Mysterious Wisdom Read Online Free Page B

the event of my being employed to paint George IV, the King, I made a faithful likeness. “It would be your ruin,” she said. “I cannot help it,” I replied. “So I shall do if I get the commission.” Which I did not. And a good thing for me, too, that I did not.’ 6
    Linnell was never elected to the Royal Academy. He supposed it was because he was a dissenter who nurtured republican leanings; but professional jealousies and personal antipathies also played a part, not least those of Constable who, hearing rumours that Linnell had engaged in sharp financial practices, preferred to pass on the gossip than check whether it was true. But Linnell’s lack of social graces would not have recommended him in elevated circles: a friend once advised him that he should dress more carefully, pointing out a large stain on the front of his coat. From 1821 to 1841, he applied year after year for Academy admission, going through the prescribed motions of setting down his name as a candidate for an associateship (an initial form of half-membership, hopefully transmuted with time to full academician’s status). Finally, after twenty years in which he had been consistently passed over in favour of often far inferior men, he gave up. ‘The Academy can make me an RA but it can’t make a fool of me,’ he said and, even when subsequently entreated to revoke his opinion, he remained steadfast. ‘Let them keep the RA for men who can’t sell their pictures without it. I can,’ 7 he told Edwin Lawrence, who had been deputed to try to persuade him. The once-coveted badge of honour had come to seem a mere bauble to Linnell by then.
    In the early 1820s, Linnell moved his wife and their by then three offspring to a rented cottage in Hampstead where the air was much healthier and the children, who were often ferociously quarrelsome, could run free. His family remained always at the top of his priorities. At weekends he would spend time with them, making bread, brewing beer, keeping hens and digging wells, but the weekdays were passed in his Cirencester Place studio where he would work on six or seven canvases at once. His was a punishing schedule; often he would start at half past six in the morning and still be standing at his easel well after midnight, a timetable which took its toll on his health. For a while he would buy bottles of oxygen, or ‘vital air’, which he would inhale to increase his energy. It became a compulsive habit and at one point his consumption rose to twelve bottles a day as he struggled to overcome what he described as a weakness in the limbs. He blamed this debilitation on his having overtaxed his strength in boxing matches with the boisterous Mulready, but, more probably, he was suffering the lingering effects of some viral infection.
    Linnell battled his ill health. He kept himself fit, often walking home to Hampstead after a full day’s labour, sometimes, when his family had been up to visit, with one of his daughters perched on his shoulders. One day on this journey he came face to face with an infuriated bull thundering down the road towards him, head lowered and horns sharp. Linnell’s wife, Mary, enjoyed telling the story of how her husband had stood his ground until the last minute when, whipping off his cloak and flourishing it like a matador, he had let the animal take it. As it had galloped away, the cloth wildly flapping, he had vaulted for safety over the nearest stile.
    It is easy to see why the wavering Palmer would have been fascinated. Linnell was a man of many facets. A gentle father who at one moment might be playing with his golden-haired daughters was a tyrant the next, delivering strident opinions that brooked no dissent. He could turn from elaborating the daintiest of ivory portrait miniatures to kneading the bread dough with his huge strong thumbs. He would stay up late into the night, drinking and discussing abstruse theories with