dear parents satisfied me at last. “You will be entering into a tremendous ruck of painters, though, my child,” my father said one day, with a shake of his head. I answered, “I will single myself out of it.”

      So, then, the lovely “Dell” was given up, and soon there began the happiest period of my girlhood – my life as an art student at South Kensington; not in the elementary class of unpleasant memory, but in the “antique” and the “life.”

      But our father wanted first to show us Bruges and the Rhine, so we were off again on our travels in the summer. Two new countries for us girls, hurrah! and a little glimpse of a part of our own by the way. I find an entry made at Henley.

      “Henley, May 31st.– Before to-day I could not boast with justice of knowing more than a fraction of England! This afternoon I saw her in one of her loveliest phases on a row to Medmenham Abbey. Skies of the most telling effects, ever changing as we rowed on, every reach we came to revealing fresh beauties of a kind so new to me. The banks of long grass full of flowers, the farmsteads gliding by, the willows allowed to grow according to Nature’s intention into exquisitely graceful trees, the garden lawns sloping to the water’s edge as a delicious contrast to the predominating rural loveliness, and then that unruffled river! I have seen the Thames! At Medmenham Abbey we had tea, and one of the most beautiful parts of the river and meadowland, flowery to overflowing, was seen before us through the arcades, the sky just there being of the most delicious dappled warm greys, and further on the storm clouds towered, red in the low sun. What pictures wherever you turn; and turn and turn and turn we did, until my eyes ached, on our smooth row back. The evening effects put the afternoon ones out of my head. I imagined a score of pictures, peopling the rich, sweet banks with men and women of the olden time.

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