THE FOUNDATION OF MY PICTURE-GALLERY.
I am unfortunate enough to “have a taste“ and very little money; indeed I am doubly and trebly unfortunate, for this makes my third “taste.” Once upon a time (not in the days of the fairies, but during my first term at college), it was ancient editions of the Greek classics, bound in vellum, clasped in brass, with wonderful and frousty texts, all abbreviations of the most complex kind, and paper of the brownest hue.
This “taste” cost me all my “tin,” more than all my patience, and, what is worse, nearly all my eyesight. I see, of course, at the present moment, and fully intend to see, but then it is now through the medium of spectacles.
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Some years after came “Taste” Number Two. I became mad after mezzotints, I raved after prints in general, and grew positively dangerous about line-engravings. I am not a great pedestrian, indeed I prefer sitting, with an occasional lounge on my back, to any other position: but I think during the three years of Taste Number Two’s reign, I must have walked at the very least something over eight thousand miles in search of “subjects.” I went into new book shops, old book shops, curiosity shops, ladies’ wardrobe shops, lumber shops, old furniture shops, frame shops, undertakers’ shops, all sorts of shops. The only questions I ever asked anybody, anywhere, at any time, during those three years, were, I firmly believe, “How d’ye do?” and “Have you any old engravings for sale?“
And then, when after a day’s march I had secured my spoil, how I used to gloat over it! Up during the night with a great goggle-eyed magnifying glass of gigantic power and proportions, lighting all the candles I could get and a lamp besides; going over each superficial inch of lines; noting down in sleepy but vigorous characters my opinion of Greatbach’s arm fore-shortenings, of Berseneff’s flesh lines, of Fittler’s draperies. And, good Lord! how they! used to laugh at me! What names they used to call me and my engravings, and how heartily they used to consign us (my engravings and me) to I shan’t say what old gentleman in Chiar-oscuro! Well, Taste Number Two was gathered to its fathers in due time, and a new king reigned in its stead.
One Saturday morning in the spring of the present year, fortified by a ticket from Messrs. Smith of Bond Street, “et quelque diable aussi me poussant,” I strolled down St. James’s and into Bridgewater House, to look at Lord Ellesmere’s pictures. I looked and was looked at; for I confess I had on peg-tops of a most aggravated form, and I saw several fat old females (with small hampers on their arms) seated on the noble Earl’s benches, examining my left ankle with the right eye, and my right ankle with the left eye, and the Raffaelles and Titians of course with the other eye.
I prowled about the princely gallery, thinking of anything, or nothing, of the Countess’s lost jewels, of the fat old lady’s well-secured small hamper, certainly not of Art high, low, or middle, when a small picture (No. 244 in the catalogue) suddenly caught my eye, attracted me, seized me, bound me, enchained me, and has never let me go since. I am at this present moment, and have been for the last four months, manacled: my gaoler’s name is Gerard Dow.
Talk of the Spitzbergs, and the Yicarias, and the Piombi, and the Conciergeries, and the Newgates
— I could escape from all of them consecutively,