CHAPTER V.

STUDENT AND LOVER. 1778-82. [ET. 21-24.]

APPRENTICESHIP to Basire having ended, Blake, now (1778) twentyone, studied for awhile in the newly formed Royal Academy: just then in an uncomfortable chrysalis condition, having had to quit its cramped lodgings in Old Somerset Palace (pulled down in 1775); and awaiting completion of the new building in which more elbow-room was to be provided. He commenced his course of study at the Academy (in the Antique School) 'under the eye of Mr. Moser,' its first Keeper, who had conducted the parent Schools in St. Martin's Lane. Moser, like Kauffman and Fuseli, was Swiss by birth: a sixth of our leading artists were still foreigners; as lists of the Original Forty testify. By profession he was a chaser, unrivalled in his generation, medallist-he modelled and chased a great seal of England, afterwards stolen — and enamel-painter, in days when costly watch-cases continued to furnish ample employment for the enamel-painter. He was, in short, a skilled decorative artist during the closing years of Decorative Art's existence as a substantive fact in England, or Europe. The thing itself-the very notion that such art was wanted.

-was about to expire; and be succeeded, for a dreary generation or two, by a mere blank negation. Miss Moser, afterwards Mrs. Lloyd 'the celebrated flower painter,' another of the original members of the Academy, was George Michael Moser's daughter. Edwards, in his Anecdotes of Painters, obscurely declares of the

:

honest Switzer, that he was well skilled in the construction of the human figure, and as an instructor in the Academy, his manners, as well as his abilities, rendered him a most respect'able master to the students.' A man of plausible address, as well as an ingenious, the quondam chaser and enameller was, evidently a favourite with the President (Reynolds), a favourite with royalty. On the occasion of one royal visit to the Academy, after 1780 and its instalment in adequate rooms in the recently completed portion of Chambers' Somerset Place,' Queen Charlotte penetrated to the old man's apartment, and made him sit down and have an hour's quiet chat in German with her. To express his exultation at such amiable condescension,' the proud Keeper could ever after hardly find broken English and abrupt gestures sufficiently startling and whimsical. He was a favourite, too, with the students; many of whom voluntarily testified their regard around his grave in the burial-ground of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, when the time came to be carried thither in January, 1783.

The specific value of the guidance to be had by an ingenuous art-student from the venerable Moser, now a man of seventy-three, is suggestively indicated by a reminiscence afterwards noted down in Blake's MS. commentary on Reynolds' Discourses. 'I was once,

he there relates, 'looking over the prints from Raffaelle and Michael

Angelo in the Library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me

' and said, "You should not study these old, hard, stiff and dry, 'unfinished works of art: stay a little and I will show you what 'you should study." He then went and took down Le Brun and Rubens' Galleries. How did I secretly rage! I also spake my ' mind! I said to Moser, "These things that you call finished are not even begun: how then can they be finished?" The man 'who does not know the beginning cannot know the end of art.' Which observations 'tis to be feared Keeper Moser accounted hardly dutiful. For a well-conducted Student ought, in strict duty, to

spend (and in such a case lose) his evening in looking through what his teacher sets before him. It has happened to other Academy students under subsequent Keepers and Librarians, I am told, to find themselves in a similarly awkward dilemma to this of Blake's.

With the Antique, Blake got on well enough, drawing with 'great care all or certainly nearly all the noble antique figures in various views.' From the living figure he also drew a good deal; but early conceived a distaste for the study, as pursued in Academies of Art. Already life,' in so factitious, monotonous an aspect of it as that presented by a Model artificially posed to enact an artificial part-to maintain in painful rigidity some fleeting gesture of spontaneous Nature's-became, as it continued, hateful,' looking to him, laden with thick-coming fancies, more like death' than life; nay (singular to say) 'smelling of mortality'-to an imaginative mind! Practice and opportunity,' he used afterwards to declare, 'very soon teach the language of art:' as much, that is, as Blake ever acquired, not a despicable if imperfect quantum. Its spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination alone, never can be taught; and these make the artist: a truism, the fervid poet already began to hold too exclusively in view. Even at their best-as the vision-seer and instinctive Platonist tells us in one of the very last years of his life (MS. notes to Wordsworth)-mere 'Natural 'Objects always did and do weaken, deaden and obliterate imagina'tion in me!'

published' by him

The student still continued to throw off drawings and verses for his own delight; out of his numerous store of the former engraving two designs from English history. One of these engravings, King Edward and Queen Eleanor, at a later date (from Lambeth), I have seen. It is a meritorious but heavy piece of business, in the old-fashioned plodding style of line-engraving, wherein the hand monotonously hatched line after line, now struck off by machine. The design itself and the other

name.

But

One

water-colour drawings of this date, all on historical subjects, which now lie scattered among various hands, have little of the quality or of the mannerism we are accustomed to associate with Blake's They remind one rather of Mortimer, the historical painter (now obsolete) of that era, who died, high in reputation with his contemporaries for fancy and correct drawing of the human figure, but neglected by patrons, about this very time, viz. in 1779, at the early age of forty. Of Mortimer, Blake always continued to entertain a very high estimate. The designs of this epoch in his life are correctly drawn, prettily composed, and carefully coloured, in a clear uniform style of equally distributed positive tints. the costumes are vague and mythical, without being graceful and credible; what mannerism there is is a timid one, such as reappears in Hamilton always, in Stothard often; the general effect is heavy and uninteresting, and the net result a yawn. drawing dating from these years (1778-9), The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul's Church, thirty years later was included in Blake's Exhibition of his own Works (1809). In the Descriptive Catalogue he speaks of it with some complacency as 'proving to the author, and he thinks to any discerning eye, that the productions 'of our youth and of our maturer age, are equal in all essential 'points.' To me, on inspecting the same, it proves nothing of the kind; though it be a very exemplary performance in the manner just indicated. The central figure of Jane Shore has however much grace and sweetness; and the intention of the whole composition is clear and decisive. One extrinsic circumstance materially detracts from the appearance of this and other watercolour drawings from his hand of the period: viz. that, as a substitute for glass, they were all eventually, in prosecution of a hobby of Blake's, varnished, of which process, applied to a water-colour drawing, nothing can exceed the disenchanting, not to say destructive effect.

(

There is a scarce engraving inscribed 'W. B. inv. 1780' which, within certain limitations, has much more of the peculiar Blake quality and intensity about it. The subject is evidently a personification of Morning, or Glad Day: a nude male figure, with one foot on earth, just alighted from above; a flood of radiance still encircling his head; his arms outspread,-as exultingly bringing joy and solace to this lower world,-not with classic Apollolike indifference, but with the divine chastened fervour of an angelic minister. Below crawls a caterpillar, and a hybrid kind of night-moth takes wing.

Meanwhile, the Poet and Designer, living under his father the hosier's roof, 28, Broad Street, had not only to educate himself in high art, but to earn his livelihood by humbler art-engraver's journey-work. During the years 1779 to 1782 and onwards, one or two booksellers gave him employment in engraving from afterwards better known fellow designers. Harrison of Paternoster Row employed him for his Novelists' Magazine, or collection of approved novels; for his Ladies' Magazine, and perhaps other serials; J. Johnson, a constant employer during a long series of years, for various books; and occasionally other booksellers, Macklin, Buckland, and (later) Dodsley, Stockdale, the Cadells. Among the first in date of such prints, was a well-engraved frontispiece after Stothard, bold and telling in light and shade (The four Quarters of the Globe'), to a System of Geography (1779); and another after Stothard, ('Clarence's Dream '), to Enfield's Speaker, published by Johnson in 1780. Then came with sundry miscellaneous, eight plates after some of Stothard's earliest and most beautiful designs, for the Novelists' Magazine. The designs brought in young Stothard, hitherto an apprentice to a Pattern-draftsman in Spitalfields, a guinea a-piece,—and established his reputation: their intrinsic grace, feeling, and freshness being (for one thing) advantageously set off by very excellent engraving, of an infinitely more robust