room in Holborn." "Where is your 'Lazarus'?" "In an upholsterer's shop in Mount Street." "And your ’Macbeth'?" "In Chancery." "Your ’Pharaoh'?" "In an attic, pledged." "And your 'Crucifixion'?" "In a hayloft." "And 'Silenus'?" "Sold for half-price." But he was incapable of bending his proud spirit to accommodate his style to the popular taste. He besieged the ministers, he pestered great men to get the Government to encourage High Art. If noble patrons would not buy heroic pictures on huge canvases, the State should do it to adorn public buildings. He took pupils,[1] who paid large premiums, and he got them to back his bills, and involved them in heavy outlay to meet them, and then pupils shrank from coming near him. He pestered the nobility, all wealthy men for loans, for grants, for pecuniary aid to help him out of immediate difficulties. He was arrested again and again, and sent to the King's Bench, had to appear in the Insolvent Debtors' Court, had distraints levied on his pictures, his furniture, his books. He went about lecturing on Art, and these lectures brought him in a respectable revenue, but he was ever under-water. How he squandered his money does not appear in his journals; but he certainly did earn sufficient with his brush to have maintained himself and his family in respectability had he known how to economize. He got into the hands of moneylenders, and was squeezed. He met with generous aid from numerous quarters, but was no sooner relieved of one pressing call than he fell into fresh difficulties.
If he were taken up by a noble patron and invited to his table, he offended him by contradiction and rudeness. "I do not think I am liked in company, except by women," he admits in his journal.
- ↑ His pupils paid him £210 each.
