Mysterious Wisdom Read Online Free Page A

supporting a family. With characteristic resolution, he made a plan and then proceeded to achieve it. He went on a sketching tour of Wales, took on several portrait commissions, repaired pictures for his father, painted the figures in Varley’s landscapes and did illustrations for books: some for the commercial artist Augustus Charles Pugin (father of the Gothic architect), others for a new edition of The Compleat Angler . Sometimes his life felt hard. He was often alone on his journeys. ‘One day I was compelled to talk to my self to counteract the painful impression of solitariness,’ 4 recorded the city-bred young man. But whatever he was doing and wherever he was travelling he made the most of it, sketching landscapes for the purposes of future pictures or experimenting successfully with his first portrait miniatures on ivory. His efforts began to pay off. A commission for one member of a family soon led to the next and Linnell’s financial future began to look secure. One problem still remained, however, before he could take his wife. Civil marriages were not legal in England and, with typical obstinacy, Linnell refused to undergo what he described as the ‘degrading’ and ‘blasphemous’ ceremony of the Anglican Church. 5 He was only twenty-five, but his principles were fixed and now they led to a long, hard and extremely uncomfortable journey to Scotland where a pair of Nonconformists could be legally conjoined without Church involvement. Linnell, jolting along on the outside of the coach, pulled out his sketchbook whenever they stopped; his fiancée Mary, meanwhile, felt horribly travel sick.
    In July 1817, in front of a magistrate, the pair were finally married and set off for a honeymoon-come-sketching-trip in the Highlands. It was hardly luxurious. One day they got lost and, before passing a night in a cow shed, dined on a trout begged from a passing fisherman. Linnell wouldn’t have worried. He always remained true to his humble roots. He lived simply and was never afraid of menial tasks. He would walk everywhere, carry pictures to clients and hang them himself; he would often tell the story of the time that he had taken a lift in a pig cart to visit a patron, only alighting a short way from the grand country house of his destination lest his hosts mistake him for a ripe-smelling hog.
    The first of Linnell’s offspring was born in 1818 and his family grew rapidly from then on. He was eventually to have nine children. Meanwhile, ever resourceful and undaunted by such temporary setbacks as being thrown out of lodgings, he worked busily to expand his practice. His prices went up and he kept back a little from every sale that he made. A successful artist had once complained to him that it was impossible to save anything on an income of just £2,000 a year, but Linnell had replied that, even had his income been only £20 a year, he would still have put at least a shilling aside. In business matters, he remained unbudgeable and pioneered the now standard arrangement whereby a deposit is paid down before delivery. When payment was due he was no respecter of rank and once greatly embarrassed the Duke of Argyll by button-holing him in public, loudly demanding settlement of an old debt. Yet, for all his penny-pinching, Linnell could also be generous. The very same account books that record his hoardings show him making loans to his father, Mulready and Varley.
    From 1821 his career gained rapid momentum. For a while he wondered if he might even be made a court painter. Twice he was commissioned to execute a portrait of Princess Sophia Matilda, the sister of George IV, but his unfailing regard for truth lost him further commissions. ‘I ventured to make my pictures to look really like . . . and I calculate it was on that account I had no more from that connection,’ he later said. ‘I asked Lady Torrens at the time what would be the consequence in her opinion if, in