James Clarke Hook: Painter of the Sea 9780228015529

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J A M E S C LA R K E H O O K

J A M E S C LA R K E H O O K PA I N T E R O F T H E S EA

J U LI E T M c M A S T E R

McGill-Queen’s University Press Mo n t r e a l & K i ng s t o n • L o n d o n • C h ic ag o

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-2280-1445-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1552-9 (ePDF) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

McGill-Queen’s University Press in Montreal is on land which long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous Peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. In Kingston it is situated on the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek. We acknowledge and thank the diverse Indigenous Peoples whose footsteps have marked these territories on which peoples of the world now gather.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: James Clarke Hook : painter of the sea / Juliet McMaster. Other titles: Painter of the sea Names: McMaster, Juliet, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230443834 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230443877 | ISBN 9780228014454 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228015529 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Hook, James Clarke, 1819–1907. | LCSH: Painters— Great Britain—Biography. | LCGFT: Biographies. Classification: LCC ND497.H827 M36 2023 | DDC 759.2—dc23

Frontispiece / James Clarke Hook, photographed by his son Bryan Hook, c. 1882

CONTENTS Figures ix Foreword / Robin Simon xiii Preface xv Acknowledgments xix

1

“The head ... of ten” Childhood and Family liFe, 18 19 –1836

2

3

“For the Silver Prize contending” at the Royal aC ademy SChool S, 1836–18 4 6

3

“Delighted at the thought of being in Venice” italian SojouR n, 18 4 6–18 4 8

4

50

“Wrapt up in Venetian coloring” hiStoRy PainteR , 18 4 8–185 4

5

75

“Sea change” Clovelly and aF teR , 1855–1860

6

138

“That freshest and most refreshing of English painters” Fame e StabliShed, 1870 –1883

9

122

“Their favourite painter” the aC ademiCian, 1860 –1870S

8

97

“Line makes LIGHT!” the etChing Club, 1838–1885

7

21

155

“The veteran Mr. Hook” towaR dS SunSe t, 188 4–1907

179

Postscript 197 Appendix 1 PaintingS by jame S Cl aR ke hook e xhibited at the Royal aC ademy oF aRtS, 1839 –1902 201 Appendix 2 membeR ShiP oF the etChing Club, 1838–1885 Notes 215 Bibliography Index 233

229

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contents

213

FI G U R ES

Unless otherwise specified, all works are oil on canvas and are by James Clarke Hook. Dimensions are given where known. The dates indicate the year of exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, usually the spring following the painting on site.

0.1 1.1

1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 3.1

Frontispiece / James Clarke Hook, photographed by Bryan Hook, c. 1882. Silverbeck Album, private collection. ii “Yo, heave ho,” 1885. Engraving after the original. In F.G. Stephens, J.C. Hook, R.A.: His Life and Work (London: Art Annual Office, 1888), opposite 20. xvii Portrait of Dr Adam Clarke. Engraving for the frontispiece of [Adam Clarke], An Account of the Infancy, Religious and Literary Life, of Adam Clarke, LL.D., F.A.S., etc., 3 vols, [written in collaboration with Mary Ann Clarke Smith], ed. J.B.B. Clarke (New York: B. Waugh and T. Mason, 1833). 6 Portrait of Hook’s grandmother Elizabeth Logan, 1836. Private collection. 18 “The Dancing Faun,” c. 1839. Chalk on paper. Private collection. 26 Portrait of Hook’s twin brothers, Adam and Andrew, 1839. Location unknown. 28 The Hard Task, 1839. Private collection. 28 Mary Noorouz Hook, “James C. Hook Making Stirabout,” c. 1837. Sketch. Witt Library. 31 Holywell, Ballyarthur, c. 1842. Watercolour on paper. Private collection. 32 Three undated student studies by Hook, and perhaps Richard Dadd, for “Come unto these yellow sands,” the subject of an 1842 painting by Dadd. Watercolour on paper, approx. 10 × 20 cm. Private collection. 35 Pamphilus Relating His Story, 1844. 76 × 152 cm. Private collection. 37 Exhibition of cartoons at Westminster Hall, Illustrated London News, 8 July 1843. 39 Richard Doyle, “Mr Punch Indulging in High Art,” Punch, 14 July 1847, 19. 41 The Finding of the Body of Harold, 1845. Engraving after the original. Illustrated London News, 20 December 1845. 43 Rizpah Watching Over the Dead Sons of Saul, c. 1845–46. Watercolour on paper. Private collection. 45 Portrait of Rosalie Burton, c. 1846. Watercolour on paper. Private collection. 47 Portrait of James Hook, 1846. 74 × 60 cm. Private collection. 48 Drawing of the return to Liddes from the Great St Bernard Pass, 1846. Pen and wash on paper, 11 × 16 cm. Private collection. 55

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 5.1 5.2 5.3

5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7

Portrait of Rosalie Hook, c. 1846. Watercolour on paper. Newman Street Sketchbook, private collection. 56 “Baccano Inn,” 3 March 1847. Pencil on paper. Italy Sketchbook, author’s collection. 58 The staircase at the Bargello, Florence, 20 August 1847. Pencil on paper. Italy Sketchbook. 63 Sketch in Parma, 1847. Pencil on paper. Private collection. 67 Quick impressions from Venetian masters in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, 1848. Private collection. 69 Revolution: Venice, 1848, 1848. Oil on paper, 34 × 25 cm. Private collection. 71 Rosalie on board the White Mouse, Mediterranean, May 1848. Newman Street Sketchbook, private collection. 73 Selections from the decorated walls at Littlecourt, West Bagborough, Somerset, c. 1848. Courtesy of Jane Kimber. 79 Othello’s First Suspicion, 1849. 53 × 42 cm. Reproduction in the Witt Library. 82 A Dream of Venice, 1850. 124 × 81 cm. Photo courtesy of Museums Sheffield, 71772. 85 The Defeat of Shylock, 1851. 79 × 99 cm. Manchester Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of Bridgeman Images, MAN7223513. 88 The Rescue of the Brides of Venice, 1851. 129.5 × 108 cm. Harris Museum and Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of Bridgeman Images, HMP86665. 90 Pluming the Helmet, c. 1852. 65 × 47 cm. Worcester Art Gallery and Museum. Photo courtesy of Bridgeman Images, WSC3601806. 92 Signor Torello Goes to Fight the Turks, 1852. Engraving after the original. Illustrated London News, 13 January 1895, 53. 93 John Leech, “Scene in a Modern Studio,” Punch, 19 April 1855. 95 A Few Minutes to Wait before Twelve O’clock, 1854. Private collection. 100 Colin Thou Kenst, the Southerne Shepheard’s Boye, 1855. 50.6 × 78.3 cm. Courtesy of Lucy Hook-Willman. 101 “Market Morning,” 1854. Sketch in ink on paper of the painting Hook was to exhibit the next spring. James Clarke Hook to William Bower, 24 November 1854, author’s collection. 102 A Fracture, 1855. 25 × 19 cm. Private collection. 103 The Fisherman’s “Good Night,” 1856. 51 × 76 cm. Private collection. 106 “Welcome, Bonny Boat!” 1856. 61 × 91 cm. Harris Museum and Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of Bridgeman Images, HMP90712. 107 A Signal on the Horizon, 1857. Woodcut by Bryan Hook after the original. Harper’s Bazaar, 3 April 1880, 216. 108

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Figur e s

5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 6.1

6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 7.1 7.2 7.3a 7.3b 7.4 7.5a 7.5b 7.6 7.7 7.8

7.9 8.1

The Shipboy’s Letter, 1857. 80 × 60 cm. Private collection. 109 The Shipboy Writing His Letter, 1863. 82 × 62 cm. Private collection. 111 A Widow’s Son Going to Sea, 1857. Sketch in watercolour after the original. Author’s collection. 112 The Coastboy Gathering Eggs, 1858. Source unknown. 113 Rosalie Hook, painting of a cottage in Clovelly, 1856. 43 × 33 cm. Private collection. 114 “Luff, Boy!” 1859. Courtesy of Rosemary Miller. 116 Charles West Cope, The Council of the Royal Academy Selecting Pictures for the Exhibition, 1876. 145 × 220 cm. Photo by John Hammond. Royal Academy of Arts, PL000127. 123 The Fisherman’s “Good Night,” n.d. Etching. Private collection. 130 Charles West Cope, The Life School at the Royal Academy, 1865. Etching, 15 × 25 cm. Private collection. 131 Samuel Palmer, The Lonely Tower, n.d. Etching. Private collection. 132 Etching: A Sea Boy Gathering Eggs, 1865. 17.5 × 12 cm. Private collection. 136 Samuel Palmer, Opening the Fold, 1880. Etching, 16.4 × 23 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, E.1896-1919. 136 “Another Dog!” [renamed Deep Sea Fishing], 1860. Guildhall Gallery, London. Photo courtesy of City of London Corporation, 51980. 139 “Compass’d by the Inviolate Sea,” 1863. 55 × 105 cm. Private collection. 141 The Acre by the Sea, 1862. 69 × 106 cm. Private collection. 143 The site at Aberporth of The Acre by the Sea. Photo by Rowland McMaster. 143 Leaving at Low Water, 1863. 68.5 × 107 cm. Royal Holloway College. Photo courtesy of Bridgeman Images, RHC9692. 145 From under the Sea, 1864. 108 × 82.5 cm. Manchester Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of Bridgeman Images, MAN940203. 146 The site at St Just of From under the Sea. Photo by the author. 146 Breton Fishermen’s Wives, 1865. 69 × 107 cm. Bonhams sales catalogue. 149 Charles C. Bennett, “Private View of the Royal Academy,” detail, Punch, 13 May 1865. 150 “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread” [renamed Hoisting the Sail], 1866. 69 × 108 cm. Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool. Photo courtesy of Bridgeman Images, WGL5053117. 152 Caught by the Tide, 1869. 70 × 108 cm. Guildhall Gallery, London. Photo courtesy of City of London Corporation, 51086. 153 Rosalie Hook, A Window in Capri, 1877. Oil on wood, 13 × 8 cm. Private collection. 159

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The Bonxie, Shetland, 1873. 74 × 112 cm. Guildhall Gallery, London. Photo courtesy of City of London Corporation, 51090. 162 8.3 Under the Lee of a Rock, 1874. 79.5 × 128.2 cm. Author’s collection. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. 163 8.4a Jetsam and Flotsam, 1874. 102 × 145 cm. Private collection. 165 8.4b The site near Gwithian of Jetsam and Flotsam. Photo by Tony Ball. 165 8.5 Cow Tending, 1874. 87 × 136.5 cm. Reproduced from Christie’s catalogue. 167 8.6 Crabbers, 1876. 76 × 129.5 cm. Manchester Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of Bridgeman Images, MAN7111079. 168 8.7 Word from the Missing, 1877. 77 × 129.5 cm. Guildhall Gallery, London. Photo courtesy of City of London Corporation, 51087. 169 8.8 Allan Hook, portrait of his mother, Rosalie Hook, 1876. 58 × 56 cm. Private collection. 171 8.9 George Reid, RA, sketches of Hook at home in Silverbeck. In George Reid to Alexander Macdonald, 15 May 1879, Alexander Macdonald of Kepplestone Collection, Aberdeen City Archives, DD391-13-5-60. 174 8.10 Bryan Hook, photograph of Fanny Burton, H.W.B. Davis, RA, Rosalie Hook, James Clarke Hook, Alexander and Hope Macdonald, Edward Linley Samborne, Allan Hook, the dogs Mac and Donald, and Marion Sambourne, 1882. Private collection. 176 8.11 John Everett Millais, Portrait of James Clarke Hook, 1883. 92 × 126 cm. Private collection. 177 8.12 Edward Linley Sambourne, “Royal Academy Maypole Dance,” Punch, 12 May 1883. 178 9.1 The Mirror of the Sea-Mew, 1884. Engraving after the original. In F.G. Stephens, J.C. Hook, R.A.: His Life and Work (London: Art Annual Office, 1888), facing page 4. 181 9.2a A Jib for the New Smack, 1890. 91 × 144 cm. Private collection. 183 9.2b The site at Gorran Haven of A Jib for the New Smack. Photo by Rowland McMaster. 183 9.3 Wreckage from the Fruiter, 1889. 92 × 155.5 cm. Photo courtesy of Tate Britain, N02252. 185 9.4 The Close of Day, 1885. 102 × 154 cm. Private collection. 186 9.5 Hit but Not Bagged, 1891. 89 × 142 cm. Private collection. 187 9.6 Good Liquor, Duty Free, 1893. 86 × 138 cm. Private collection. 187 9.7 James Clarke Hook, self-portrait for the Macdonald Collection, 1895. 34 × 28 cm. Aberdeen Art Gallery. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. 191 9.8 Hook’s monogram. 192 8.2

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FO R EWO R D

in 2005 an article was submitted to The British Art Journal about a certain James Clarke

Hook (1819–1907), Royal Academician (RA), of whom I had never heard. Fortunately, it came with illustrations of some of his works, which were sensationally good. Just as fortunately, I soon met the author, Juliet McMaster, and quickly came to understand why and how, as a descendant of the artist and a formidable scholar, she was determined to rescue this gifted painter from his latter-day obscurity. Readers of the journal were introduced to Hook and his talented sons and were soon to enjoy Juliet’s inspired identification of the locations of many of the landscapes. On one occasion, near the coastal village of Gwithian in West Cornwall, England, as we learn in the present book, she became entangled with and assisted by naturists – who were indeed in a state of nature – as they all tried first one angle and then another in order to match the present-day view to the painted composition. In later articles, readers of the journal came to appreciate what a central role Hook had played in the life of the Royal Academy and in the wider art world of his time, all of it more fully recounted here with authority and charm. Purely as a master of technique, Hook must have been hard to beat among his fellow artists, which they all seem to have appreciated, and surely there can have been few grander tributes than the portrait of Hook by John Everett Millais, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1883 and described by Punch as “without exception the finest picture in the entire Show” (12 May 1883). Hook responded by presenting a “Hookscape” to Millais, one of his by now much-admired maritime views. Hook had begun by carrying off most of the glittering prizes at the Academy Schools but, as so often happens, found his vocation as a painter of the sea almost by chance. He could do history painting supremely well, with a mastery of Venetian colouring inspired by Veronese that few, if any, could match. By 1849 Hook was already a close associate of Millais and William Holman Hunt, and he was particularly praised by Dante Gabriel Rossetti that year. In 1856 Ford Madox Brown was to note of the academy’s exhibition, “Hunt and Millais unrivalled, except by Hook, who for colour and indescribable charm is pre-eminent.” In 1857 John Ruskin was ecstatic about his work. But by now these towering figures of the Victorian art scene were not writing about Hook’s history pictures but about his paintings of Devon and Cornwall. It was a visit to Clovelly in 1855 that had opened Hook’s eyes to his true vocation – and he never looked back.

Yet perhaps the most satisfying thing that we learn in this absorbing biography, precisely because it tells us so much about the man, is how Hook’s painting was a family enterprise, with the artist encouraging his sons at every turn within a shared world that in one rare instance is also reflected in a jewel-like painting by his wife. Hook’s art was anchored – that is surely the correct word – in his family life. It is all the more fitting therefore that he should now be guided back by a direct descendant to reassume his rightful place as one of the major artists of his time. robin simon Editor, The British Art Journal

xiv

For ewor d

P R E FAC E

H is for Hook, and the Sea is his Line! Come, love, hear the billows, and smell the fresh brine.

so runs a n a l ph a b e t jingl e in Punch in May 1865.1 Merely looking at one of James

Clarke Hook’s sea pieces, with its luminous waves and deep, vivid colouring, brought the sounds of the sea as well (so the thinking went), and even the smells too. It was a common perception. In his long career – born in 1819, the same year as Queen Victoria, John Ruskin, and George Eliot, and living until 1907 – Hook evolved from being a brilliant student at the Royal Academy Schools, where he won the coveted Travelling Studentship to Italy, into a successful painter. Initially, he presented historical subjects; then he turned to contemporary rural scenes; and finally he specialised in the sea with its changing moods, and the fisher people who worked on its margins and sailed its deeps. His early studies of the great Venetian masters Titian, Tintoretto, Carpaccio, and Veronese, amidst the shining waters of Venice, as well as his own native genius as an outstanding colourist, enabled him to capture effects of light and water with incomparable assurance. He was a friend and colleague of many of the other prominent British artists of the day, including the Pre-Raphaelites John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, the brilliant etcher Samuel Palmer, and the painter and sculptor G.F. Watts. Among Victorians, his name was a household word. His glowing coastal scenes came to be known as “Hookscapes.” Anthony Trollope, in his 1871 novel Ralph the Heir, economically conveyed his hero’s total ignorance of art matters by the comment that “Ralph did not know a Cooke from a Hook.”2 (E.W. Cooke, RA, was known as a painter of ships.) It has even been claimed that Hook’s name and its suggestions were perpetuated in the hook-handed villain in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), Captain James Hook. (There were many puns on Hook the painter’s name, and he used a hook in his monogram.) Barrie’s writers’ cricket team in Farnham were the rivals of the artists’ team that Hook’s sons played for, so the connection is an established one.3

With the arrival of Impressionism, and with the Modern rejection of all things Victorian, Hook and his work fell out of fashion during the twentieth century. But the substantial body of his work, with its undeniably brilliant quality, calls for renewed attention. As the granddaughter of his son Bryan Hook, I have valuable access to family archives – including student work, sketchbooks, etchings, paintings, and diaries – that are available to no other art historian. And as a Hook biographer, I make full use of these precious materials, as well as the wealth of paintings and information in public collections. Besides being a brilliant painter, Hook was a vivid character, with huge energy and a fund of humour. In my biography, I engage with him as a man as well as an artist. Although he was the son of a bankrupt, and largely had to make his own way, he managed to paint himself into country gentlemanhood and become the proprietor of an elaborate estate. His courageous change of subject matter, from historical compositions to contemporary coastal scenes among fishermen and their families, brought him close to working people, and he had an abiding sympathy and respect for them. He could be feisty and intolerant too. And by way of illustrating his character, I take a scene from an author of the next generation, the novelist and naturalist W.H. Hudson. Hudson had worked with Hook’s son Bryan, who had illustrated his book Birds of London (1898), and it was no doubt Bryan who supplied the anecdote that Hudson used to illustrate the character of Cornishmen in his book The Land’s End: A Naturalist’s Impressions in West Cornwall (1908). Hook spent many summers painting at Sennen Cove, the village close to Land’s End. He and his wife Rosalie, often with their two sons, would board with a local fisher family, sharing the space and the cooking facilities, and Hook would spend his days facing whatever wind and waves came his way – painting for all he was worth at the adaptable easel that he had invented, wedged in place against the depredations of the weather, with a four-foot canvas attached. In The Land’s End, Hudson provided an anecdote in which we see “the stubborn boy surviving in the adult”: The late Royal Academician, Hook, was on the sands at Whitesands Bay working on a sea-piece when two [Cornishmen] came up and planted themselves just behind him. There was nothing the artist hated more than to be watched by strangers over his shoulders in this way, and pretty soon he whirled round on them and angrily asked them how long they were going to stand there. His manner served to arouse their spirit and they replied brusquely that they were going to stay there as long as they thought proper. He insisted on knowing just how long ... And one of them incautiously declared that he intended staying on that spot for an hour.

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0.1 / Engraving of “Yo, heave ho,” 1885

“Do you mean that?” shouted Hook, pulling out his watch. Yes, they replied, they would not stir an inch from that spot for an hour. “Very well!” he said, and pulled up his easel, then marching off to a distance of thirty yards, set it up again and resumed his painting. And there within thirty yards of his back the two men stood for an hour and a quarter, for as they did not have a watch they were afraid of going away before the hour was expired. Then they marched off muttering curses.4 The incident illustrates Hook’s character as vividly as it does that of the Cornishmen. He did indeed hate to be watched while he painted, and he would take precautions to prevent it. And in this incident, he demonstrates as much boyish recalcitrance as the Cornishmen. Although at the time he was a distinguished academician and proprietor of a splendid estate, he is far from playing the grand seigneur. He relates to these two working men as an equal, not a superior. And if he wins the battle, it is for greater cunning, not higher status. What painting was he working on at the time? The Whitesands Bay location suggests that it was probably the picture that he called “Yo, heave ho,” from the summer of

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1884, when he and Rosalie spent July and August in Sennen. The original is lost, but Hook’s biographer F.G. Stephens reproduced it in an engraving (see figure 0.1). But for the absence of his marvellous colour, the composition can stand as a succinct example of Hook’s work: men and women working together in a common enterprise, boat and sea also participating in the action, and the details of the location faithfully rendered. Sure enough, “The Sea is his Line!”

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AC KN OWL E DGM E NTS

i coul d not h av e launched myself on this critical biography of James Clarke Hook,

distinguished Victorian painter and member of the Royal Academy of Arts, without the kind help and frequent hospitality of the descendants of Hook’s elder son, Allan Hook. They have given me invaluable access to their inheritance of Hook paintings, etchings, sketchbooks, and much more. I also thank the descendants of Hook’s younger son, Bryan Hook, my cousins, who have kindly given me permission to reproduce the paintings that they have proudly bought back into the family over several generations. And I warmly thank Jane Kimber of Littlecourt in Somerset, who graciously allowed me full access to the beautiful room in her house that Hook elaborately decorated. For permission to use reproductions from the many galleries that own Hook paintings, I provide separate acknowledgments. I am also grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which supported my research on Hook in the early stages, and to Charn Jagpal and Amy Stafford for their indispensable research assistance. My late husband, Rowland McMaster, a photographer of professional calibre, besides being my colleague in the English Department at the University of Alberta, was a staunch participant in our many travels to the sites of Hook paintings, and provided indispensable photographic records. My sisters too, Eleanor Fazan and Valentine Clarke, have shared many an excursion to seek out the location of this or that “Hookscape.” And my daughter Lindsey McMaster stands ready to supply help whenever I need it. This book has indeed been a family project. Lastly, I warmly thank Robin Simon, editor of The British Art Journal, who kindly provided the foreword to this biography of a distinguished British painter.

J A M E S C LA R K E H O O K

1 “ T H E H EA D … O F T E N ” Childhood and Family Life, 1819–1836

a documen t s t il l pr e serv ed by descendants of James Clarke Hook is a charming

invitation from his parents to their children. Dated 1 February 1834, it begins, “James and Eliza Frances Hook invite their Sons and Daughters to a noble family dinner tomorrow at one o’clock precisely, Where they expect to see them all neat and clean with smiling faces and good appetites.”1 Then follows a list of the names of eight children, from James Clarke, at fourteen the oldest, to Anna Matilda, who was only a year old at the time. (The family was not yet complete: another daughter and two more sons were to arrive in the next four years.) Presumably, the children ate en famille on a regular basis, and would not have had to wait for a meal till the following day. But this was to be a noble family dinner, and the playful formality of the invitation signalled not only some special occasion, but also a chosen demonstration of family affection. This was clearly not the kind of family in which the children were expected to be seen but not heard. Not all parents would take the trouble to pen such a document, with its solemn pretence that little Anna Matilda, for instance, could get herself “neat and clean” for the occasion and that the assorted eight childish bodies could get themselves to the scene of celebration on their own steam. Clearly, there was to be much family co-operation involved, with the older ones helping the younger, and the parents helping all. It was a happy and close-knit family, and from the first young James Clarke was expected to look after his many siblings and do what he could for them. We do not know what was the special occasion for the celebration. But in November of the previous year, 1833, the family had suffered a severe blow in the bankruptcy of the father, James Hook,2 which was probably the reason that young James left school at fourteen. The record of the places where the children were born suggests that the household had folded, and they had moved to the premises of Eliza’s father, the famous

Methodist and scholar Adam Clarke, at 13 Canonbury Square in North London. James Hook needed to recoup his fortunes, and may well have been planning a return to Senegal or Sierra Leone, where for a number of years before his marriage, and again in 1825, he had been a merchant and trader. His absence following the noble family dinner seems to be indicated by the fact that after the birth of his next child, a little boy who was probably conceived soon after the family dinner and born in his maternal aunt and uncle’s house at Stoke Newington, Eliza had no more children for two years and two months – an unusual gap in the otherwise regular appearance of offspring. It seems that the family dinner may have been a final assembly of his nearest and dearest that the father could carry in his memory during his temporary exile. The Hook family Bible records that James Clarke Hook was born on 21 November 1819 in his parents’ house at 27 Northampton Square, Central London. His grandfather himself writes that he was “baptized on Wednesday December 15 1819, according to the form of the Church of England, by me Adam Clarke, LL.D.” Famous Methodist though he was, Adam Clarke never left the Church of England, and deeply regretted all schisms between the Methodists and the established church. The grandson he baptized remained a faithful Methodist, and he too retained a connection with the Church of England. His grandfather Adam Clarke was to be an important figure in young James Clarke’s life. A close associate of John Wesley, Clarke spent many years as a preacher under the orders of the Methodist Conferences. But he was a born scholar too, and besides pursuing his hugely popular preaching and Methodist activity, he produced over many years the several volumes of his Commentaries on the Bible, which was in its time the last word in biblical scholarship. I shall have more to say about him, since he played a notable part in young James Clarke’s boyhood and early life, and indeed was an enduring influence and source of pride to his painter grandson.

1

ja m e s an d eliz a h o o k

2

We do not know how these two devoted parents met and courted. James Hook was born in Belford in Northumberland, and Eliza Frances Clarke was living with her famous father at his estate at Millbrook near Liverpool. Although they were both in the north, she was near the west coast and he on the east. Perhaps he had travelled to hear her father preach. When they married, on 20 January 1819 at St Helen’s Church in Lancashire, he was thirty-two, with some years of experience as a merchant in West Africa, “a well-grown, strongly built man,” and his bride Eliza was twenty-five, “small, slight, almost fragile.”3

4

j a me s cl a r k e hook

To the modern reader, the succession of births that followed young James Clarke’s is staggering. Eliza Frances produced, in order, John Logan ( January 1821); Mary Noorouz ( January 1823); twins Adam Clarke and Andrew (November 1824); Samuel Tomkins ( July 1826), who died young; Eliza Frances, named after her mother (November 1827); a stillborn boy (May 1829); Adelaide Rosa ( June 1830); Anna Matilda (December 1832); Charles Broomfield (December 1834), who also died young; Charlotte Isabella (February 1837); and finally, when the mother was forty-four, Henry Ware Eustace (December 1838). In most cases, until his death in 1832, the babies were baptized by their distinguished grandfather, though occasionally he was away on his many travels. Of the twelve birth occasions, the first four were at 27 Northampton Square, a pleasant ten-room family house (Stephens 1888, 2n), the next four were at 12 Cross Street in the London borough of Islington, and the last four were at different addresses in London and in what is now called Greater London. The frequent moves at this stage probably reflect their father’s financial troubles. Eliza Frances cannot have had an easy time of it! “You are the head ... of ten,” James Hook wrote from Sierra Leone to his firstborn in 1843.4 Young James Clarke, then, grew up surrounded by brothers and sisters, for whom he was taught to feel a strong responsibility. For much of his youth, his father was absent, and his mother was partly reabsorbed into her own family. The Hook family’s intercourse with her famous father, Adam Clarke, and his sons, who lived nearby, was frequent and intimate. From Bathurst St Mary’s in Senegal, James Hook wrote to his son, who was only five at the time, “You know that your kind Mother has taken a great deal of pains with you and you must try to teach your Brothers and Sisters to read because your Mother has not so much time to attend to them as she had when you were little.”5 The responsibility for teaching his younger siblings how to read was a serious burden to lay on a five year old. But the affectionate father offered inducement in the form of a promised present, along with rational persuasion in the argument that the mother who had taught him to read now needed his help with the other children. This was a family of high attainments and high expectations. According to nineteenth-century custom in the middle class, mothers were expected to teach daughters, not sons. But it is no surprise that Eliza Frances began her eldest son’s education. The Methodists respected women, expected sound sense from them, and delivered where possible a good education. Her father, Adam Clarke (see figure 1.1), said that in certain contexts one woman was “equal to seven men and a half.”6 Eliza’s mother could write excellent verse on intellectual subjects; her sister Mary Ann Clarke Smith was soon to complete the three-volume biography of their father; and her brother J.B.B. Clarke was likewise a scholar and editor. To Eliza herself, her father had written in 1809, when she was only fifteen, “Learn all you can, for youth is the time ... in which

5

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1.1 / Portrait of Dr Adam Clarke, published in 1833

learning can be attained ... We have endeavoured to give yourself and your brothers and sisters all the advantages [of education] in our power.”7 No letters from Eliza Frances survive, so we do not hear her voice. But Hugh Stuart Boyce, a notable scholar who taught Greek to poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, wrote what he called an “Epitaph” on her – though she was in perfect health at the time. It is a lively tribute, and speaks not only to her virtues and intellectual attainments, but also to her wit and her sense of humour. Empress of fun and sovereign Queen of Quizzars, How oft has he by whom these lines were writ Writh’d, quak’d and trembl’d at her piercing wit. Yet still Eliza had her share of merit, A prudent head, keen sense and genuine spirit; Good humour in her honest bosom play’d, Nor ever from that honest bosom stray’d.8

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In the course of her productive life, managing a large family, with a husband who had money troubles and then was absent for years at a time, Eliza must often have had to make the most of that “prudent head” of hers. “I suppose you have been out to East Cote and had some fine sport among the trees with your cousin Adam,” James Hook wrote from West Africa to his firstborn. Eastcote was the village (now part of Greater London) where young James’s distinguished grandfather lived, and his home, Haydon (or Haddon) Hall, seems to have been something of a playground for the Clarke grandchildren. After a lifetime of dedicated scholarship and strenuous preaching all over the British Isles, Adam Clarke had earned his estate at Haydon Hall, a rural retreat commodious enough to accommodate the numerous Hook family when their father was abroad. One of Hook’s biographers, A.H. Palmer, described Haydon Hall as “a fine old house, with gardens abounding in tall trees, whose branches the boy explored energetically during his many visits.” And he added that the painter “preserves many pleasant recollections of those early days and of the old divine.”9

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Adam Clarke (1760/62?–1832), “LL.D., F.A.S, etc.” – the awards recognizing his high attainments as a scholar – was a self-made man. The son of a schoolmaster in Northern Ireland who was too poor to send him to university or get him ordained in the Church of England, he rose to become perhaps the most prominent figure after John Wesley in the huge movement of Methodism. He was loved and listened to, spellbound, by countless thousands; and he was probably the most respected scholar in the kingdom, consulted by the nation’s antiquarians and visited by royalty. A fascinating letter of April 1802, during the Napoleonic Wars, recounts how he was consulted about the Rosetta Stone, which Britain had acquired as spoils of war. Members of the Royal Society of Antiquarians were not sure what to make of it; and the secretary called on Clarke, telling him they “had just received from Egypt a curious stone, with a threefold inscription; one hieroglyphics, the other Greek, and the third utterly unknown.”10 Dr Clarke accepted their invitation to come to see the stone for himself; and he was able to correct the translation of the Greek, identify the “utterly unknown” language as Coptic, and define the substance of the stone as basalt. There was still much to be discovered about the Rosetta Stone; but by his encyclopaedic knowledge and familiarity with ancient languages, Clarke had advanced the understanding of this famous monument by huge strides. James Clarke Hook adhered all his life to the middle name that honoured his grandfather. An anecdote of 1872 told by Hook’s son Allan gives some idea of Adam Clarke’s

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lasting significance in Hook’s memory. In search of new painting sites, the Hook family had chosen to go to the remote Shetland Islands, far to the north of Scotland. In the little town of Hillswick, they were disappointed of accommodation at the only hostelry, since the family there were down with the measles. They decided to ask the local church minister for advice on where they might stay; and while they were waiting for him in his study, Hook noticed on the bookshelf the many volumes of Adam Clarke’s Commentary on the Bible. When the minister arrived, Hook announced, tapping the Commentary, “I am that man’s grandson.” “Come awa, Sir, come awa! I’m proud to see you in my house!” was the eager response; and the Hooks – painter, wife, and teenage son – were swiftly introduced to the Sutherland family, who persuaded them to remain there for the duration of their stay on the island.11 It is not surprising that a resident clergyman of the Shetland Islands should have welcomed a descendant of Adam Clarke with open arms. The islands had become a special mission for Clarke, and during two visits, in 1826 and 1828, he had made many friends and set up several schools and chapels. “Shetland lay near his heart, and was bound up with the deepest and most affectionate feelings of his nature,” his daughter wrote in his biography.12 It seems that Hook’s visit to the Shetlands in the 1870s, besides being part of his usual search for new locations, was something of a pilgrimage in the steps of his grandfather. Clarke had noted that the occupations he had chiefly observed on his first visit were “cutting, drying, and burning seaweed, to make it into kelp.”13 One of Hook’s paintings from this visit was called Kelp Burners, Shetland, exhibited in 1874. Adam Clarke remained a beloved figure to his grandson the painter, and to some extent a role model. The extended family of the Clarkes was necessarily an important part of Hook’s boyhood experience. They were busy professionals. Nearer to hand than Adam Clarke’s Haydon Hall, in St John’s Square, London, were Eliza’s two brothers, John and Theodoret, who ran a printing business there. One sister, Anna Maria Rowley, lived in Worcester; another, Mary Ann Smith, was much closer, in Stoke Newington in Greater London. And her youngest brother, the uncle young James would have most to do with in later life, went to Cambridge, was ordained, and later became rector at West Bagborough in Somerset, where Hook visited and painted. Over his long career, Adam Clarke was assigned by the Methodist Conferences to dozens of districts, and had walked literally thousands of miles to preach thousands of sermons to tens of thousands of eager listeners. When by his scholarship and fame he had earned some measure of freedom and independence, he still took to the road on missions that he believed in, founding dozens of schools, for instance, in Northern Ireland as well as on the Shetland Islands.

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Clarke was a devoted family man. While still at Millbrook in the north, in November 1821, he wrote to his scattered children to convene a full family reunion at which they would all take the Sacrament together: “father, mother, John, Theodoret, Anna Maria and Rowley, Eliza and Hook, and Mary and Joseph: this would be to me the happiest day of my earthly existence.”14 The Hook children, young James and John, were only two and one at the time, but it seems likely that they went too. And James Hook would have had a chance to visit his mother, and to display his little boys to grandparents on both sides. This was a family that made full use of opportunities for seeing more of the world and each other. The venerable scholar was not so pious as to be daunting. He had a playful disposition, and entertained his grown offspring with light verse of his own composition. He loved children, and “would sing the nursery rhymes of his own infancy, or the popular ballads familiar to the days of his youth.”15 Despite his religious vocation, he had no objection to the traditional romances of Guy of Warwick or the fairy stories that gathered such opprobrium among early-nineteenth-century moralists. He spent time with his grandchildren, always involving them in some busy or creative activity: “To one he would give a book of pictures to look over, – to another different bits of coloured stones, or paper to arrange on the floor, – to a third a piece of board with a little hammer and some nails, to drive in and pull out again.”16 For all his serious scholarship and deep piety, Clarke seems even in his seventies to have retained something of the child in his makeup: “He gained a game at marbles with as much delighted satisfaction as any of the children with whom he played.”17 I dwell on these characteristics, for they seem to have been passed on to Hook, who loved to paint children and to enter into their amusements. To have a famous grandfather, whose name, in Methodist circles at least, was a household word, and especially one so close and devoted, no doubt did much to bolster the boy’s confidence and foster his independence, even in the teeth of his father’s financial troubles. A more solemn occasion than the family reunion or the many visits, and one that would have made a deep impression on young James, was the death of his grandfather. By now an old man past seventy, Adam Clarke died in harness. Despite serious incapacity in his leg and foot, in the six weeks before his death in August 1832 he had done more, and travelled farther, than most people in the pink of health. As a striking example of his energy and devotion to the last, it is worth detailing the travels of his last few weeks. He had not long been back from a tour in Northern Ireland when in July he was summoned to the Methodist Conference in Liverpool – “into the very jaws of the cholera,” as he wrote to his son.18 He achieved a great deal there, despite feeling “very poorly.” Apparently putting his house in order, he handed over to the Methodist Conference the management of the schools he had founded on the Shetland Islands and in Northern Ireland, and he preached the principal sermon of

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the occasion – “and a glorious time it was,” he reported.19 He was always inspiring, and much sought after, though he preached impromptu, without notes. From Liverpool the next day, he took a twelve-hour journey to Worcester, where he stayed with his oldest daughter, Anna Maria Rowley, and her family. Here too the cholera was rife. His next duty was to assist his son Joseph at an important meeting in Frome in Somerset, and he preached there in favour of the charity his son had established. He then proceeded, by way of a visit to Joseph’s in-laws, to Bristol, where he preached both at Westbury nearby and at Bristol itself. Still ailing, but never failing, he headed homeward, and in London managed to visit his son John in St John’s Square, his daughter Mary Ann Smith and her family at Stoke Newington, and his daughter Eliza and the Hook family, before taking the public coach home to Haydon Hall and his beloved wife Mary. This tour, the last of many, had taken him many hundreds of miles to the north, to the west, and finally back to the home counties. On the way, he had managed to see all his children and their families. During two days at home, the ailing old man wrote a number of letters, working devotedly to bring help to the Shetlanders after a disastrous storm had devastated the fishing fleet and left “about forty widows, and nearly two hundred fatherless children.”20 Then he was on the move again, and due to preach in Bayswater in London, as the first duty in a “roving commission” laid upon him at the Methodist Conference, which would not permit his retirement. He spent the Saturday night beforehand with friends there, though he was suffering from diarrhoea. But on Sunday he rose early, and, ready dressed in hat and coat, called urgently to his host, “My dear fellow, you must get me home directly, without a miracle I could not preach; get me home.”21 The miracle was not forthcoming. He was judged unfit to travel. Doctors were called and recognised at once the symptoms of cholera. He faded fast. His wife was summoned from Haydon Hall, and the children and sons-in-law who were within reach were assembled. Death was then a community affair. He died that day, with his family, including Eliza and perhaps other Hooks, all around him.22 The Bayswater sermon was one of the very few preaching engagements that he did not honour. Young James was twelve at the time, and the event must have impressed him deeply. Adam Clarke’s business was not just with spiritual welfare, but with the whole of life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. And something of his unflagging energy and commitment was surely inherited by young James Clarke Hook, who himself lived to an even riper old age, and kept painting till the end. When Hook was about the age of Adam Clarke at his death, as F.G. Stephens wrote, “There is energy in every turn of his body, and no one takes more delight than Hook in a good story, at which his laugh is irrepressible as a boy’s, or enunciates with more zest his opinions of Art, politics, morals,

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or the order of life.”23 Hook took after his famous grandfather. Although one was a scholar and preacher and the other a painter, each had a creative vision that demanded expression, and each worked almost compulsively to communicate it. The fact that a three-volume biography of Clarke was published the year following his death,24 and was promptly reprinted in America, fixed this life as important and made its events accessible to his grandchildren and to everyone else. Adam Clarke’s life, in this literary form, remained a model to emulate, particularly for his grandson James.

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The Hooks had an extended family on the father’s side as well, but they were not as numerous or as well documented as the Clarke side. The letter written by Dr Clarke to James Hook, in response to Hook’s request to marry Clarke’s daughter, still survives in family archives. Dated 17 October 1817, it is rather austere in tone, as fathers on such occasions are apt to be. It was his maxim, Clarke wrote, to leave his children to their own choice in marriage, while “reserving the right to counsel and advise.” Though his first care was for his daughter’s spiritual welfare, he said he must of course also pay attention to “secular matters” – in other words, to money, and to the aspiring groom’s ability to support a family. He continued, “Now, as I know nothing of you as a man, having never to my knowledge seen you; nothing of you as a Christian nor even what your religious sentiments are; and nothing of your profession or prospects in life, except for the very slight hints contained in your letter, you cannot suppose that I can give you any satisfactory answer.”25 James Hook could probably have satisfied his prospective father-in-law on his “religious sentiments.” His family were chapel-goers like Clarke’s; and his letters to his son show him as devout and God-fearing, as well as fiercely opposed to slavery. But his “prospects in life” at the time would not have been satisfactory. We may deduce something of James Hook’s circumstances from the years leading up to his application to Dr Clarke. Born in Belford, Northumberland, on 20 October 1787, James Hook was the son of Elizabeth Logan and Andrew Hook, who was probably “a land-surveyor” and a farmer.26 It is clear from his letters that he was well taught and somewhat literary in his tastes. And he must have been a young man of some enterprise, for though his father seems not to have moved more than a few miles in his life, the son set forth as a merchant to West Africa. At the time of his application to Dr Clarke, he had already spent several years in the gum arabic trade in Senegal. In the early nineteenth century, disputes were rife among the colonial powers following the Napoleonic Wars and the division of territories after the Treaty of Paris

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in 1814. On the West African coast, despite the official abolition of the slave trade, the traff ic in slaves still continued, though clandestinely, and f lourished the more for the disputes over territory. James Hook’s own legal trade was necessarily affected too. He was an able and ambitious young man. A number of his letters, preserved in the Colonial Office, show him as an active British merchant in Senegal, a spokesman for his colleagues. He sought help and sometimes a position from the British government. In 1817 – the year of his application for Eliza’s hand – he began a series of letters to Lord Bathurst, asking initially to be appointed consul to Senegal, which the 1814 treaty had reassigned to France; and then requesting redress for British merchants, since the French government had not honoured the built-in safeguards for their interests. His letters went unanswered. “Finding us neglected by our own Govmt,” Hook wrote bitterly, the French commandant “has gone from one degree of illegal persecution to another,” thus reducing the conditions of the English merchants to “the most abject slavery.”27 With the six years of the treaty reduced to a mere three months, English merchants had to unload their goods at catastrophic losses.28 Hook’s request to be appointed consul to Senegal received a brush-off. So his response that autumn to Dr Clarke’s enquiries on “secular matters” cannot have been very encouraging. It seems, however, that Eliza Frances exercised her right of free choice, and married James Hook anyway. They were married early the next year. Dr Clarke did not officiate – the family Bible records that the marriage was performed by Richard T. Piggott – but perhaps he had chosen the role of giving his daughter away instead. The next surviving communication from Dr Clarke was sent from Millbrook, soon after James Clarke Hook’s birth. Warm and genial in tone, it came with the handsome gift of the “noble Bible” of 1688, newly bound, with extra pages inserted for the recording of family births and deaths – a precious document in family hands that I have drawn on freely for the detailed information it preserves on births and deaths. This gift, like Dr Clarke’s punctual baptizing of his Hook grandchildren, suggests that however rocky the beginning of the relation, Clarke was fully reconciled to his son-in-law after the marriage. Understandably enough, family sources are meagre on James Hook’s means of support for his growing family between his marriage in January 1819 and his bankruptcy in November 1833.

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James Hook does not provide descriptions of the Dark Continent. His letters from Africa are about trade and his profession, and he provides little local colour. But there is a story about a lion that keeps appearing in accounts of his son’s life. From Senegal in 1825, James Hook wrote to his five-year-old firstborn promising to bring him a monkey. And he added, “If I can get a Lion I mean to buy one for Dr. Clarke” – who he knew was fond of animals.29 Little James was visiting his grandfather at the time. This letter is the one piece of documentary evidence in the recurring family accounts of a lion from West Africa that haunts Hook biographers. Hook’s contemporaries A.H. Palmer and F.G. Stephens heard the story decades later from Hook himself, who had probably embroidered it. Palmer wrote of two lion cubs that were initially pets of James Hook in Africa; but after they had “successfully disputed the possession of a joint of meat with a scared butcher,” he sent them home to England. “Being declined by Mrs. Hook,” Palmer wrote drily, they were passed on to the menagerie at the Exeter Exchange, “after one of them had been etched by [Edwin] Landseer.”30 Stephens, writing soon afterwards, quoted Palmer, and added, “This etching seems to have been that entitled ‘Heads of a Lion and Tiger,’ produced by Landseer in 1809, when he was seven years old.”31 But 1809 predates James Hook’s time in Senegal, as well as his marriage, so Landseer’s must have been a different lion. The account by Hook’s son Allan is probably the most reliable. He had access to his grandfather James Hook’s letters, as Palmer and Stephens probably did not. Quoting the letter of 1825, he related that when James Hook returned to London from Africa, bringing a lion cub with him (only one this time), he kept it for a while in his own home, until it became unmanageable. He added, “There is even a legend (possibly apocryphal), that [the cub] insisted on taking a leg of mutton from the butcher’s boy who was bringing it to the house” – that piece of the story having moved from West Arica to London. Younger members of the Hook family claimed to have met the very lion, now grown old, in the Zoological Gardens.32 Hook’s son made no mention of any connection with the great animal painter Sir Edwin Landseer, whose long connection with lions culminated in the iconic four bronze lions that famously guard Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square; but later Hook descendants have eagerly claimed that James Hook’s lion became one of Landseer’s models. A recent article by Mathew Norman in The British Art Journal, “Drawings of Lions by Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) and the Trafalgar Square Monument” (2020), raised my hopes of finding James Hook’s lion from West Africa among Landseer’s many depictions of lions over many years – especially when I discovered reference to a painting of one Nero, a Lion from Senegal, which Landseer painted at the Exeter Exchange.33 But alas,

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that picture dates from 1814, during Landseer’s boyhood – too early for the Hook lion. And the Hook lion would have been long dead by the time Landseer was working on the Nelson’s Column monument, which was not completed until 1869. Family legend cannot always be trusted. Nevertheless, I still believe that James Hook, according to his intention in 1825, did indeed send (or bring) a lion cub (or two) from Senegal to London, which may have disputed (or was soon to dispute) a joint of meat with the butcher. And if this cub arrived when James Clarke Hook was only five or six, it is no surprise that his memory of the events was a little unreliable, his accounts not always consistent. (Such are the tangled webs that challenge the biographer!) During the early years of his marriage, James Hook’s career seems to have been stable, if not prosperous. In the five years from 1819 to 1824, which saw the births of five children, the family was established at their Northampton Square address, not far from their Clarke uncles. In 1824 they moved to 12 Cross Street, constructed during a building boom in Islington.34 And Hook was enough in funds to contribute to the North Islington Preparatory School, where he probably sent his two oldest boys, James and John. By 1832 his situation seems to have taken a turn for the worse, after his tenth child, Anna Matilda, was born at Canonbury Square, in premises, it seems, that had been vacated by Dr Clarke when he moved to his country home of Haydon Hall. “Wretched Canonbury Square,” Clarke called it.35 No doubt his daughter Eliza and her family were glad to find refuge there in hard times. What had James Hook been doing? In a trade directory of 1822–23, he is listed as a “merchant,” with a partner called Dodds. He joined Lloyd’s of London in 1828. And in the 1833 register of bankruptcies, he is listed as an “insurance broker” living at Canonbury Square, with premises also at Lloyd’s Coffee House. Able and conscientious as he was, Hook’s ruined fortunes were more likely the result of misfortune than incompetence. In fact, in some correspondence of the Foreign Office, it emerges that before his appointment as judge arbitrator in the Mixed Courts, enquiry was made into his character and reliability, since his bankruptcy had resulted in “rumours in disparagement of Mr Hook.” Lord Aberdeen, the foreign secretary, appointed an enquiry by three men he trusted, and they reported that “Mr Hook’s misfortunes arose from misplaced confidence in a Partner residing on the coast and that there were not the slightest grounds for questioning his honour or Integrity as a British Merchant or which could disqualify him from the office proposed to be conferred on him.”36 Thus reassured, Lord Aberdeen granted the appointment. Perhaps it was those rumours of disparagement that had caused his various applications to be ignored.

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James Hook’s son, meanwhile, had benefited from the move to Islington. At school he began to show his gifts as an artist. Warmly encouraged by the art master, he won the prize for drawing – a volume of outlines by the distinguished academician Benjamin West, which he treasured and preserved. “An artist born,” as his son Allan recorded, he appreciated a reward that demonstrated his talent to his family, and suggested a career.37 Islington was still almost rural, and afforded pleasant country outings. Young James and his brother John roamed the lanes and fields of Islington and swam in the New River, which had not yet been covered and tapped as part of the city’s water supply. But the family’s hand-to-mouth existence in these years was not conducive to regular courses of study. Without much in the way of further prospects, James left school at fourteen to follow his own devices. Chronically short of cash, with an allowance of a halfpenny a week, he would make “vegetable forays” to feed his pet rabbits and guinea pigs. For holidays their father sometimes took them north to visit his mother near Belford on the northeast coast. These trips would be made by the cheapest means, along the east coast of England to Leith and Berwick, aboard 200-ton sailing smacks. Such voyages, which could last from two days to two weeks, depending on wind and weather, made young James steady on his sea legs and contributed to his life-long love of seafaring, fishing, and messing about in boats. He became acquainted with the mariners, fishermen, and wreckers, and he could sing shanties of “a hundred sail and a thundering gale” with the best of them.38 His visible talent suggested art as a career. Early in the century, well before painting had attained the high status that it was to win later, the middle classes were apt to consider painting as merely a craft or a trade, something one worked at with one’s hands, not a profession. The example of the notoriously dissolute painter George Morland loomed large for parents keen on respectable careers in business or the professions. The hugely successful artist William Powell Frith, who was born in the same year as Hook, amusingly related the reaction of his uncle and aunt to the proposal that he should be trained as an artist: “They simply thought my parents insane when the project of my embracing the disreputable calling was broached, and they said so.”39 William Thackeray, who was born a few years earlier than Hook, had also aspired to be an artist. He attended Sass’s Academy briefly in the 1830s, and provided a memorable fictional rendering of it in The Newcomes, the great panoramic novel that features an artist hero, Clive Newcome, and explores in some depth the matter of the status of art. When it came out serially between 1854 and 1855, it was a novel that the young artists of the day, including the Pre-Raphaelites, folded to their hearts. Thackeray concerned himself with the dubious social status of the artist in that day, and also chronicled the

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joyous life of the art student. Major Pendennis, Thackeray’s memorable social commentator, is flabbergasted, like Frith’s uncle, at the notion that Colonel Newcome is prepared to accept his son’s choice of art as a career: “Is it true that he is going to make his son an artist? I don’t know what the dooce the world is coming to. An artist! By gad, in my time a fellow would as soon have thought of making his son a hair-dresser, or a pastry-cook, by gad!”40 James Hook, however, rose above such prejudices, and seems from the first to have believed in his son’s talent, and encouraged him in his calling. It must have been difficult for a fifteen year old, however talented, to find ways to harness and develop his talent. But young Hook sought advice and encouragement, and he found it. The portrait artist John Jackson, RA, was a staunch Methodist like Adam Clarke, and indeed had painted a portrait of Clarke.41 While Jackson was alive, young James visited him in Newman Street, familiarising himself with the artists’ quarter of London. Thackeray’s commentary gives a vivid sense of a different community, and the attitudes of the “respectable” classes. “British art ... loves to fix her abode in desert places,” he wrote. As a fashionable district goes downhill, first the physicians take over, then the boarding-house keepers, and finally “Dick Tinto comes in with his dingy brassplate, and breaks in his north window, and sets up his sitters’ throne.”42 These were the quarters that young James Clarke Hook learned to feel at home in. Jackson’s daughter introduced him to the great landscape painter John Constable, who lived in Charlotte Street, and who took a close interest in the boy’s progress. Also in Charlotte Street were the Chalon brothers, Alfred and John, both academicians, who also encouraged him. The cluster of artists had in common not only their profession, but also their connection with Methodism, and the anti-slavery cause. Young James, thus encouraged by his father and by established artists, sought out the next step towards a career. The principal art school preparing students for entry to the Royal Academy Schools was Sass’s Academy on Charlotte Street, of which Frith gave a memorable account in his autobiography.43 John Everett Millais studied there, and Charles West Cope, and several other notable painters who became Hook’s friends and fellow academicians in later years. Sass’s Academy also accepted women, though it seems likely that they received different instruction from that available to the young men. The vigorous woman painter Henrietta Ward, wife of Edward Matthew Ward, RA, and author of two books of reminiscences, began her career there.44 And young Rosalie Burton, daughter of a prosperous London attorney and Hook’s future wife, also trained at Sass’s Academy. But in the 1830s there was no way the teenage James Clarke Hook could find the money to pay the fees for this somewhat prestigious preliminary training. The alternative was to study drawing for himself by a steady course of work among the sculptures of the British Museum. The “Museumites” were looked down on by the “Sassites,” but the path was a recognised one. And though the Museumites

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had no regular instruction, they had each other, and whatever passing advice the more experienced artists on the same scene would supply. It was a demanding life. Young James had to walk every day from North London to Bloomsbury, and back again in the evening, after hours spent laboriously drawing, for instance, an exact, shaded, two-dimensional rendering of part of the Elgin Marbles. For lunch, his son Allan recorded, he could afford only “a roll of Penny-buster,” a small loaf of bread, which was so dry that it had to be wetted under the tap to make it edible.45 The boy fending for himself in the big city recalls Charles Dickens’s experience, as recorded in David Copperfield (1850). Young David too must buy his own meals on meagre funds: “Often, of a morning, I could not resist the stale pastry put out for sale at half-price at the pastry-cook’s doors, and spent in that the money I should have kept for my dinner.”46 Unlike David, Hook could return to a loving home for dinner. But in later life he attributed to these hard times the fact that he fell short of the stature of his father and brothers. At this time he was a slender and even fragile youth. One advantage over the privileged Sassites he did have, however. He learned to paint in oils, and from live, three-dimensional subjects. To us, this would seem a basic and obvious requirement. But orthodox masters of the day were adamant that students should not be “seduced into the practice of painting instead of drawing,” as decreed by William Hilton, RA – the Keeper at the Academy Schools in Hook’s day.47 Nor were they allowed to represent reality except by drawing classical sculpture or copying two-dimensional old masters. Training at Sass’s Academy, young Frith was first set to endless exercises in copying “outlines from the antique, beginning with Juno’s eye and ending with the Apollo ... all in severely correct outline.” Only after these two-dimensional efforts were approved was the student “considered advanced enough to be allowed to study the mysteries of light and shade,” undertaken by an exact and convincing chalk study of a “huge white plaster ball, standing on a pedestal,” with the effect of rotundity to be achieved by laborious cross-hatching. “I spent six weeks over that awful ball,” Frith recorded bitterly.48 And when he got to the Academy Schools, such exercises continued. It was only when he was finally allowed to try his hand at painting, Frith wrote, that he actually began to enjoy his work.49 Young James Clarke Hook managed to leap such obstacles. At some stage, it seems, he took instruction in painting from an older friend, Edward Opie. This Opie was the great-nephew of the distinguished eighteenth-century portrait painter and academician John Opie, so he was familiar with the art establishment, and brave enough to circumvent some of its rules. From Edward Opie, Hook early learned the rudiments of oil painting, even before he gained access to the Academy Schools. Moreover, he was allowed to paint from life, and from three dimensions, rather than copying old masters – an invigorating leap beyond conventional training.

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1.2 / Portrait of Hook’s grandmother Elizabeth Logan, 1836, painted when Hook was sixteen years old

An early foray was a portrait in oils of his grandmother, Elizabeth Logan Hook, on one of his visits to his father’s family near Belford in Northumberland (see figure 1.2). He probably went there with his father and brother John, and perhaps other members of his family. The grandmother looks a dour old dame, and Hook had certainly not yet learned the portrait painter’s talent of flattery. But the effort is impressive as a work in oils by a mere sixteen-year-old. Family tradition places the portrait at that age; so it predates Hook’s entry into the Academy Schools.

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There young James had to submit himself to the traditionally conservative training. I shall take up his career at the schools in chapter 2. Here, by way of following through the Hook family fortunes, I turn to the developments in his father’s career.

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rel ative prosperit y at l a st

2

At last, in 1842, James Hook achieved an appointment of considerable prestige, with a salary that was sufficient, if not munificent. The shame attached to his bankruptcy could be put behind him, and he could don robes and even associate with royalty. But the appointment took him away from his beloved family, and back to West Africa. During his hand-to-mouth years in business in London, he had maintained his connections in West Africa, and in July 1840, hearing of the dangerous illness of the lieutenant-governor of Sierra Leone, he wrote to Lord John Russell to apply for the position. He enclosed a letter of support signed by a number of current and past merchants whose confidence in him, he wrote, derived from his extensive knowledge of Sierra Leone, its people, and its commerce. And he made an impassioned plea for the effective ending of the slave trade, which “is still carried on almost under our forts,” despite its nominal abolition.50 In reply to this well-supported application, he received, again, a brush-off.51 However, James Hook’s eloquent plea eventually bore fruit. Two years later, Lord Aberdeen appointed him as Her Majesty’s commissioner of arbitration in the Mixed British and Foreign Courts of Commission. Enforcing the abolition of the slave trade was an international matter – hence the “Mixed” Commission set up by the British government with other nations. It was to be the duty of James Hook and his superior, one Mr Melville, to adjudicate cases of the infringement of the law. The appointment itself, as James Hook proudly told his son, was “signed by her Majesty and the Earl of Aberdeen.” And he left England in September 1842, with high hopes for recognition and distinction. It is quite touching to read of his delight in the prestige that his new position conferred: “In fact my post is one of great honor and high respectability. I took my seat on the bench for the first time about a fortnight ago to adjudicate on a Brazilian Slaver, which we condemned. My colleague and I entered the Court in full Uniform when the Proctors, Barristers and all rose to pay respect to the Judges Mr Melville and I. We were addressed by ‘Your Honors the Judges &c.’ And let me tell you I got on perfectly well.”52 He went on to describe a visit to the Prince de Joinville (son of Louis Philippe, King of the French), who commanded his own frigate, the Belle Poule – the very ship in which he had famously brought back Napoleon’s remains from St Helena to be buried in state at Les Invalides. “This has been a high day with your old Father. I have just returned from on board the ‘Belle Poule’ French Frigate. My Colleague Mr. Melville and I went off in

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chil dhood a nd Fa mily l iF e , 18 19 –18 3 6

regular state ... We the Commissioners, in full Uniform, by special invitation waited upon his Royal Highness the Prince de Joinville. He received us most cordially in his own cabin, where we remained with him an hour.”53 Although James Hook lamented his exile, and begged his artist son to send pictures of his children and their mother, he clearly enjoyed his new-found status after the lean years in London. “We have encountered severe gales in the voyage of life,” he wrote from his safe haven.54 And from that distance, he mused, “I sometimes fear that our dear children may have formed very incorrect ideas about their Parents whose tempers were so severely tried during our long adversity ... However, the storm is past.”55 And presently, we find him adapting the famous opening of Richard III: Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this Sun of – Wealth.56 Wealthy, so far, he was not. But the family circumstances had improved at a bound, and even in his exile he could rejoice. Young James was now to be the head of the family at home, and his father continued to urge him to “pay every personal attention and kindness to your sisters”57 and to remind him, “You are the head ... of ten.”58

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2 “ F O R T H E S I LV E R P R I Z E CONTENDING” At the Royal Academy Schools, 1836–1846

henry sa ss, the proprietor of Sass’s Academy, may have considered training among the

sculptures of the British Museum to be “a refuge for the destitute,”1 but young James Clarke Hook’s sojourn as a “Museumite” paid off. In the summer of 1836, he sent in a detailed drawing that gained him acceptance as a probationer in the Royal Academy Schools, where instruction by academicians was provided free of charge. The list of probationers admitted with him on 5 July 1836, when he was still only sixteen, shows not only each student’s name and address, but also a sponsor – the name of the person recommending him, often an academician. Henry Sass, who was no great shakes as a painter but recognised as an excellent instructor, successfully recommended many of his pupils, including Augustus Egg, William Powell Frith, and Hook’s friend William Dobson. It is interesting to examine sponsors’ names as evidence of professional connections formed early. Young John Everett Millais, at ten the youngest student ever admitted, was recommended by the academy’s president, Sir Martin Archer Shee. There seems to have been no rule against nepotism, since years later Hook was allowed to recommend his own sons, Allan and Bryan. On his own entry, the academician who sponsored him was “J. Constable, R.A.” – who it seems recommended students only very rarely. The support of the great landscape painter was unfortunately to end soon, with Constable’s sudden death in 1837.

1

fellow st u d en ts

2

The list of Hook’s fellow students in the Academy Schools provides a roll call of most of the major painters of the period. Many of them remained colleagues who shared Hook’s strong and lasting concern with the Royal Academy of Arts as an institution. Some became lifelong friends. The boy and general favourite John Everett Millais was later to be a fellow member of the Etching Club, a convivial association very dear to Hook’s heart. As students he and Hook won medals in consecutive years. When they were both recognised as distinguished artists, they arranged for an exchange of paintings, whereby Millais was to paint a portrait of Hook – which was hailed as the outstanding portrait of the academy’s 1883 exhibition – for which Hook was to pay with a “Hookscape” of his own. G.F. Watts, who entered the schools a year before Hook, was later to encounter the Hooks in Florence, and, later still, to co-host with Hook the important social gathering at Little Holland House just before Sending-in Day, when works were submitted for the annual academy exhibition. William Powell Frith, famous painter of contemporary crowd scenes, corresponded with Hook on academy politics, and Hook found him one of the models for Frith’s Derby Day (1858). Edward Matthew Ward, the historical painter whose work was to decorate the new Houses of Parliament, was another fellow student. William Dobson, a painter of biblical and genre scenes, early became a close friend who visited Hook’s family, and James Hook wrote affectionately of him. And the genre painter Henry Le Jeune was another life-long friend. So was Frederick Pickersgill, who was in due course to marry Hook’s sister Mary Noorouz. Another pair of fellow students who became similarly connected by marriage were John Phillip, later called “Spanish Phillip” because of his characteristic subjects from Spain, and the brilliant young Richard Dadd. Frith touches only lightly on the tragic story of the two men: “John Phillip, who became an Academician, and one of the finest painters of the English or any other school; and Richard Dadd, his intimate friend and future brother-in-law, a man of genius that would assuredly have placed him high in the first rank of painters, had not a terrible affliction darkened one of the noblest natures and brightest minds that ever existed ... I cannot go into details that would be distressing to me to relate.”2 Henrietta Ward was not so delicate. Wife of Edward Matthew Ward, granddaughter of the animal painter James Ward, RA, mother of the Vanity Fair caricaturist “Spy,” and a painter of note herself, she was deeply connected in the art world, and “knew everyone.” Dadd was a friend of her husband, who noticed Dadd’s odd fairy subjects and disturbing behaviour on his return from a tour of the Continent. Ward mentioned his apprehension

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to Dadd’s father, who laughed the matter off, and said, “A day in the country would soon blow the cobwebs out of D’s brain and set him right.” Father and son did indeed take a trip by rail to familiar country, Cobham in Kent, and took a walk there from which the father never returned. His corpse was found, stabbed, and with the throat cut; and with the body were found the knife and razor that the son had bought from a cutler’s for the purpose. Richard Dadd escaped to the Continent, where he was apprehended. Among his effects was found “a paper containing pen-and-ink portraits of a number of his friends – each with his throat cut.”3 Among the likenesses, clearly a list of his next intended victims, was the author’s husband, Edward Matthew Ward. Henrietta Ward’s gossipy account of “D” differs somewhat from more official studies, such as the fully researched book by David Greysmith,4 and some of her information is clearly melodramatically heightened (although parricide hardly needs heightening). But her story of the list of intended victims is confirmed by Greysmith, who writes that in Dadd’s rooms “there were drawings of many friends, each with a dash of red across the throat”;5 and she is not likely to have invented her husband’s presence among them. Many years after Dadd’s death in 1866, Edward Matthew Ward cut his own throat with a razor, while in a fit of what was called temporary insanity. Dadd’s intentions, it seems, were finally fulfilled. In the 1840s, when the events were new, they must have inspired horrified speculation among the students about this madman in their midst. Dadd had a studio in Newman Street, and so did Hook. The grisly parricide happened in August 1843. Dadd was apprehended in France, declared insane when brought back to England, and incarcerated for the rest of his life. At first he was in Bedlam; later, when he was moved to Broadmoor, he was allowed to paint and receive visitors. Greysmith mentions a brother, George William Dadd, who likewise showed alarming symptoms, and was committed.6 But for another chapter in the story, and one that connects more definitely with Hook, Henrietta Ward again proves useful. John Phillip, or “P” as she calls him, married Dadd’s sister Maria in 1846; and as he gained in reputation, the couple moved to Kensington and associated with the artists’ community clustered near Campden Hill, where Hook built his home Tor Villa.7 It is a gloomy confirmation of Victorian theories on hereditary madness that Maria too went insane. “I remember his wife coming to a ball at our house,” wrote Henrietta Ward, “and thinking her very distraught and peculiar. Shortly afterwards, she went completely mad, and as the crying of her youngest child annoyed her, she made frantic efforts to strangle it. She was put in an asylum, the sad affair nearly killing poor ‘P.’”8 John Phillip indeed died at fifty in 1867. His wife was first incarcerated in London; and then in 1863 he moved her to his birthplace, Aberdeen, and paid for her care at Elmhill House, the private section of the Royal Aberdeen Lunatic Asylum. Hook’s

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close friend, the engraver Thomas Oldham Barlow, was Phillip’s executor, and made the arrangements for Maria’s care. It seems that the £200 a year paid for her at the asylum, even after her husband’s death, was enough to allow her certain privileges, such as a private room and a servant. And there she lived, estranged from her children, until her death thirty years later.9 The cause of her insanity was said to be “hereditary.” But she was not entirely forgotten. In a diary entry of 2 October 1879, when the Hooks were visiting friends in Aberdeen, Rosalie Hook recorded, “J.C. visited Mrs John Phillip who knew him.”10 When I was editing the diary, I didn’t understand the reference. Why was it worth recording that Mrs Phillip recognised Hook? Was the woman in question Phillip’s mother, who might have been somewhat senile by then? The story of Phillip’s incarcerated wife provided an explanation. If she could recognise Hook after such a lapse of years, we must assume that their association had been a close and friendly one. The painful story must have touched him deeply. William Holman Hunt entered the Academy Schools in 1844, rather later than Hook, but they were to become fellow members of the convivial Etching Club, and Hunt became Hook’s tenant – and incidentally a very tardy payer of rent! Dante Gabriel Rossetti – destined to become another member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – was also admitted to the schools while Hook was there; but he disliked the discipline and did not remain. Another of the original members of the Brotherhood was F.G. Stephens, who was to make his mark not as a painter but as a critic. In the 1880s he was to write Hook’s biography and become a close friend.11 The two died within weeks of each other, both of them old men and veterans of the art world. Among Hook’s other fellow students were Angelo Hayter, who never made a success of a career in painting but joined Hook and his wife on their travels in Italy, and John Tenniel, who began his career as a painter and indeed achieved the considerable success of being one of the prize-winners in the famous competition for the decoration of Westminster Hall. He changed his career path, however, and became best known as the chief political cartoonist for the weekly satirical magazine Punch, and as the illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books of 1865 and 1871.

1

i nstru cto r s

2

These early days as students together provided an intimacy and a lasting bond among the artists of the day; for although the Academy Schools were not the only place in England for training (and some chose to study abroad), they were certainly the principal venue. The academy’s own report of 1860 announced that three-quarters of the current

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academicians had come through its own schools.12 The academy was both revered and derided as a bastion of privilege, and was often criticised as being resistant to innovation and reluctant to accept work for its highly popular annual exhibition that did not conform to its rather rigid conventions. But its strong commitment to its teaching function, evident in the training that it provided at no cost to the young artists of the nation who met the entry requirements, gave it a good defence against its critics. The schools, as Helen Valentine explains, “gave [the academy] a seriousness of purpose beyond the selling of art.”13 In 1836, the very year of Hook’s acceptance as a probationer, a government report had strongly criticised the schools, claiming that the teachers were often absent, and that technique was neglected. Sir Martin Archer Shee, who was the president at the time, paid little attention, and did not change the way that the schools operated. However, the Keepers and Visitors must have noticed, and perhaps become more regular in their attendance. The government turned its attention to founding its own Schools of Design, a program that was largely in the hands of Richard Redgrave, another of Hook’s Etching Club colleagues of later years. Hook’s own experience at the schools seems to have been very positive, and he spoke with affection of the Keeper of his day, William Hilton. Hilton, who served as Keeper from 1825 until his death in 1837, was committed to history painting, and the subjects of the paintings that he exhibited between 1803 and 1838 were largely biblical, mythological, and literary. He was at the end of his career when Hook entered the Academy Schools, but Stephens related that Hilton “did not fail to notice the ability and energy of young Hook, and gave him all the assistance in his power.”14 Hook appreciated his kindness and was fully converted by Hilton’s advocacy of high art, and by his efforts to promote it in England. The regular course for students was to proceed from the Antique School to the Life School and then to the Painting School. Hilton had charge of the Antique School, and as part of the system of promotion from probationary student to full admission, Hook submitted the required anatomical diagram of a skeleton, with all its bones labelled, and another detailed drawing from the antique. His drawing was from the classical bronze figure in the British Museum known as The Dancing Faun (see figure 2.1). It is still in the family, subscribed “James Clarke Hook, for a student’s ticket,” and in another hand, “Admitted Decr 1836 / W.H.” – or William Hilton, the Keeper. With the formal admission, Hook acquired his “bone,” the small ivory disk that attested to his status and gained him full access to the schools. The professor of perspective when Hook entered was J.M.W. Turner, who famously painted like an Impressionist long before the Impressionist movement arrived. At the time, he was popularly recognised as a genius, but as one who did very peculiar things. William Thackeray, who was a champion of art, and a knowledgeable one at that, was

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2.1 / “The Dancing Faun,” c. 1839, which confirmed Hook’s full entry into the Royal Academy Schools.

able to appreciate the late Turner, including “the astonishing picture called Rain – Steam – Speed,” in which “he has out-prodigied almost all former prodigies.”15 Thackeray wrote, “He has made a picture with real rain, behind which is real sunshine, and you expect a rainbow every minute. Meanwhile, there comes a train down upon you, really moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and which the reader had best make haste to see, lest it should dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross through the wall opposite.”16 And he proceeded to an analysis of the technical means by which Turner achieved this stunning verisimilitude. But even a brilliant young fellow artist like Frith, who hugely admired the early Turner, considered Rain – Steam – Speed “a rather eccentric representation of a train in full speed.”17 There were many jokes about Turner’s paintings and how to tell which way up they were meant to hang. Turner himself, as Frith related, cheerfully joined in. Being offered a salad at dinner, he commented, “Nice cool green that lettuce, isn’t it? and the beetroot pretty red – not quite strong enough; and the mixture, delicate tint of yellow that. Add some mustard, and there you have one of my pictures.”18

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Taking a stance on Turner, indeed, was a self-defining moment for critic and painter alike. We have no quotable pronouncement on Turner by Hook, but in later life, when he could afford such indulgences, Hook made it his business to buy the Liber Studiorum (1807–19), the set of engravings that Turner had put together from his own work, although it cost him an arm and a leg. For a landscape painter, to be recommended by Constable and taught – however eccentrically – by Turner was to achieve impressive credentials. In 1838 the Royal Academy and its schools moved from Somerset House to what is now the National Gallery. Succeeding Hilton as Keeper was George Jones, who had been in the Peninsular War (1807–14), and who painted battle scenes. His principal claim to fame seems to have been that he looked like the Duke of Wellington. (Being informed that Jones was sometimes mistaken for him, the duke himself responded, “That’s strange, for no one ever mistakes me for Mr. Jones.”)19 Indeed, a bust of Jones recently on display at the academy shows the likeness of which Jones was so proud. Like Hilton, Jones was a historical painter, although of the kind that Thackeray poured scorn on. In a long career, Jones exhibited many subjects from the Old Testament, and many battle scenes, including, not surprisingly, some of Waterloo and the Duke of Wellington. Still, he seems to have had students’ interests deeply at heart, and was known to have wept at the celebrations attending the award of medals every 10 December. Some lines of verse by an unnamed contemporary of Millais at the schools give an idea of the students’ labours, and their cheerful attitude: Remember you the Antique School, And eke the Academic Stool, Under the tutorship and rule Of dear old Jones, Our aged military keeper And medal-distribution weeper, For whom respect could not be deeper In human bones; Whose great ambition was to look As near as might be like ‘the Dook,’ With somewhat less of nasal hook, And doubtless brains20 The verse captures the cheerful irreverence of students everywhere. Hook’s formal course of training kept him in the Antique School at these academic pursuits until his promotion to the Life School and the study of anatomy in 1842. But in

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2.2 (left) / Portrait of Hook’s twin brothers, Adam and Andrew, 1839 2.3 (facing) / The Hard Task, 1839, showing Hook’s sisters Mary Noorouz and Rosa

fact, he was proceeding with projects of his own before that. Thanks to his extracurricular training with Edward Opie, in which his friend Dobson joined him, he was making progress in portrait painting, and like many an artist before him, he started with his own family. At the British Institution, he won a medal from the Society of Arts for the double portrait of his twin brothers, Adam and Andrew (see figure 2.2), and in the spring of 1839, he exhibited his first painting at the Royal Academy, The Hard Task, showing two of his sisters, Mary Noorouz and Rosa, the elder hearing the younger recite her lesson (see figure 2.3). The originals of these portraits are lost to sight, although they remained long in the family. However, remaining reproductions of them give some clue to family activities at the time. The twins, Adam and Andrew, dressed exactly alike, seem to have been on a foray to the countryside, for Adam, seated, is cradling something in his hand – perhaps a bird’s nest or a hedgehog. Mary Noorouz, following her father’s plea that the elder children should help the younger, has conscientiously taken on the tutoring of her little sister Rosa. This first exhibited painting by this greenhorn achieved “a somewhat exalted position in the exhibition of the Academy.”21 That probably means it was “skied,” or hung so high that it was almost out of sight. In the academy’s catalogue, Hook’s London address was no longer 12 Dalston Place, the family home at the time, but 18 South Lambeth, and presently we find him listed at 58 Newman Street, in the heart of London’s art quarter, where he had his own studio.

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The family had moved again, to what must have been temporary quarters at North Addington Place in the South London district of Camberwell. The 1841 census shows that despite having his own studio, he still lived with them. His father still identified himself as “Merchant.” For James and Eliza Hook, with their ten children ranging in age from young James at twenty-one to little Henry at two, there was only one live-in servant, Harriett Short, who must have had a busy time of it. But none of them would have been idle. James declared himself “Artist,” and John was listed as “Clerk.” By now the young artist was earning some money, and could take off on his own travels.

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1

st u d en t tr avel s

2

The Academy Schools were only in session for half the year, and Hook found time for certain kinds of recreational excursions as well as for professional forays. We know of a light-hearted student excursion to Kent, although the date is uncertain. Hook went with his friend Dobson, who had shared his lessons in oil painting from Edward Opie, and also with Frederick Pickersgill, his future brother-in-law. The purpose of this trip seems to have been more pleasure than labour. There are various notes and rough sketches in a folio called “Sketches in Kent.” and some cheerful mementoes. Written over the fireplace in a small public house were some crude verses reminding customers to be punctual in payment “for spirits and tobacco,” and the carousing students preserved a copy, and added that here Bumbkin brewed his peck o maut And we were at the drinking o’t. A humorous sketch of a man in a top hat and raincoat smoking a pipe bears the legend “Willy C. T. D. [i.e., William Charles Thomas Dobson] son of ye party of ye Picklewicks Club trying ye merits of ye new MacIntosh.” The “Picklewicks” were presumably following the steps of the members of the Pickwick Club through Kent and partaking of comparable good cheer. Charles Dickens’s novel The Pickwick Papers had come out serially in 1836–37, and was hugely popular. A light sketch of a man in a cap with a bowed head, who is apparently sewing, is labelled “Pick fecit”; Pickersgill’s name had probably helped to identify the band with the Pickwickians. And the sketch is accompanied by the only verse that has survived from Hook’s pen: 1 This is James Clarke Hook, Esquire A mending his breeches is he: ’Twas leaping a ditch in Merry Kentshire, With an extra jerk, for fear of the mire, He burst them, but not at the knee. 2 Freddy Pickersgill fecit I sware, Al fresco was he when he drew it: While Willy and George looked on with a stare,

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Wondering greatly if he was aware, That Hookey would make him rue it. 3 Naughty Freddy’s fresco state Made Hookey’s blushes rise, So pulling down his nightcap straight, He covered both his eyes. 4 And this accounts, now I can trace, (At least I should suppose) That all you see of Hookey’s face Are, his night cap, and nose. Jas. C. Hook

2.4 / Mary Noorouz Hook, “James C. Hook Making Stirabout,” c. 1837

Like students everywhere, they were having fun, drinking and smoking, clowning and cavorting around in the nude, and enjoying a frivolous holiday away from the rigours of the academy. The sketch of Hook’s head, as the verse says, shows little more than his nightcap and nose. And we have few other records of Hook’s clean-shaven face, which in his more famous years was much covered by his post-Crimea beard. But one light sketch in his sister Mary Noorouz’s sketchbook, called “James C. Hook Making Stirabout,” shows a slim young man whom one can easily imagine as one of the “Picklewicks” (see figure 2.4). “Freddy,” “Willy,” and “Hookey” are readily identifiable. But who was “George”? The most likely “George” among contemporary students was G.F. Watts. When James and Rosalie Hook encountered him in 1846 in Florence, as we shall see in the next chapter, they both already knew him. A foursome of Hook, Dobson, Pickersgill, and Watts, sojourning as the “Picklewicks” in Rochester and its environs, suggests tempting parallels with Messrs Pickwick, Winkle, Tupman, and Snodgrass of Dickens’s novel. At some stage Hook took a trip to Ireland, prolonged over several months, when he made his way by painting kit-cat portraits (i.e., from the waist up) at twenty guineas apiece – quite a respectable price. Frith, whose avowed purpose in writing his autobiography was to provide example and advice to aspiring young artists, wrote of a similar interval of painting portraits in Lincolnshire: “No better preparation could be imagined for a man whose powers enable him to cope successfully with the lower or higher branches of art, than the careful study of nature and character that portrait-painting insures.”22 The dating of Hook’s trip to Ireland is uncertain. According to A.H. Palmer, it was at about the time of The Hard Task, or 1839, and he stayed some eight months;23 but according to Allan Hook, it was later, in 1843, and it was a “short sojourn.”24 Hook was

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2.5 / Holywell, Ballyarthur, c. 1842

engaged to paint members of the Beresford family, and he stayed in the houses of his patrons. Both biographers agree, however, that it was probably in Ireland that he took to riding and hunting, becoming perfectly at home on horseback. Palmer also recorded, clearly from Hook’s own narration in the 1880s, that he took part in boating expeditions and made use of the swimming skills that he had gained as a boy in the New River. It seems that while the party visited the skipper of a vessel off the coast, their boat was overturned, and they had to swim to shore. Such an upset, said Palmer, was “dear to his amphibious soul” and a preview of many cheerful sallies in various crazy craft on lake or at sea.25 We have no examples of the portraits that earned Hook his keep and something besides; but he ventured also on some watercolours of local scenery in Ballyarthur, a few of which are still preserved in the family and show considerable skill in the medium, with fast confident brushstrokes that turn the texture of the watercolour paper to good

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account – as in Holywell, Ballyarthur (c. 1842), a picture of a grotto deep and damp and watery (see figure 2.5). Ballyarthur, in the Vale of Avoca in County Wicklow, was a notable beauty spot. Hook seems to have revelled in painting from nature, which must have seemed quite a holiday after his academic studies from the antique. A folio called “Sketches from Irish Scenery etc. by James Clarke Hook” and dated 1842 contains pencil sketches and watercolours from Somerset as well as several from Ballyarthur. The subjects are sometimes marked in pencil – “Laurels Ballyarthur 3/42,” for instance – so it seems that he was there in March 1842. It seems likely that there were two trips to Ireland, this one to the Vale of Avoca in 1842 and an earlier one painting portraits. It is likely that these trips to Ireland marked a new step in independence for Hook, who was now in his early twenties. He was earning his own living and paying his own way. And if the portraits were done for breadwinning, the landscape watercolours took him to beautiful places and gave him a taste of painting natural scenery. It was to natural scenery that he was to return, after he had made his mark as a historical painter. Another such excursion took him to the home of his uncle J.B.B. Clarke, his mother’s brother, who was the youngest son of Adam Clarke. This uncle was ordained in the Church of England, and in due course was established as the rector of West Bagborough. Here young Hook was made very welcome, and his watercolours feature local scenes, including one of a very recognisable local landmark, the Dunster Yarn Market, with Dunster Castle in the background. He also painted his uncle’s kitchen interior and A View from Bedroom Window. Here he felt sufficiently at home to return after his marriage, using the occasion to design and execute an elaborate set of mural decorations for a large and handsome room. The decorated walls have been lovingly preserved, as I record in chapter 4.

1

st u d en t e xercise s

2

“The examples of student drawings that do survive,” writes Annette Wickham in her fascinating essay on the Royal Academy Schools, “offer some insight into practices in the Schools.”26 She writes of drawings from the life classes in the academy’s collections. The same could be said of the surviving watercolours by Hook and some of his student associates that are preserved in family archives. Typically, three watercolour sketches of the same set subject have been kept and mounted together. They would be practice for “subject pictures,” as they were called, the more professional figure compositions that could ultimately be enlarged and elaborated as oil paintings for the academy’s annual exhibition. These studies are not signed, so attribution of each piece must usually be conjectural, although family tradition asserts that Hook, Frederick Pickersgill, and William

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Frost frequently worked together. Two cognate studies of Tintoretto painting a portrait of his beloved daughter Marietta on her deathbed are reliably attributed to Frost and Pickersgill. These student works are particularly interesting, not only for exemplifying the subjects set and Hook’s fellow students’ early style, but also because the subjects were sometimes developed into paintings for exhibition. One group of three presents a lady showing two men a vision – clearly Beatrice conducting Dante and Virgil; and in 1843 Pickersgill exhibited a painting called Dante’s Dream. Another shows a floating female figure in a night sky with a star on her forehead, probably the “Evening Star” – a subject that Charlotte Brontë’s character Jane Eyre was to show to Mr Rochester: “Beyond ... an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight ... was a woman’s shape ... The dim forehead was crowned with a star.”27 Perhaps the visionary conception was less original than Jane thought. Yet another group shows, in different styles, sprite-like semi-nude figures dancing on a shore, with the moon rising over the sea, a visual rendering of Ariel’s song from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands” (see figure 2.6).28 The first of these studies, I believe, is Hook’s. But the third is surely a preliminary sketch for Richard Dadd’s painting Come unto These Yellow Sands, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1842, the year before his breakdown and the murder. The figures in the preliminary composition are similar to those in the painting, some in cognate poses, although they are dancing in the opposite direction, and the cave-like cloud is almost identical in both. It is tempting to compare the second study, with its vivid back lighting and large-scale blooms, with Dadd’s Puck and the Fairies (1841).29 Two of the studies show Bassanio of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice considering which casket to choose in order to win the hand of Portia; and in 1847 Hook exhibited Bassanio Commenting on the Caskets, a painting from Italy, for which his wife Rosalie posed as one of the musicians.30 We have in these student works, then, a series of examples of the early work not only of Hook, but of his contemporaries too, several of them awaiting firm attribution. Although the studies are not signed, there is reason to believe that these group sets on the same subject contain early work not only of Hook, but also of Pickersgill, Frost, Dadd, and possibly others such as Dobson, Le Jeune, Phillip, and Watts. Another of the subjects, taken from the Second Book of Samuel, is Rizpah watching over the dead sons of Saul, with two small watercolour designs, and a third on a related topic, mounted together. I will return to this subject, since Hook was later to adapt his student study on his way to greater things. He evidently had a shrewd sense of when to break out on his own path, as with painting in oils and from nature, and when to toe the line at the Academy Schools.

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2.6 / Three undated student studies by Hook and perhaps Richard Dadd on “Come unto these yellow sands,” a subject that Dadd subsequently developed as a painting exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1842

1

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Every back is archly bending For the Silver Prize contending, This the latest night for sending In the drawings.31 So goes the verse of the anonymous student chronicling the routines of the Academy Schools. And in contending for the “Silver Prize,” Hook was triumphant. In 1842 he had passed from the Antique School to the Life School, drawing the nude male figure. The academy and its schools had recently moved to the National Gallery, and the models for the Life School were posed now in the “pepper-pot,” or central rotunda. As reported in The Times, the president, Sir Martin Archer Shee, presided at the award ceremony of December 1842, and the occasion was attended by the big names of the day, including Charles Lock Eastlake, William Etty, Edwin Landseer, Daniel Maclise, William Mulready, the brothers Alfred and John Chalon, and J.M.W. Turner. Shee’s speech included a vigorous defence of British art and artists, and he regretted the “unworthy and groundless prejudice that still remains in the minds of a few of the noble and wealthy classes of England, which would place foreign modern art far above that of Great Britain, even at the present day.”32 The argument was to take effect, and the following decades were to see an unprecedented rise in public estimation of homegrown art, and a corresponding increase in prosperity for British artists. Shee specially commended the copy in oil of “Guido’s picture of ‘Fortune’” – Hook’s entry for the copy from an old master. At the distribution of the medals, sure enough, Hook won the silver medal for this copy of Guido Reni’s La Fortuna (1637).33 And as The Times reported, no sooner had a prize been awarded for the runner-up than Hook was called again, this time to receive the silver medal for “the best drawing from the living model.”34 The medals remain in the family. Very solid items over two inches in diameter, they are cast in deep relief: on one side, the young Queen Victoria, with her date of accession, 1837; and on the other side, the Belvedere torso from the Vatican, with the inscription “ROYAL ACADEMY INSTITUTED MDCCLXVIII [1768].” The two medals are identical, and probably a large number were struck to serve for many a year; but around the outer edges comes the individual occasion: “To Mr. J. C. Hook for the best copy made in the Painting School. Decr 10th 1842”; and “To Mr. J. C. Hook for the best drawing from the life,” with the same date. Such recognition would have constituted quite a triumphant occasion for the Hook family, who probably needed cheering up, because the previous September James Hook had left for his appointment in Sierra Leone. Far

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2.7 / Pamphilus Relating His Story, 1844

away a colleague showed James Hook the report in The Times. “Need I tell you how delighted I was,” he wrote to his son. “In truth ... tears of Joy rolled down my, now, sun burnt cheeks.”35 Also in 1842 Hook had exhibited his second picture at the academy, another portrait, this time of his young cousin, son of Adam Clarke’s daughter Mary Ann Smith. In 1844 he exhibited another portrait, and also his first “subject picture,” considered much more challenging than portraits, and the kind of performance for which he and his colleagues had long been practising. To exhibit one’s first subject picture at a major venue was to declare oneself a launched professional. Pamphilus Relating His Story shows the storyteller with his audience of eager female listeners (see figure 2.7). It is a topic from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1353). The main composition has the arched frame popular at the time and often utilised by the Pre-Raphaelites; and in the corners outside the arched frame appear small vignettes of a grieving woman and a corpse, reminders of the plague from which the storyteller and his listeners have isolated themselves. Hook seems to have been excited by this more ambitious piece, and he wrote to his father about the praise he had received; but it did not sell.

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In 1845, however, he exhibited The Song of Olden Time, and received critical praise from no less a figure than Thackeray. In his review of the academy exhibition in Fraser’s Magazine, Thackeray tended to pooh-pooh the established academicians, and to admire the up-and-coming young men. He singled out Frederick Pickersgill, “(not the Academician [his uncle] by any means),” for his subject from poet Edmund Spenser, and recognised him as “a disciple of Hilton ... that graceful and agreeable English painter.”36 Also named as a disciple was “Mr. Hook, whose Song of Olden Time is hung up in the Octagon Closet, and makes a sunshine in that exceedingly shady place”37 Imagining himself a rich patron, the reviewer muses, “I should like to possess myself of the works of these two young men.”38 Thackeray had yet to become the celebrated author of Vanity Fair (1848), but his sharp and often ironic take on the scene was informed and intelligent. Such praise was undoubtedly sweet to young Pickersgill and Hook.

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Meanwhile, however, and quite separate from the annual anxiety about exhibiting at the Royal Academy or the British Institution, the art world was stirred with excitement over the competition for decorating the new Houses of Parliament. Benjamin Robert Haydon, who saw himself as the principal champion of high art, pushed the project; and after the old Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834, Prince Albert, always deeply interested in the arts, had been a leading figure in persuading the nation to see the decoration of this new national monument as a grand opportunity for encouraging national talent. In 1841 a royal commission was appointed on promoting the arts through the new buildings, and it announced a competition for cartoons: full-size designs for large pictures to be executed ultimately in fresco. The cartoons were to be at least ten feet wide, with life-size figures, and were to be on subjects from British history or British literature. Entries were to be submitted anonymously, with the first deadline to be May 1843, and Samuel Rogers and Prince Albert were judges. This grand occasion was to be the nation’s principal incentive to “high art”; and all who aspired to be history painters – and which of Hilton’s and Jones’s disciples would settle for less? – were keen to compete, although few of them had any knowledge either of how to do fresco or of the particular problems of the medium in the damp English climate. Richard Dadd, between his return from his aborted tour of the Continent and his descent into madness, chose the subject of Saint George slaying the dragon. It is hard to avoid psychological speculation on his choice of such a subject. It seems that he had a growing antipathy for authority; for instance, while in Rome he had felt a strong urge to attack the Pope,39 who his voices told him was an emissary of the devil. In killing his

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2.8 / Exhibition of cartoons at Westminster Hall, Illustrated London News, 8 July 1843

father, he believed that he had acted “as the son and envoy of God, sent to exterminate the men most possessed with the devil.”40 While he was designing his cartoon for the fresco, it is very likely that he saw himself as Saint George quelling the source of all evil. Hook too occupied himself with the devil. He decided on a subject from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) – “So started up in his own shape the Fiend” – when the angel Ithuriel catches Satan whispering evil dreams at the ear of Eve.41 At ten feet by seven feet, four inches, this was Hook’s largest work. It is now untraced, but it included three life-size figures. It seems that this too was a subject that had been set for the students – because family archives include a watercolour treatment of it signed by Pickersgill. Nor was Hook’s entry the only one on the subject – since John Callcott Horsley submitted a cartoon of the same scene, which was eventually accepted, and may be seen in the Houses of Parliament today.42 The competition made a tremendous stir when the hundreds of large cartoons entered were displayed in Westminster Hall (see figure 2.8). Historical painting on the grand scale (as represented by these multitudinous designs) was never to have such a following

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again, nor such ample coverage. At the same time, there was a built-in potential for satire in the grand public and private aspirations. Punch, still in its relative infancy, but already feistily anti-establishment, latched onto this potential, and John Leech changed the name of his principal weekly cuts, usually on a political subject – from “Pencillings” to “Cartoons”; subsequently, the term changed its meaning from the full-size design for a large painting to the modern sense of a humorous drawing in a journal.43 The further sense of a humorous animated film was yet to come. Hook evidently threw himself into the work, and wrote to his father about it. James Hook wrote back from Sierra Leone, “How rejoiced I feel at your all praiseworthy resolution to start boldly for the prizes ... I rather think your strongest adversaries will not be RAs but others who are not yet distinguished by the addition of those aristocratic letters to their names. I shall long to hear the result of your Cartoon affair ... You have made a happy choice in selecting one of Milton’s most spirit stirring subjects ... what a grand scope for your imagination.”44 Hook’s Satan, however, was not among the prize-winners; and those who failed in this competition were debarred from entering again. His father was right that his chief rivals would be the young men rather than the seasoned and established ones. Neither John Martin nor Benjamin Robert Haydon, the aficionados of the grand style, won prizes either. Hook must have shown himself disappointed, as his father wrote back hearteningly, “I am surprised at your ever entertaining the foolish thought of your turning out a mere ‘dauber,’ why, I doubt whether any Englishman at your age ever attained a higher standing in your profession than yourself.”45 In 1845 the royal commission opened a new contest for allegorical subjects for the decoration of the House of Lords.46 In this contest the dimensions were to fit the panel spaces – over nine feet wide by sixteen feet high. Richard Doyle drew Mr Punch at work on his own cartoon (see figure 2.9) to give a new meaning to the term “High Art.” The accompanying text read, “England will never know what High Art really is till it has seen Punch’s own historical picture, thirty-five feet by ten, painted with the aid of a ladder.”47 This time Hook’s friend Pickersgill was among the prize-winners, as Thackeray’s Punch review recorded, with a burial of King Harold. “There are monks, men-at-arms, a livid body, a lady kissing it, and that sort of thing,” he wrote chattily. “And I congratulate the British public that KING HAROLD is buried at last; and hope that British artists will leave off finding his body any more, which they have been doing, in every Exhibition, for these fifty years.”48 The other prize-winners were G.F. Watts, with a King Alfred, and William Armitage, with a more modern and bloody battle scene. Thackeray, having worked as an art student himself, knew how hackneyed these historical topics could become. In the steps of the old masters – and following the dictum of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, that historical subjects were the noblest, and

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2.9 / Richard Doyle, “Mr Punch Indulging in High Art,” Punch, 14 July 1847, 19

that historical painting was the highest branch of the arts – the art establishment in the nineteenth century had embraced the principle that English painters should now turn to English subjects; and Queen Boadicea and Kings Alfred and Harold were the new heroes for patriots. Thackeray carried on his satire of these principles in The Newcomes. “An English istorical painter, sir, should be employed chiefly in English istory,” declares his art master Gandish, a take-off on Henry Sass. And he shows off his “Boadishia ... with the Roman elmet, cuirass, and javeling of the period – all studied from the hantique, sir, the glorious hantique.” “High art!” mutters the portrait painter Smee (a take-off on President Shee). “I should think it is high art ... fourteen feet high, at least!”49 And the illustration shows a huge canvas with a tangle of figures that are more than life-size. The full engagement of a novelist like Thackeray, as well as Fraser’s Magazine and the relatively new illustrated satirical magazine Punch (which proceeded to wield considerable

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power), demonstrates the extent to which the Victorian public involved itself in the art world. The opening of the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition had something like the media importance of, say, the Academy Awards for American moviegoers today. It was typical of Punch and of Thackeray and Doyle to deflate high pretentiousness in the arts. The days of serious history painting were numbered, and the Westminster Hall competitions to decorate the Houses of Parliament and the House of Lords were in many ways the last great fling of the mode. It is of a piece with Punch’s burlesques that when the frescoes came to be executed in the Houses of Parliament, many of them, because of damp and foul air, were rotting away on the walls before they were finished, and some had to be painted over before the end of the century.50 Before the second round of submissions and prizes, however, Hook had collected his honours and moved to Italy, the birthplace of high art.

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After winning his silver medals for the best copy of an old master and for the best drawing from the nude figure, and failing to win a prize in the Westminster Hall competition, Hook was in the running for a higher honour still among the students: the gold medal for the best historical painting. The subject was a set one: no less than the finding of the body of King Harold! And as further evidence for Thackeray’s contention that Harold’s body had been recurrently a-finding for fifty years, it emerges that each of the Keepers of Hook’s day had exhibited his own version of it: George Jones in 1832 and William Hilton in 1834. It seems that the Keepers were committed to the tried and true as the topics for their students. With a set topic, even an overworked one, Hook had no choice but to go to work and do his best, along with the other students. According to the requirements, the entries on the set subject were to be in oils, and on a canvas of over four by three feet; there were to be at least three figures, the principal of whom had to measure over two feet in height – a long way short of the Westminster Hall requirements, but this was to be a finished painting, not a cartoon. The distribution of medals was an impressive formal occasion, with media coverage, held by tradition on 10 December, the anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Academy. In 1838, when young John Everett Millais won the medal for the best drawing from the antique, as William Holman Hunt related, “All voices were hushed when Mr Jones mounted the steps and called out the name of John Everett Millais. Immense cheering followed, and little Millais was lifted up at the back of the auditorium and carried on the shoulders of the students to the receiving desk.”51 Hook had known his

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2.10 / Engraving of The Finding of the Body of Harold, 1845, for which Hook won the gold medal for the best historical painting

own triumph in winning two medals in 1842, although being full grown he would not have been made a pet of as Millais was. But the gold medal for the best historical painting was the prize most desirable of all, not least because the winner then became eligible for the Travelling Studentship and three years in Italy. On 10 December 1845, in the central room of the National Gallery, the students were assembled again with their friends and many of the current academicians. F.G. Stephens, who had been admitted in 1842, was probably present on the occasion. He recorded, “Thunders of applause greeted the announcement that ‘Mr. James Clarke Hook’ had won the heavy disk of gold. Mr. George Jones made to the happy artist a neat, encouraging, and extremely wise and very moral speech.”52 Besides the gold medal, Hook also received a handsome bound volume of the Discourses of Presidents Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West – again, a volume still preserved by his descendants. An engraving – clearly a very poor one – of his painting of The Finding of the Body of Harold appeared in the Illustrated London News on 20 December 1845 (see figure 2.10).

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The story of how the beautiful Editha, called “the Fair,” was summoned by two monks to assist in finding and identifying the body of Harold amidst the piles of the slain after the Battle of Hastings is told, for instance, in Francis Palgrave’s The History of England (1831).53 One can see why the historical painters, once they had embraced the principle that English historical painters should turn to English history for their subjects, would find the subject suitable. As a moment in so decisive an occasion as the Battle of Hastings, it has the necessary gravitas; moreover, the subject has pathos, patriotism, and especially the chance to treat the nude or scantly clothed human body – since Harold’s corpse was plundered before it was identified. Harold becomes a kind of English Christ, his mutilated body reminiscent of The Deposition from the Cross; and the grief of the woman he loved, as the only one who can identify his remains, also suggests Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–99). Harold’s stripped body shows that Hook had deserved to win the medal for painting from the nude. And besides, he effectively exploits the analogy with Christ. The king’s body makes a stark and harrowing contrast with the dark habits of the monks and with the piles of dead figures on which it rests. Editha’s gesture of horror and distress is somewhat wooden and hackneyed. But the monk whose lifted face just shows in profile against his cowl has real drama. And the detail of the lifeless trailing fingers of Harold’s left hand is a touch of true observation. The next year, 1846, was a very busy one. Hook managed to send in a painting for the academy exhibition, The Controversy between Lady Jane Grey and Feckenham, a subject that he evidently chose himself. It may have been a kind of homage to his grandfather Adam Clarke’s staunchly Protestant stance on the doctrine of transubstantiation. For his own declaration, Hook chose to present Lady Jane Grey, the Protestant heroine, winning the argument against the Catholic Feckenham, who was sent to convert her. The lady wins the argument, but loses her head. It is a rare piece of polemic among Hook’s paintings. He still had his eye on the Travelling Studentship. Winning the gold medal for the best historical painting did not in itself guarantee the award, but it was a necessary qualification.54 To clinch the matter, Hook was required to produce a different painting, on a subject of his own choice. This time he reverted to a set topic for which he and his fellow students had already done studies, Rizpah Watching Over the Dead Sons of Saul (c. 1845–46). In the Second Book of Samuel is the account of David’s capitulation to the Gibeonites, who demand, in compensation for Saul’s slaughter of their people, seven of Saul’s sons. David surrenders them, and the Gibeonites hang them all. Rizpah, the mother of two of them, spreads sackcloth near the corpses, “and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest upon them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night.”55 Of the three related studies, this time I reproduce only Hook’s (see figure 2.11), which is certainly the most moving and dramatic treatment of this painful biblical subject (one that Alfred Tennyson too was to treat).56

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2.11 / Rizpah Watching Over the Dead Sons of Saul, c. 1845, study for the painting that won Hook the Travelling Studentship

Here again, as with the Harold subject, he had dead bodies and a grieving woman driven to heroic action. In the Bible, Rizpah’s story is over in a few verses, but Sophocles’s Antigone exploits the full tragedy on the cognate subject of a woman watching over the unburied bodies of her menfolk. Hook was not usually given to gloom. Once he was left to his own devices, he turned in general to cheerful subjects. But every young student is entitled to some periods of Byronic agony: and he was probably correct in assuming that high seriousness was called for in this competition. His entry for the Travelling Studentship had to be large and striking. The original is now lost to sight, but Stephens saw it, and his detailed description makes clear that many elements from the earlier study in watercolour, especially the dramatic use of light, were brought forward in this much more ambitious production:

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[The picture] is still preserved at Silverbeck, and in excellent condition, measuring nearly five feet high by seven feet long, and truly a surprising example to have been painted “by dint of early rising and very hard work” in a month ... The leading element, Rizpah – half-sitting, half-kneeling on the darkened plain, rears her body and bare shoulders, turning her face (with an intense expression of pain and weariness in watching) to our right – is duly emphasized. The effect of light has been carefully adapted to the sentiment of the design. Rizpah ... holds a heavy naked sword as a defence against the swooping birds which hover in the twilight of the scene.57 The picture was duly submitted, and also exhibited at the British Institution. And it won Hook the Travelling Studentship. The prize paid for three years’ travel abroad, and provided him with the chance to widen his horizons, acquaint himself with the cradle of Western art, study the masters, gather the confidence and sophistication that such experience affords, and confirm himself in his choice to be a historical painter.

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While Hook was developing professionally – establishing a reputation among his fellow students and with the academicians, exhibiting his paintings at the British Institution and the Royal Academy, and becoming financially independent through painting and selling portraits and copies of old masters – things were also progressing on the domestic front. Through his father’s letters from Sierra Leone, we know something of events in his family. And – although similar documentation is wanting – we learn that young Hook had fallen in love. Rosalie Burton, one of a numerous family, was the daughter of a London attorney, James Burton. She too was an art student, and attended Sass’s Academy – so her family was better off than the Hooks, which is hardly surprising given James Hook’s financial troubles. In the lightly tinted watercolour portrait that Hook made of her around this time, she looks bright and eager, ready to take on any challenge (see figure 2.12). We know very little of the training for women at Sass’s, but the fact that the male students in their reminiscences make no mention of female contemporaries suggests that the sexes were segregated. There were no life classes for either group at Sass’s, but the men could proceed to them when they entered the Royal Academy Schools, which in the 1840s were still barred to women. Considering the massive institutional resistance, even when women were admitted, to their taking the life classes, either with the male students or in a separate group, it seems likely that even drawing nude male statues from

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2.12 / Portrait of Rosalie Burton at the time of their marriage in 1846

the antique would have been frowned upon, if not forbidden.58 But Rosalie and Hook had to have met somewhere, and their son Allan believes that they met at the National Gallery, while they were both copying old masters – a standard exercise for students and a recognised means of making money by selling the copy.59 They met, it seems, in 1843, and became engaged. Hook’s father announced himself as “a great advocate for Gentlemen to marry as soon as ever they can ‘keep the Chimney smoking’”60 – but although Hook was prospering in reputation and had achieved a degree of independence from his family, he had yet to make enough to marry on. Winning the academy’s Travelling Studentship, however, would provide regular payment, plus whatever he could make for himself. And Rosalie too was ready to contribute towards an income by her own copying work. Back at the Hooks’ home at 4 Sidmouth Street, the large family presumably received regular remittances from James Hook in Sierra Leone, once he was established there in 1842, for although he was not rich, he was decently paid. “Now things at home are very different, and our proper rank and style maintained,” he wrote proudly early the next

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2.13 / Portrait of James Hook, 1846

year.61 He was building himself a house outside Freetown, and enjoying his status as “Laird” and property owner, even though his letters sometimes show disenchantment with “this fag-end of creation.”62 Aside from sorely missing his family and his sad sense of being an exile, James Hook seems to have taken satisfaction in his circumstances, and to have worked hard and effectively at his job as judge in cases of infringement of the ban on the slave trade. He was

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healthy and relatively prosperous. A fly in the ointment seems to have been his colleague and immediate superior, Melville. Though always guarded in writing about him, and warm in asking his family to be hospitable to him on his visit to England, one reads between the lines that Melville was a difficult colleague, and jealous about status. “Entre nous,” James Hook wrote to his son, “M is a ‘rum-un.’”63 With his eldest son well placed to build his career in art, James Hook looked to see how he could help the others. The next son, who was close to his brother, was John. And in 1844 John arrived in Sierra Leone to take up a job at £300 a year, as a translator to the courts. His father had urged him to gather a competence in Spanish and Portuguese before he arrived; “yet, out he came with his poco-poco acquaintance of either language however he has got a severe wigging from Melville and myself which seems to have roused him and he has a Master three times a week which I hope will enable him better to discharge his very important duties.”64 Later John got an appointment with “H.M.S. Customs,” and he seems to have been thriving. Arriving with John was James Hook’s brother Logan, with his wife and a daughter, Elizabeth. In fact, there seem to have been quite a cluster of Hooks in Freetown; and in due course, young Andrew Hook arrived too. James Hook was disappointed of his hope to get home in 1845; but in 1846 he was reunited with his beloved family, and introduced to Rosalie. Young Hook took time off painting Rizpah to do a portrait of his father (see figure 2.13). James Hook looks hale at fifty-nine, with hair only slightly receding, and a good set of whiskers (the Victorians had not yet taken wholesale to beards). His complexion looks fresh and English, so he must have stayed long enough to lose his African suntan. The conventional arrangement of curtain and pillar behind lends a certain formality to the composition; but the face is touched in with intimacy and affection. One hopes he arrived in London in time to hear the happy news that Rizpah had won the judges’ approval, and that James Clarke Hook had achieved the very blue ribbon of the schools, the Travelling Studentship. Great must have been the rejoicing. At last young James was in a way to “keep the Chimney smoking.” The requirement to launch upon the travel followed hard upon the announcement of the winner of the Travelling Studentship. Young James and Rosalie found themselves in a position to marry, and marry they did, in short order. Rosalie herself later recorded the event in the family Bible: “James Clarke Hook was married at the Church of St. George the Martyr, Queen Square, Bloomsbury, on 13th August 1846 to Rosalie, fifth daughter of James and Anne Burton of No. 3 Parvis Place, Queen Square.” Within days the honeymoon couple were headed for Paris, on their way to Florence.

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3 “ D E L I G H T E D AT THE THOUGHT OF B EI NG I N VEN I CE” Italian Sojourn, 1846–1848

“at an e ar ly hour we wok e,” wrote Rosalie Hook two days after Christmas in 1847,

“delighted at the thought of being in Venice. Our pleasure however was damped by seeing the rain falling fast.”1 The combination of delight and sobering experience was to be a recurring feature of the young Hooks’ extended working honeymoon in a land that was at once hauntingly familiar from literary descriptions and reproductions of art works, and strikingly new and strange. The Hooks’ sojourn in Italy is the most fully documented phase of Hook’s life, since his new wife, determined to retain all she could of this exciting experience, kept a diary that was as full and explicit as she could make it. Moreover, many sketches from Italy have survived, with notes and often with dates. Most of the diary has been preserved among family archives, and Hook’s early biographers, F.G. Stephens, A.H. Palmer, and Allan Hook, all had access to it and sometimes quoted from it. I have now published it, and in what follows I make free use of my edition. Rosalie is an engaging narrator. A trained artist herself, she has a fund of delight in the beautiful things and lively people around her, and an eye for character and picturesque detail, as when she wonders over the view of the Campagna on the approach to Rome, “such a blue distance! and such a variety of colour in the middle distance and foreground, and all in long straight lines. For hours we saw the St Peter’s, without seeing ... the city of Rome at all.”2 Her descriptions are often enlivened by humour and touches of irony. Watching High Mass in Rome, when the cardinals were called on to exchange “the kiss of peace,” she notes drily that “some of the Cardinals did not look at

all in a kissing humour.”3 When she and James are persuaded to go to see the “santissimo bambino,” a decorated wooden effigy of the Christ Child that was said to cure all kinds of diseases, she explains, they sloped off early, “as we happened to be in very good health at the time.”4 During the nighttime ascent of Mount Vesuvius on horseback, her mount was scorched by a torch, and “threw me neatly off. – I did not feel inclined to remount, as the road was somewhat dangerous to be thrown upon in such an unceremonious manner.”5 It is not every young bride who could joke about the indignity, not to mention the danger, of being thrown in such circumstances. As a young Protestant Englishwoman among excitable Catholic Italians, with their festivals and revolutionary enthusiasms, she does her best to overcome prejudice and respond warmly to this foreign culture. And though initially “understanding neither their money nor their language,”6 she learned to be at ease with napoleons, pauls, swanzingas, and other currencies, and ready to chat with the locals and to quote large chunks from her favourite Italian authors. James, one gathers, was less patient and less accommodating, and his Methodist background made him less tolerant of priests, Catholic services, and tourist traps. He did not accompany Rosalie and their travelling companions in attending the papal ceremonies in Rome at Easter. The two Hooks’ accounts of the Palazzo del Té are comically at variance. Rosalie, with Murray’s guidebook for tourists to hand, writes a conscientious description: “There is a great deal of taste displayed in the ornamenting of some of the rooms ... The room of the Giants [is] a very curious and grotesque representation of the Titans suffering from the wrath of Jupiter ... The unfortunate Giants ... are falling about ... and looking very pitiable and very comic at the same time.”7 James was not so respectful. He didn’t keep a diary, but on the same visit he dashed down in his sketchbook, “Palazzo del Té a regular imposition; lots of whitewash, gilding quite faded, and beastly fat figures in the most academic style possible. Room of the Giants regular stuff and nonsense.”8 During the two years of their trip, the Hooks were intrepid travellers. The railway boom was spreading tracks all over England during the 1840s, but in the summer of 1846, when they got married and crossed the channel, most vehicles on their route were still horse-drawn, and Rosalie’s sympathies for the overworked draught animals were often called upon. Rich and accustomed English travellers like John and Effie Ruskin would take their own carriage across the channel, ready-laden with their effects, and their courier would hire post horses along the way. But the Hooks, being students on a tight budget, would take tickets on the diligence, or public stagecoach, when they could get them, though these heavy vehicles were crowded both inside and above. As an example of their endurance: at Chambéry in Switzerland, they found all places on the diligence crossing the Alps were taken for the next four days; so they struck a bargain with a vetturino, the owner of a vehicle and horses who could be hired by a group for

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a particular journey. It was slower than the diligence, because the same horses did the work throughout, and they needed to be fed and rested. But the vetturino became responsible for providing accommodation along the way. On this occasion the Hooks were placed in the coupé, “which was not very comfortable for the Apron which fastened us down was of wood, and cramped us dreadfully.”9 On the three days of their journey, they left in the morning at 6:00, 4:00, and – before crossing the Mount Cenis pass – 2:00. Occasionally, they walked with the other passengers; and it was past 9:00 in the evening when they arrived at Turin – not surprisingly, “tired with three days’ rambling.”10 One of their fellow passengers, dressed so sprucely that they thought he might be an Italian count, discreetly offered his services as their courier. “This was my first intimation that in Italy English and rich mean the same,” wrote Rosalie.11 Far from being “Milords” with deep pockets, they felt he could more readily have employed them than they him. On the next diligence, crossing the Apennines between Turin and Genoa, their waggish conductor, “to set our minds at rest” as they swayed alongside a precipice, told them that “not long since the Diligence had swung right over and the Conductor and several passengers were killed.”12 Such were the entertainments along the way. In the summer of 1846, when they started, they had no idea that they were travelling to Italy at a time of increasing tension and upheaval, which was to come to a crisis two years later and drive them home. Briefly united under Napoleon, the many different states of Italy had been redivided at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and returned largely to their previous occupiers – in most cases, the Austrians. But the different states were becoming impatient, and the movement towards expelling the occupiers and the unification of Italy was gathering momentum even as the Hooks arrived. Without the benefit of historical hindsight, Rosalie was recording day-to-day events in the struggle, at street level as it were, and often without recognising their importance. The year of their arrival coincided with the appointment of the new pope, Pius IX – or “Pio Nono,” as he was known – who for once was a liberal pope (at least, at first) and not under the thumb of Klemens von Metternich and Austria. And the enthusiasm for him was to feed into the political agitation towards independence and unification. The two newly wed art students little knew that they were arriving just in the midst of the build-up to the turbulent revolution of 1848. But they were young, talented, and engaged in an exciting adventure. Moreover, the opportunity provided by the Travelling Studentship gave them an identity and a purpose beyond those of the tourist and traveller for pleasure. William Thackeray, who had been an art student himself in the 1830s, wrote memorably of the delights of the student’s life, especially in Italy. His protagonist Clive Newcome, he wrote, “will remember his Roman days as amongst the happiest which fate ever awarded him. The

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simplicity of the student’s life there, the greatness and friendly splendour of the scenes surrounding him, the delightful nature of the occupation in which he is engaged, the pleasant company of comrades ... make the Art-students the happiest of youth, did they but know their good fortune.”13 The Hooks too, though initially strangers, soon joined the artists’ communities in Florence and Rome, and they too fully enjoyed “the delightful nature” of their occupation as art students.

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Now to follow their travels more consecutively. Soon after their marriage at St George’s Chapel on 13 August 1846, where James’s father was happily present, the newlyweds crossed the channel to Boulogne. At Amiens their diligence was transferred to a railway carriage – a curious mix of travelling modes – and they journeyed by train overnight to Paris. In these first weeks of their honeymoon, they already set to work. Taking lodgings near the Arc de Triomphe, they went by day to the Louvre, where James copied a Titian portrait for a commission – copying old masters was a standard resource for young painters – and Rosalie sketched a Veronese. They visited Versailles and Fontainbleau, and they clearly enjoyed the street life of the Champs Elysées, and came to feel pleasantly at home in Paris, despite being there only about three weeks. On 8 September they set off on the three days’ journey by diligence to Geneva. They were placed near the conductor, a memorable character who had been a soldier under Napoleon. Allan Hook recorded, “Ah! he hated the English – he would like to conquer the country and extirpate the English – only he would make an exception in favour of these two, as he had taken a fancy to them ... If only Napoleon could have had railways, then indeed he would have conquered the world.”14 It was a phase of their travels that they long remembered. They arrived at Geneva tired with the journey, but stimulated by the splendid scenery. Here they settled for being ordinary tourists for a few days, taking out a rowing boat, and then boarding a steamer round the lake to “the Castle of Chillon, so immortalised by Byron,” which they found disappointingly insignificant in appearance.15 They decided to visit the Great St Bernard Pass, although for the actual crossing of the Alps, probably because they carried weighty artists’ luggage, the pair chose the Mount Cenis pass a few days later. Staunch pedestrians, they made the ten-mile journey to Orsières on foot, “James in a French blouse, grey hat, and with a knapsack, and I with an umbrella across my shoulder, on it slung my bag and shawl,” wrote Rosalie.16

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The historic route to the Great St Bernard Pass had been taken and described by many famous Englishmen and women, including Samuel Rogers, whose book-length poem Italy of 1830 was a favourite with John Ruskin as with Hook. And the famous St Bernard rescue dogs at the hostelry made it into Rogers’s poetic description: “Dogs of grave demeanor ... All meekness, gentleness, tho’ large of limb.”17 James and Rosalie were well read in these precedents, but they were determined to see for themselves and recognise, if not discover, what others had described before them. They heard the stories of the brothers lost in an avalanche, and they met the dogs. James sketched the dark little lake that Rogers wrote “lay like a spot of ink amid the snow”;18 and like Charles Dickens he visited the “house for the dead,” which held the bodies of those who had perished in the snow, including “a woman with her arms crossed, holding an infant in them.”19 Rosalie writes of “a piano of the tin kettle kind,” a gift to the hostelry from a visitor; and their monk host, having arranged for a fire so they could warm themselves after their chilly ride up on the mules, entertained them by playing on it.20 Another young couple, Ruskin (born in the same year as both Hooks) and his wife Effie, who was later to marry Hook’s friend and colleague John Everett Millais, made the same journey to the Great St Bernard Pass just a few years later, in 1851, and were similarly entertained on the same piano – on which Effie also played. But the Ruskins were several notches higher on the social and especially the financial scales than the Hooks, and Effie was not about to be impressed. “We all agreed the establishment was going to the dogs,” she wrote to her parents. “The place was filthily dirty, so were the dogs, and the smell was like a kennel. We got fleas and I was starved with cold.”21 Rosalie too suffered from the cold in the night – “my poor nose became so frozen that the skin peeled off and made me a fright for days” – but she had nothing but praise for their “kind Entertainer” the monk.22 Hardier and more energetic than Effie, she walked to Liddes, the farthest village with a road fit to take a vehicle, while Effie rode in a charabanc. When their night’s stay was done, James and Rosalie took the mules back to Liddes – James made a charming sketch in pen and wash of the descent (see figure 3.1) – before walking the thirteen miles to Martigny, and thence riding back to Geneva. Once in Turin, after their three-day journey by vettura, they caught a glimpse of the young prince, the Duc de Gènes, son of King Charles Albert, who was soon to take the lead in Italy’s bid for independence, and brother to Victor Emmanuel, who was finally to become the king of a united Italy in 1861. But the Hooks had no intimation of these stirring events of the future. From Turin they took the overnight diligence for Genoa, and then the steamer to “Leghorn,” as the English called the port of Livorno. (“I hope I may never have another tossing like this one in the Gulph of Spezia,” wrote

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3.1 / The return to Liddes from the Great St Bernard Pass, 1846

Rosalie fervently.)23 A final night on the diligence brought them on 26 September 1846 to Florence, where they were to make their first extended stay. Here they met G.F. Watts, whom Rosalie remembered from his student days as “a retiring thin youth.” In the warmth and culture of Italy, he had blossomed: “Now he had gained a foreign ease in his manner, wore a prodigious pair of mustachios and had a little of Don Quixote’s look about him.”24 He was on his way to becoming the revered “Signor” of later years. He was proud of his moustache, and painted a self-portrait in armour that showed it off and probably provided Rosalie with her Don Quixote analogy. He was staying at the Villa Orsi, as the guest of his patrons Lord and Lady Holland, and showed the Hooks the fresco he had made, which is still in place, depicting Lorenzo de Medici’s doctor being thrown down a well for failing to save his patient’s life. Thus initiated into the English artists’ community in Florence, they set about finding lodgings and a studio. A previous acquaintance, Eugenio Latilla, took them in hand, and they rented one of a nest of studios in Santa Barnaba, and ground-floor rooms opening onto a garden and a small terrace on the Arno. One supposes this would have been ideal, but it seems to have been an unhealthy spot, and James, who in later life was legendary for his hardiness, was often ailing. Moreover, as the winter set in, it poured with rain,

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3.2 / Portrait of Rosalie Hook, 1846–47

and the Arno threatened a flood. The waters reached halfway up their last step before subsiding. In November, they moved to the Via Larga, and James’s health improved. For sociability they exchanged visits with young Angelo Hayter, who had been a fellow student at the Royal Academy Schools, and now had lodgings that looked out on Santa Maria Novella; and they also formed a friendship with another young couple, the Scottish painter Robert McInnes and his wife.

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In the sketchbook given to James in his Newman Street days, there are plenty of drawings of Rosalie, including one full-length watercolour of her looking back from a chair (see figure 3.2). It was their honeymoon, after all. Rosalie was determined to teach herself Italian; and some of the sketches show her “Reading Benvenuto Cellini” in various more and less comfortable positions. She sketched too. One of James’s drawings shows her back view, on a balcony under a parasol, and provides a scrap of dialogue: “I’m drawing Giotto’s Tower.” James was inspired by the vivid light of Italy. In a note to one sketch of Rosalie, he reminds himself, “Sun shining on the wall making the most brilliant golden reflections under the chin, nose, lips and arm.” They were hard at more formal work too. Rosalie was supplementing their income by doing copies of Titian’s Flora (1517) and The Holy Family with a Shepherd (1510) at the Uffizi, and James was studying Fra Angelico and Ghirlandaio. In the studio he worked on the picture he was required to submit for the next spring’s academy exhibition. He had yet to clap eyes on Venice; but he chose a subject from The Merchant of Venice – the one that had been set in the schools for him and his fellow students Frederick Pickersgill and William Frost – and sent Bassanio Commenting on the Caskets (1847). Stephens tells us that Rosalie did duty as a model, and appeared as one of the female musicians, playing a lute. The picture fetched £150, not a bad price for that day, which no doubt eased the Hook pocket somewhat.25 An incident that stood out in Rosalie’s memory from their first sojourn in Florence was an encounter with the Misericordia, the band of volunteers who in an emergency – signalled by a bell – donned black robes, went to the site of the accident, and carried the victims “to their home, the hospital, or the grave.” She recorded, “We had not been long in Florence when one evening, as we were walking home from the Studio and chatting merrily, we suddenly met the sable troop of the Misericordia – not jabbering Ave Marias like those who carry the Dead to their graves but in silence, their faces covered, and bearing torches, and six supporting the shell or bier on which the body was laid. The effect was very solemn, and we forgot our laugh in the interest they created.”26 Less like passing tourists and more like residents, the young English couple could now respond in kind to the customs and ceremonies that surrounded them.

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Once Hook’s painting was safely dispatched for England, with plenty of time in hand, they were in holiday mood, and ready for further travel and sightseeing. For their journey to Rome and Naples, they were clearly better prepared than they had been for the hit-or-miss travels between Paris and Florence. They arranged to travel by vettura to

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3.3 / “Baccano Inn,” 3 March 1847

Rome with Hayter and the McInneses. It was February, the winter not over, and as they gained altitude, often supplementing horsepower with oxen, they encountered snow and ice. So they proceeded for several days – riding, walking, and sightseeing – through Arezzo, Perugia, and Assisi. Rosalie was a conscientious sightseer; she proceeded with her Murray’s guidebook to hand, and recorded her impressions of churches, pictures, people, and the countryside. And the company of artists were often sketching; James’s sketch of the “Baccano Inn” dates from this trip (see figure 3.3). Their vetturino’s horses were not up to the long journey: the party ascended the Apennines with the help of oxen, but coming down, the horses were in trouble: “Suddenly down went one of these poor wretches. – He seemed dead for some time, and we began to wonder what we should do next ... Happily a beautiful moon lighted us; – and after a time the horse recovered. The Vetturino declared he had only fainted, as any Christian might have done. And we moved slowly on.”27

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By the time they were approaching Rome across the Campagna, these poor Christian horses were clearly on their last legs, and had to be lashed, “poor wretched creatures.”28 The party’s entry into the Eternal City was anything but triumphal. As the friends had travelled through the Papal States, they had heard flattering accounts of the Pope’s popularity, and were often confronted by signs reading “Viva Pio IX liberatore!”29 After the death of Pope Gregory XVI, the College of Cardinals, to forestall an essentially Austrian appointment, had managed to appoint their own choice in only two days, and Pius IX earned his title as Liberator by declaring an amnesty for the many political prisoners from the time of his predecessor. Once they were in Rome, the Hooks had a vivid example of the hatred for the previous pope, and the popularity of the new: “At dinner the Waiter gave me in change a paul with the head of Gregory XVI on it. It was nearly defaced by some scraping it had suffered. “‘There,’ he said, ‘I serve all his coins so – because I hate the man – he condemned me for political reasons to 20 years imprisonment. – 3 were passed when he died – and the new Pope released [me].’”30 So the Hooks’ presence in the Holy City at this first Easter of the new pope placed them at a historical moment of great interest. After his liberal beginnings, Pio Nono, during his long papacy (still the longest on record), was to turn reactionary, and gather enemies of his own, including many in England; but for now he could do no wrong. Even Rosalie warmed to him. At the Palm Sunday ceremonies, she relates, “He is very mild and kind in his expression, and kept his eyes down with something of timidity. I was amused at a man near, who seemed the leader of a political group, crying out as the Pope passed, ‘Non temete, Pio, siamo tutti con voi!’” (“Don’t worry, Pius, we’re all on your side!”).31 In Rome, as Rosalie records, the group of artists set up housekeeping together. “We took some [apartments] at last in the Via dei Macelli, neither remarkable for cleanliness nor comfort. However as a party we laughed at little inconveniences and were merry enough – Mrs McInnes taking the housekeeping in hand, and calling on contributions from each. We had one common balcony leading to all the rooms.”32 In fact, they became part of the English artists’ sub-community in Rome, as Thackeray described it: “the broad-hatted, long-bearded, velvet-jacketed, jovial colony of the artists, who have their own feasts, haunts, and amusements.”33 James was indeed equipped with a “grey Charles 2nd hat and velvet loose coat,” so he fitted the pattern.34 James was sometimes ill in Rome, but he got to work making “elaborate sketches of Michaelangelo and Raphael, omitting no observations which could strengthen his knowledge of style and dignified expression,” wrote Stephens.35 He and Rosalie often went sketching together – for instance, in the Borghese Gardens, where he did a charming drawing of Rosalie as she sketched. And, being in Rome, they visited the studios of John Gilbert, the eminent sculptor and academician, and his neighbour Richard Wyatt,

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who were both completing works for the Royal Academy exhibition. Their company of artists was sometimes joined by James Uwins and G.F. Watts. As Easter approached, Rosalie, Hayter, and the McInneses became spectators at the papal celebrations. This too was a tried and true spectacle for English visitors. “The ancient city of the Caesars, the August fanes of the Popes, with their splendour and ceremony, are all mapped out and arranged for English diversion,” Thackeray noted drily; “and we run in a crowd to high mass at St. Peter’s, or to the illumination on Easter Day, as we run when the bell rings to ... the fireworks at Vauxhall.”36 Sure enough, Rosalie and her friends went eagerly to High Mass, watched the Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, and Easter celebrations at St Peter’s, and saw the illuminations from a distance; and Rosalie conscientiously commented on the vestments and rituals, not without some predictable Protestant reaction. “The Ceremony I could hardly imagine a religious one,” she wrote of the Palm Sunday occasion. “It seemed so much more like a pantomime.”37 James usually absented himself from these occasions. Rosalie at least was sorry to leave Rome and its charms: “We had worked very hard at sight-seeing, and yet we might have seen on for ever almost: there seems no end of the treasures of the City.”38

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After some six weeks in Rome, the same party – the Hooks, the McInnises, and Hayter – left on 16 April 1847, with the addition of James Uwins (son of the academician Thomas Uwins, who also painted Italian scenes). As before, they travelled by vettura, this time to Naples. There, like other tourists, they spent time at Pompeii and Herculaneum (the latter still only partially excavated), and visited the museum, Virgil’s house, and the associated classical sites. But their principal adventure was their nighttime trip up Mount Vesuvius to view the volcano in eruption. Dickens had made this trip too, and a most amusing account of it he gives in Pictures from Italy (1846). There he describes ascending with the head guide, Salvatore, and a crowd of vociferous locals. Their party consists of Dickens himself, a “Mr. Pickle from Portici,” two ladies carried on litters by six men each, and “a rather heavy gentleman from Naples,” who is carried by no less than fifteen men.39 Dickens’s ascent is made in winter, with snow underfoot and ice covering the steep cone; and after his risky excursion to look right over the lip of the crater – from which he returns with his “dress alight in half a dozen places” from the falling cinders – the steep descent over ice becomes a major hazard.40 The walkers are “constantly alarmed by the falling among us of somebody from behind, who endangers the footing of the whole party, and clings pertinaciously to anybody’s

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ankles.”41 They are also terrified lest the rather heavy gentleman with his fifteen litterbearers should roll over all of them like a juggernaut. Mr Pickle of Portici, as Dickens relates, does indeed fall, and “plunges away head foremost, and rolls, over and over, down the whole surface of the cone!”42 He is shaken, but fortunately sustains no major injury. The ascent of the Hook party was on 20 April, some three years later than Dickens’s, and Rosalie’s account can’t compete with his; but it has its own picturesque appeal. The same head guide, Salvatore, officiated again, and their party, like Dickens’s, ascended at nighttime to catch the full effect of the molten lava in the darkness: The road was very rough and stony, but our horses picked their way very cleverly. How I wished I could paint the scene ... In front rode James in his grey Charles 2nd hat and velvet loose coat; a man dragged himself by the tail of James’s horse, and another carried a torch and cloaks; before us smoked the mountain, which gave us every now and then a volume of fire – a stream of fire was quietly rolling down the side of it – 5 feet wide at the top and 50 at the foot ... Behind me was quite another scene: Mr Hayter and Mr Uwins following with men and torches, and the moon setting beautifully over the Town of Naples.43 Hardier than the ladies in Dickens’s party, who were carried up on litters, Rosalie – after her horse threw her – walked up the steep cone, though holding onto a strap; and she was duly rewarded with a spectacular sight: “There was something awful and mysterious in the scene. The burning mass of lava looked frightful, so wide and red: and now and then came rolling slowly down large masses of lava, large enough to crush a poor mortal in an instant – then with a great rumbling noise came the shower of cinders.” With remarkable sangfroid, the party, while they waited for daylight to make the descent, “threw [their] cloaks on a warm cinder, and slept quietly till daylight.”44 It seems amazing that tourists could be so regularly taken up the mountain while it was in eruption. But Dickens’s and Rosalie’s accounts, besides many others, testify to a flourishing trade for Salvatore and his followers. Before they left, however, Hook wanted a souvenir. He tried embedding a silver coin in a piece of lava, but it simply melted and flowed away. The copper coin that he tried next, on a cooler piece of lava, was successfully embedded, and Hook’s son Allan relates that this memento of the ascent was always preserved in their home – along with the medals Hook had won at the Academy Schools. The Hooks of course had read Dickens’s account of Vesuvius in Pictures from Italy before they made their own ascent – as had, probably, almost every English traveller of the period. And they stayed in Italy long enough to learn the identities of more of the characters in Dickens’s account. A few months later, when they were back in Florence,

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they met “a Mr. Ridway from Naples, the same whom Dickens describes in his account of ascending Vesuvius as ‘the fat gentleman.’ He told us the man Dickens calls ‘Mr Pickle of Portici’ is a Mr Le Gros, who did in reality, from a little too much confidence in his legs, roll down the mountain side as described.”45 Editors of Pictures from Italy have discovered that Mr Pickle was indeed a Mr Le Gros, but the identity of the rather heavy gentleman as Mr Ridway of Naples is revealed only by Rosalie. For the return journey from “this charming Naples” to Florence, the Hooks took ship for Livorno, leaving “Mr Hayter disconsolate on the shore.”46 From there they took a train for Pisa, and arrived in a mere twenty minutes. But the railway had not reached Florence yet, and their journey from Pisa to Florence was overnight on the diligence. The contrast between the new mode of transport and the old must have struck them forcibly.

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For this second long stay in Florence, they decided to live at the studio – “the first little room as sitting room, then the studio, the loggia, and 2 other small rooms”47 – only supplementing the space by renting a separate bedroom on the floor above. They now felt more at home in Florence, and no doubt it helped that they had the summer months before them, instead of the cold soggy winter they had endured before. They took to early hours in order to make the most of the cool of the day. Rosalie obtained permission to copy a painting in the Pitti Palace, presumably a commission, The Marriage of St Catherine, for which she was allowed six weeks. While she was at work, on one occasion the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II himself, paused to comment on her painting. It was like an encounter with royalty, and Rosalie was both impressed and amused. She took a peek at his lunch as it was carried by in handsome silver dishes – “raspberries, currants, sponge cakes, artichokes, and slices of bread and butter” – and commented in mock surprise, “Why, he eats just as others do!”48 James went to work on a subject from Florentine history, a romantic medieval episode of the Emperor Otho IV choosing a bride, Gualdrada, from Giovanni Villani’s Chronicles. This time he wasn’t recycling a topic from his training at the schools, but making the most of his current surroundings and their associations. And since Villari had not yet been translated into English, he must have been reading the chronicles in Italian. Both Hooks were often sketching, and the Italy Sketchbook is full of recognisable bits of Florence: the Boboli Gardens and its statues, Dante’s house, the fountain in Piazza Annunciata, the staircase at the Bargello (then called the Palace of the Magisteria) (see figure 3.4), and “that house of the Donati” – complete with a quotation from Rogers’s Italy (1830).

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3.4 / The staircase at the Bargello, Florence, 20 August 1847

During this phase of their travels, an acquaintance that ripened into friendship was with Richard Hoppner. Hoppner was the son of the famous portrait painter and academician John Hoppner, and was himself highly cultured. He had been the British consul in Venice at the time of Lord Byron’s stay there. Byron had been a close friend, and he had also known Byron’s associates Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. He and his wife Isabelle had taken care of Byron’s daughter Allegra. His conversation was fascinating to the Hooks. Like the conductor who had fought for Napoleon, the Hoppners provided these young Victorians with a connection to the great figures of the past. Allan Hook records that years later, in old age, Hoppner wrote an affectionate letter from his last home in France to the painter who had become famous since their pleasant association in Florence.49

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On the same day that the cannons announced the birth of a son to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Hook’s sister Mary Noorouz was married to his friend and fellow student Frederick Pickersgill. The couple were often to host the Hooks in London in later years.50 But Florence in these days was frothing with excitement for more reasons than a new heir to the Grand Duke. “There is some little disturbance in the Town,” Rosalie wrote on 25 August 1847. “The people are calling out for a national Guard in imitation of the guard at Rome. The young men assemble every evening in front of the Duke’s palace and remain very late, crying ‘Guardia Civica.’”51 The creation of a national guard was recognised as a preliminary step towards getting a constitution, and as progress towards eventual self-government and freedom from Austrian rule. Pio Nono had granted a guard in Rome on 14 March 1847, a date marked in national histories of Italy; and any gain in the Papal States was sure to be considered a precedent for other states. Presently, as Rosalie wrote on 4 September, the Grand Duke granted the guard, and great were the rejoicings. The warm Italian temperament was manifested in an outpouring of enthusiastic gratitude for each concession; and on Sunday, 12 September, a day of glorious memory for Italy, the Florentines and other cities of Tuscany staged a grand procession. It was a splendid affair, and the Hooks were invited by their friend Latilla to view it from his windows on the Via Maggiore. Marching in the procession were representatives of the different nations in Florence (the English, French, Germans, Americans, and others); the many professions and trades, with flags bearing their emblems, such as a palette for painters, and so on; and members of the different city states within Tuscany (Livorno, Siena, Arezzo, and others). The Hooks and their friends watched the enthusiastic demonstrations by those in the procession. “They very often rushed out of their ranks to kiss on each cheek the men on each side,” Rosalie wrote, “and the whole town rang with their noisy vivas and rejoicings ... Viva la liberta! Viva Leopoldo Secondo! Viva Pio Nono! Viva l’Italia! ... The soldiers came in for a large share of embraces: ‘Siamo fratelli tutti!’ [‘We’re all brothers!’] was the cry.”52 Not far away, in Casa Guidi near the Pitti Palace, poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning were watching the same scene, and Elizabeth at least was carried away with shared enthusiasm: Rude men, unconscious of the tears that kept Their beards moist, shouted, some few laughed aloud, And none knew why they laughed or wept;

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Friends kissed each other’s cheeks, and foes long vowed More warmly did it ... O heaven! I think that day had noble use Among God’s days ...53 The Hooks didn’t involve themselves so fully in the matter, and a few days later they were off on a day’s sketching excursion to Fiesole with their fellow artists. “No people make better company that artists,” wrote Allan Hook, who ought to know.54 Rosalie affords a vivid glimpse of a certain Colonel B and his wife, who were of the party: “The stout Colonel was dressed in his summer costume, brown holland suit, buff shoes, green spectacles and green umbrella. – His wife too carried a green umbrella, and had on her other arm a huge basket containing turkey and ham etc, which she insisted on carrying all the way herself ... The sun was very powerful, but our walk by easy stages was very agreeable, and the view of Florence from the height full payment for all fatigue.”55 The party split up in Fiesole to do their sketching, refreshed themselves with the grapes and figs that dangled within reach, ate their picnic, compared their work, and once back in Florence, spent the evening together. Clearly, they were living up to Thackeray’s description of the delights of the artist’s life in Italy. There were other such jaunts to the countryside, and to the grape harvest. The Italy Sketchbook contains sketches done on walks with Hoppner. James and Rosalie took a brief trip to Siena, and admired the cathedral, though clearly they were not as well informed on Siena’s early masters as on those of the High Renaissance. While the English art community were enjoying themselves, the local population were still restless and excitable. Somebody got hold of a list of suspected spies, and among the names was one Giuseppina, a flower girl who distributed flowers to visitors in hope of tips. The enraged crowd went in pursuit of her, and she took refuge in a church. The monks there were willing to give her safe haven, but not indefinitely; so they called on the Misericordia, who, in a rescue worthy of the Scarlet Pimpernel, disguised her as a corpse, and carried her to safety on a bier. Rosalie records the incident in October 1847. Thirty years later, in 1877, when the Hooks returned with their sons to Florence, James saw and recognised the very woman, and spoke to her, as Allan Hook records: “‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I am that Giuseppina.’ And then they talked of those old times and of the year the Italians were always ready to talk about, ’48.”56 The Hooks were in the thick of a stirring historical era.

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In November they started for Venice, but with plans adaptable enough that they could linger wherever they liked. As they left Florence in the early hours of the morning, two members of the new Guardia Civica were on duty. “They looked very cold and miserable,” Rosalie wrote, “and now that service is required of them, it seems that all these valiant men seek some excuse to save themselves from these early risings and interruptions to their occupations.”57 Rosalie thought the whole upheaval was fizzling out. She was wrong. During their two days in Bologna, the Hooks were daunted to hear that the diligence to Parma, which they planned to take the next day, had been stopped on the road and robbed. The passengers were unhurt, but thoroughly scared. The Hooks proceeded nonetheless; and though they had their passports examined no less than ten times as they crossed in and out of the various territories of the Papal States, the journey passed without further incident. In Parma they lingered to examine Correggio’s paintings in the church and cathedral, and among his many murals they particularly admired his Saint Jerome. Like Dickens and other tourists, they were dismayed at the crumbling state of Correggio’s work; but unlike them, they could do something about it. They decided to stay a month, and work at making copies – of the Saint Jerome, his Madonna della Scodella (c. 1530), and other paintings in the Accademia di Belle Arti. They found themselves lodgings, and launched on the work. The accademia was unheated, and so cold in December that no local artists came. Hardy students as they were, the Hooks kept at the work, and Rosalie bought herself a scaldino, a miniature stove that she could fill with live charcoals at the fire and keep under her skirt as she worked. The copying at this stage was more than just an exercise – more too than an effort to preserve a record of the deteriorating frescoes. For James at least, this process of reproduction was a training and an inspiration, and his management of the materials was developing skills that would last him a lifetime. He was soon to pursue the same occupation in Venice. In Parma too the Hooks had their brush with history. When they gathered around the fire with the other lodgers in their building, the usual subjects of conversation, Rosalie records, were “Napoleon’s career or Pio Nono’s fame or the difference between the Protestant and Roman Catholic religion, which the Priests [their fellow lodgers] discuss with great spirit.”58 James’s participation would undoubtedly have been just as spirited. The subject of Napoleon was close to the hearts of the Parma citizens, for their grand duchess was the Empress Marie Louise, Napoleon’s second wife, the mother of his only son, and the daughter of Francis II, the previous emperor of Austria. When Italy was redivided after Napoleon, she was granted the Duchy of Parma. The day the Hooks

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3.5 / Sketch in Parma, 1847

started work at the Accademia di Belle Arti, they saw her pass from her palace. (“She was dark and not very good-looking,” wrote Rosalie.)59 But while the Hooks were in Parma, this relic of Napoleon’s era was stricken ill. Before they left, she had died, and they were invited to view her lying in state. “Maria Louisa was lying on a bed dressed in white silk, her crown at her feet,” wrote Rosalie.60 It was the end of an era for the citizens of Parma – and likewise the end of the Hooks’ stay.

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Travel at Christmastime, in bitter winter weather, was not easy, and the Hooks found that the diligence was full. However, they managed to get alternative transport to Guastalla, and thence, in deep snow, to Mantua. Here, ominously, they found the town “full of Austrian soldiers.”61 They spent Christmas day in Verona, and fell into the tourist trap

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of visiting what was purported to be Juliet’s tomb. On the same evening, they had to take the omnibus overnight to Vicenza. Now, at last, they could travel by train, first to Padua and then on to Venice. “We jumped into a gondola, which soon carried us to our Inn, the Vapore.”62 They must have been exhausted, but Rosalie never complains. Although they did not yet know it, the Hooks were nearing the end of their stay in Italy – they had only January, February, and March in Venice – but in many ways, this time was the most important for James, and provided the most lasting legacy for his career. The weather remained cold and wet. When they looked out in excitement on their first morning, wrote Rosalie, “We could see nothing but water above and below.”63 Perhaps it was the Venice impress that lasted through Hook’s career, for “water ... below,” at least, pertains in the majority of his paintings. The sea, of course, was to dominate his work from 1856 onward; but even his landscapes nearly always have a body of water in them, with translucence and gleaming surfaces. He came to depend on a light source below as well as above, as there is in Venice with its lagoon and reflecting canals. They took lodgings in Corte Minelli, near the Venice theatre (now the Teatro La Fenice) in “a very large house kept by a French lady and let out in apartments to foreigners, principally Artists, as it is very conveniently situated between the Piazza and the Academy.”64 And they allowed themselves some shopping pleasures. A swift sketch of Rosalie shows her modelling a recent purchase: “After tea Rose trying on the bit of green stuff we bought at S. Paulo Venice. Capital effect,” James wrote alongside it. They saw the usual sights, going into San Marco, the Doge’s Palace, the Scuola San Rocco, and many churches, as well as crossing the Grand Canal on the Rialto. As artists, they were more informed and better qualified than the average tourist to receive lasting impressions. And they made it their business, as in Parma, to go daily to the Accademia di Belle Arti. Here James was receiving strong inspiration from studying and copying certain prominent Venetian painters – particularly Carpaccio, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Bonifacio (see figure 3.6). Allan Hook recorded that James made three studies from Tintoretto’s splendid Miracle of Saint Mark (1548) in the accademia, and kept them for immediate reference in his studio in later years.65 The vigorous action, striking gesture, and bold foreshortening, as well as the colour and management of lighting effects, were to be features he could cultivate in his own historical paintings, and later in the expressive figures of his fishermen and women. Still in the family are a number of his small oil sketches of parts of many other Venetian paintings, tossed off in the heat of admiration, including swift small versions of Tintoretto’s paired nudes, Adam and Eve (1578) and Cain and Abel (1553), and a number of small studies of groups and individual figures from Carpaccio’s Arrival of the English Ambassadors (1495) and other paintings in the accademia.

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3.6 / Quick impressions from Venetian masters in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, including Tintoretto’s Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and details from Carpaccio’s Arrival of the English Ambassadors, 1848

Typically, Hook was not interested in the religious or devotional aspects of a painting. When he chose to extract small sections of a picture, they were pieces of genre, figures in contemporary dress engaged in some temporal activity – paying court to a local dignitary, carrying a baby, or waiting on the sidelines of a crowd. These brief quotations were not so much conscientiously exact replicas as hasty notes towards committing them to memory, and also meant to demonstrate to himself, “I can do this, too.” He dashed them off in half a day. A.H. Palmer had the opportunity to discuss this work with Hook himself: “[He] attributes not a little of his appreciation of colour to this early and earnest study of Venetian masters. ‘The sketches I made ... of the finest Venetian pictures, taught me more than anything – they taught me the material.’”66 Both the rich colouring of the Venetian masters and their mastery of light and shade were to become staples of his own work. Hook’s frequent choice of Carpaccio is revealing. Although Carpaccio often painted religious subjects, his focus was practical and down-to-earth. The serene contemplation of one saint, though standing next to another who may be stuck full of arrows or carrying his own skin, was not for him. Carpaccio, however, brought a realistic eye to such manifestations. When Saint Jerome turns up with his lion, as in St Jerome and the Lion (1502), Carpaccio shows the monks in full flight, as from a very real wild beast. Such practicality would have appealed to Hook, who liked to think of his figures as downto-earth, and made of flesh and blood, for all their human dignity. While Hook in Venice was drinking in inspiration, developing his vision, and honing his grasp of materials, revolution was brewing. Rosalie got her politics at street level. A severe cold kept her home from the freezing accademia for a few days, and she chatted with the servant Antonia, a Venetian married to a Hungarian whose son “is almost an Austrian and settled somewhere in Austria. Accordingly Antonia’s politics were rather unsettled, and divided between the Austrians and Italians, who are greatly at variance just now.”67 That was an understatement. Presently, Rosalie recorded that the Carnival, usually such a feature of Venice in February, was not happening, and that Italians were boycotting the theatre and the promenade at San Marco. “Now the ladies refuse to listen to Austrian music, and when the band makes its appearance the company walk to their homes.”68 Soldiers arrived from Croatia to shore up the Austrian forces, and “the poor Venetians looked very down-hearted at the sight of more troops.”69 Tensions mounted. When the Austrians forbade the sale of portraits or other mementoes of the pope, the people declared they would buy nothing else. With no customers, the shopkeepers closed early to save on gas lighting; next the police were called to force the shopkeepers to stay open.70 Even James, sympathetic as he was to the Italian cause, got into trouble. While he was sketching a street scene – two girls laughing at

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3.7 / Revolution: Venice, 1848, 1848

the antics of an ape – someone shouted that he was taking likenesses. The crowd turned on him as a spy, and he had to beat a hasty retreat.71 The fall of Klemens von Metternich, the powerful chancellor of Austria, on 13 March was hailed as an opportunity, and riots broke out all over Italy and elsewhere in Europe. During the famous Five Days of Milan, the Milanese rose against the Austrian occupiers; and despite the superior forces against them, succeeded in driving the Austrians out. Charles Albert, the king of Piedmont and Savoy, mustered a liberation army. And in Venice on 22 March, “a never-to-be-forgotten day in Venetian history,”72 the arsenal was seized, the tricolour flew in Piazza San Marco, and Daniele Manin proclaimed a republic. Hook made a quick sketch in oil of a fierce Italian, which he called Revolution, Venice, 1848 (see figure 3.7). The excitement was intense. When the Hooks had first gone to work at the accademia, Rosalie had described the statue atop the building as “a personification of Venice sitting on the Lion – under her the arms of Austria.”73 Now the accademia was closed, and she saw “men chipping out the arms” there.74 The same thing had happened in St Mark’s Square. James wrote in a notebook, “22nd March, 1848. Saw the Venetians cut down

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the colours and arms of Austria from San Marco and carry them in triumph to throw them into the sea. ‘Viva Italia! ... Viva la Republica!’”75 According to Stephens, Hook, “a Liberal to the heart, and on every ground deeply interested in Italian liberty,” himself participated in the upheaval.76 He was always on the side of the underdog, whether it was Methodists, working people, or Italians suffering foreign occupation. Again it is interesting to contrast the sympathies of John and Effie Ruskin, who came to Venice in 1849, just a year after the Hooks had left. Ruskin had deferred his wedding trip to Savoy and Venice because of the revolution, but by 1849 Joseph Radetzky had defeated Charles Albert, a treaty between them had returned Milan and Venice to the Austrians, and the revolution had collapsed. Effie, particularly, who enjoyed moving in high society, was delighted by the Austrians, whom she found to be “kind and good-tempered and so eminently well-bred.”77 Naturally enough, since she moved in Austrian society, she took her opinions from them: “The contempt the Austrians have for them [the Italians] is wonderful and really deserved,” she concluded.78 She took it for granted that Italians were “degraded” from the great race of the Renaissance,79 and she had no sympathy for Italian aspirations for unification and self-government. “Every town in Italy dislikes the other,” she wrote. “How is such a country fit to govern itself?”80 Rosalie frequently deplored the ignorance of Italians she met, but neither she nor Hook ever patronised them to this extent, nor considered that they deserved “contempt.” For all their sympathy for the Italian cause, however, James and Rosalie found that Venice was becoming too hot to hold them. The accademia was closed, and foreigners were flooding out by any means they could find. Returning to England overland, as they had come, seemed impracticable, as in 1848 revolution was breaking out all over Europe, and even in England the Chartists were raising fears that revolution might be imminent there too. At Mudie’s Library, the Hooks were warned of “the dangers of the road.”81 The British consul-general, Clinton Dawkins, offered to find them places with him on a steamship, but he had no idea when one would be available. In this extremity, they took passage as promptly as they could in a small English sailing vessel with the picturesque name of the White Mouse, under the command of a Captain Dichem. Rosalie shopped for supplies for the voyage, including poultry; and they boarded on 30 March.

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Their troubles were not over. Initially becalmed for several days, they could see and hear the Austrian guns firing on Venice. Even once a fair breeze sent them “spinning down the Adriatic,”82 they were alternately torn by gales and stuck in a calm. The chickens were washed overboard, the longboat was stove in, and they almost lost the ship’s boat

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3.8 / Rosalie on board the White Mouse, Mediterranean, May 1848

too. Supplies ran short, and the grubs that had boarded with the previous cargo of raisins from Smyrna added to the discomforts. A bad sailor, Rosalie was constantly seasick. They were toiling through the Mediterranean for more than five weeks. In one relatively leisurely interval towards the end of their trying voyage, James drew Rosalie in an unconventional pose. Sitting cross-legged on the deck, her bonneted head bowed, she tries to write as the wind plucks at the pages of her notebook (see figure 3.8). It is the only image that we have of life aboard the White Mouse. Because of their emergency departure, they still owed something for their passage; and when they finally reached Gibraltar, the captain refused to allow both of them

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ashore at once until the full bill was paid. Fortunately, James was able to find a distant connection in Gibraltar who was ready to advance some money towards what remained of their fares, and James pawned his watch for the rest. Now, at last, Rosalie was able to escape to shore; and they were heartily glad to see the White Mouse sail out of port without them. In Gibraltar they were obliged to stay while they wrote home to get money for the voyage to England, and permission from the Royal Academy (given the circumstances) to end the Travelling Studentship one year early. Their health had suffered, and they needed the rest. For the final part of their travels, they took the steamship Madrid, and thoroughly enjoyed the relative luxury of the accommodation on board, including free champagne with the Sunday meal. They had certainly earned it. In his Newman Street Sketchbook, next to a pencil sketch from Gibraltar, James scribbled, “We had had enough of travelling and so returned home ... going ashore at Cadiz and Lisbon ... A good stiff breeze across the Bay of Biscay ... Got up in the morning: Bravo! the cliffs of old England in sight ... Landed Southampton ten o’clock. Clean bed!!!”

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4 “WRAPT UP IN V E N ET I A N C O LO R I N G ” History Painter, 1848–1854

e x a sper ated by a longer than usual silence of his firstborn, James Hook wrote to Rosalie

from Sierra Leone, “I suppose he’s so wrapt up in Venetian coloring (entre nous I first gave him the idea) that he forgets everyone but Othello and Desdemona Portia &c.”1 The letter is undated, but the mention of Shakespeare’s Venetian subjects suggests it was some time in 1849. James Clarke Hook had exhibited Bassanio Commenting on the Caskets from The Merchant of Venice at the Royal Academy of Arts two years earlier, but that was a subject from his student assignments, and he had yet to see Venice itself, or to study its masters. In 1849, however, at the first exhibition after his return from Venice, he exhibited Othello’s First Suspicion, showing Othello crumpled in the agony of jealousy, and a concerned Desdemona tenderly ministering to him. The colouring is rich and resonant, with shades of gold and red predominating, a patterned marble floor, and an arched balcony behind. The Venetian colouring evokes Veronese and Carpaccio as well as the Moor of Venice. And there was soon to be another subject from The Merchant of Venice, with The Defeat of Shylock, showing Portia confronting Shylock, with other identifiable dramatis personae, all colourfully clad, participating in the moment. Perhaps Hook had told his father about it. But by the time it was exhibited in 1851, James Hook had died, still an “exile” in Sierra Leone.

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No doubt the son felt a pang of guilt that he had not written more frequently to his father, who had indeed been admirably supportive of his choice to become a painter. Although not in general given to collecting and organising archives, young James carefully preserved his father’s letters from Sierra Leone, and they are still in the family.

There is indeed some pathos in the end of James Hook’s career. After the euphoria of his appointment as a commissioner of arbitration in cases of the infringement of the act abolishing the slave trade, with his delight in his judge’s robes and in the invitation from the Prince de Joinville, James Hook had a lot to put up with. For one thing, there was the dangerous climate of Sierra Leone. Here, as he wrote to Rosalie’s father, James Burton, “the rays of a vertical sun, during eight months of the year, almost burn up our imaginative powers, and in the other four months, one would think that ‘the bottles of heaven’ were opened upon us poor deluged Bipeds.”2 However, he and his brother Logan and sons John and Andrew seemed for a while to be blessed with immunity from the many diseases that plagued the whites in Sierra Leone. There were other troubles too. His brother Logan had been a collector of customs in 1827, and later also became a commissioner and a judge in the Court of the Royal Commission. But in September 1849, he got into money difficulties, lost six thousand pounds, and “died of a broken heart,” wrote his brother.3 Perhaps he committed suicide. James Hook’s senior in the court, one Mr Melville, the first commissary judge, was hard to get along with, and seems to have left much of his work to his subordinates. By the middle of 1847, James Hook was explaining that although Melville had all but retired, he needed to hang on another nine months to get his pension, so he had returned to be a nominal judge. “This keeps me out of several hundred pounds a year for nine months longer,” the acting judge complained.4 In due course, when Melville did at last retire and depart, James Hook made formal application for his job; and several of his junior colleagues likewise applied for promotions all along the line. Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, the foreign secretary at this time, loftily asked his subordinate, “Is there any necessity for fill[ing] up this appointment at all? and who and what is this Applicant?”5 The subordinate answered to the best of his ability, backing up Hook’s claims about the number of cases he had judged, and added that “Mr. Hook is known to be a Person most zealous in the Cause of the Abolition both of the Slave Trade and Slavery.” Mr Hook had occasionally “shown want of temper and Discretion in certain Quarrels and differences ... between him and Mr. Melville.” But in all fairness, he added, “It must be observed that the fault did not lie solely on the side of Mr. Hook.” He admitted, however, that the Court of the Royal Commission now had less to do than formerly, since it had been so successful in stamping out the slave trade, and therefore that the business of the court would not materially suffer if “Mr. Hook ... continue, as at present, to hold the position of Acting Judge.”6 So poor James Hook continued to do Melville’s work without receiving Melville’s pay. In 1849, however, it seems that his report drew respectful quotation in both Houses of Parliament, and Lord Palmerston and William Gladstone paid attention. Here he is named “the Commissary Judge of Sierra Leone,” with no mention of “Acting.”7

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James Hook was eager for James and Rosalie to have children, and having attended their wedding, he was well qualified to count the months. In July 1847 he wrote to Rosalie’s father, asking if he knew of a prospect of their both gathering a “new Title” – that is, of grandfather. “Time fairly allows me to make this delicate enquiry,” he apologised.8 In fact, the Hooks did not produce offspring for another six years. Presumably, they practised some form of birth control until they were good and ready for children. However, James Hook, by now in his sixties, was counting the days to his retirement and homecoming. “My banishment is lessening,” he wrote on 24 November 1849, “and I begin to fondle the endearing thought of soon having you and yours and all of you smothering me with caresses.”9 Early in 1850, however, the Foreign Office documents show him still zealous in his calling, and proposing measures for an increase of commerce in nearby Gallinas and Sherbro in order to provide the African leaders with a new source of prosperity now that they had lost their profits from the slave trade. In writing to Palmerston, he had to adopt the rather cringing language of the colonial subordinate: “I beg respectfully to submit to your Lordship’s consideration, a matter which in my humble opinion, would prove of vast importance.”10 No answer to his proposal is recorded. And on 19 July 1850, before his fond hopes of homecoming were realised, poor James Hook got dysentery, and descended at last into the white man’s grave. His brother Logan had preceded him. His son John, despite his early immunity, also succumbed. After a brief period of prosperity as Brazilian vice-consul for Sierra Leone, John died of fever in 1852. The next brother, Andrew Hook (one of the twins), found his health suffered in the climate, and returned to England.

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After their travels in Italy, and the wearying journey to Gibraltar, James and Rosalie arrived at Southampton on 3 June 1848, pleased to be home, but still in need of rest. James had sent his history painting, on the subject of the Emperor Otho IV from Florentine history, ahead of him from Venice, and it seems likely that the couple would have gone to the exhibition at the Royal Academy to see how it was placed. But by 21 June, they were installed as guests with James’s uncle, J.B.B. Clarke, youngest son of Adam Clarke, and rector of the Church of St Pancras in West Bagborough, Somerset.11 James had spent happy times there in his bachelor days, producing watercolours of local scenery and the nearby Quantock Hills. And we know that his aunt Matilda Clarke had sometimes gone sketching with him. Here James, probably Rosalie, and perhaps Mrs Clarke too, threw themselves into a happy project of designing and executing the decoration of an elegant room in the

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rectory. It was an elaborate undertaking. After James had entered his cartoon in the illfated Westminster Hall competition, he must have felt some lingering interest in fresco and mural decoration, which his time in Italy nourished. Here was a chance to extend his professional skills in a friendly, nonthreatening environment. The walls of a panelled room in the rectory are still completely decorated, floor to ceiling, with intricate designs that have been lovingly restored, including dozens of small vignettes of figures and landscape scenes. The background colouring is a rich gold, with oranges and browns, such as Hook had been absorbing from Tintoretto and Titian, with the panels picked out in contrasting shades. Some panels are filled with mainly decorative repeating motifs of vines and flowers – geraniums, cherry, grapevines, holly, and ivy – that might have developed towards Morris wallpaper; some feature fairy-size figures sporting upturned bluebells for caps, playing on honeysuckle trumpets. And among the decorative twirling vines are fanciful, almost surrealistic elements: cherubs, stags, and dogs that are apparently bursting out of the wall itself. Among a series of figure subjects set in ovals with no background, we come across a back view and a front view of Rosalie, recognisable from Hook’s sketchbooks. Some mythological subjects – Pluto carrying off Persephone perhaps – occur on the higher levels, with a comic repeating frieze below them of alternating gryphons and umbrellas, a humorous mix of elements from heraldry and demotic nineteenth-century life. Much of the decorative work may have been executed by Hook’s assistants, Rosalie and Mrs Clarke. But the total scheme demanded a high degree of co-ordination, not to say geometrical accuracy. The many vignettes – each a miniature painting in its own right, with background filled in, and characterised by expressive gesture – were probably nearly all by Hook himself, though Rosalie would certainly have been competent to do some of them. The subjects vary widely; but one large set, seasonally connected, forms an engaging nineteenth-century “Book of Hours.” We find a male figure hacking at a tree in spring, a woman in Renaissance garb with a basket of summer flowers, and several scenes of harvest – lovers among stooks of corn, a girl stamping on grapes, another with a sickle cutting wheat. Many of these are small-scale versions of rural scenes that Hook would return to often through his career. There is a Christmas scene where girls are fixing holly above a mantelpiece. One group, I believe, shows separate scenes of faith, hope, and charity. And then there are local scenes – a recognisable view of Bagborough church and a view of the rectory, which is now a house called Littlecourt (see figure 4.1). It is impossible to know how long the Hooks spent on this elaborate and engaging project; probably it would have occupied several visits to Bagborough. Although Allan Hook mentioned that his father painted a room in his uncle’s house, over the years, as the house changed hands, the record of who had painted the room, and when, was lost.

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4.1 / Selections from the decorated walls at Littlecourt, West Bagborough, Somerset, c. 1848

The identification of James Clarke Hook as the principal painter wasn’t made until I sent a letter to “The Occupant, The Rectory, Bagborough,” in 2003, and received an excited reply and a kind invitation to come and see it. And we were treated to a gracious lunch in that elegant room. I have done my best to set the project in time and to deduce some of the principles of its design. Its ebullience and amplitude speak to its being a friendly and collaborative project. Probably, the Reverend Clarke, as host and uncle, paid the expenses of the materials, and perhaps a stipend besides, for his nephew the artist to help him along at this still early stage of his career. The project tells us much about young Hook, where he came from, and where he was going. The mural mode, the rich colouring, and the decorative style look back to his recent studies in Italy, bringing to mind the mural decorations in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and especially those in the Procurate Nueve in Venice, now part of the Correr Museum. There is a similar mixture here of decorative motifs and small vignettes of finished landscapes and figure compositions. Hook was also looking about him at the present – hence the “portraits” of local scenes like the church and the rectory as well as the figures of Rosalie and probably his aunt. But his vignettes also look forward to his long and successful career, first in his current identity as a historical painter, with figures in period dress, and then in his turn to traditional representations of the seasons and the activities that go with them. It was not to be long before his historical scenes gave way to contemporary rural scenes such as he presents here – scenes of harvest, family festivals, and rustic occupations. One small scene shows a woman, with her baby in a cradle at her feet, waving out of a window at a boat launched on the sea – a miniature intimation of the coastal scenes and fisher families that were to become Hook’s principal subject matter and make his fortune. The glowing room in West Bagborough shows Hook and Rosalie in holiday mode. But Hook was not going to let the grass grow under his feet for long, and presently he and Rosalie moved into 15 Thurloe Place in Brompton, London, which was soon to be absorbed into South Kensington. Here he set up his studio and resumed his vocation as a painter of historical subjects. And it was encouraging to find a number of fellow artists, congenial companions such as Richard Redgrave, in the same area. In many ways, Hook had not so much chosen to be a history painter as been chosen. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, had insisted that in the hierarchy of subject matter for the artist, history painting stood highest. It was, writes Richard Altick, “the pinnacle of artistic ambition, the exact equivalent of the epic in the hierarchy of poetry.”12 In the Academy Schools, Hook had been trained by William Hilton and George Jones in the same assumptions. And having competed in the Westminster Hall competition, and then won the academy’s prize for the best history

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painting – which led on to the Travelling Studentship – he could well have assumed that artistic success meant being a history painter. But there was a haunting negative example, the sad case of Benjamin Robert Haydon. A generation older than Hook, Haydon was a friend and associate of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. He was an enthusiast. “What are the difficulties of life in comparison with the rapture of a successful effort to realize a poetical character? Who would change the difficulties of an historical painter for the luxuries of a Portrait painter?” he wrote in his journal in 1814, before Hook was born.13 Though constantly disappointed of success, and perennially in debt, he never doubted that he was in pursuit of the highest calling. “All my old inspirations and raptures! glorious! inspiring!” he rejoiced, after a necessary interval of portrait painting to keep the wolf from the door. “I converse with the Heroes of the World and pace my narrow ... room with Achillean strides, glorying.”14 It was Haydon who, by Herculean efforts worthy of one of his heroic subjects, persuaded the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to devote some part of the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament to “high art.” And having succeeded in creating this opportunity, he flung himself into designing a winning cartoon. But his work was overlooked, and younger men became the prize-winners. “The art is becoming a beastly vulgarity,” he commented bitterly. “The solitary grandeur of Historical painting is gone.”15 Two years later, after further disappointments, he bought a pistol and shot himself, failed to die, and slashed his throat with a razor. That was in June 1846, not long before James Clarke Hook won the Travelling Studentship, married Rosalie, and headed for Italy to continue his training as a painter of history subjects. Hook was not the first to believe that he could succeed where others had failed. By this time, however, history painting had descended somewhat from its high horse. The history painter was no longer limited to “the great events of Greek and Roman fable and history,” or “the capital subjects of scripture history,” as required by the Reynolds formula,16 for history painting was now allowably more familiar and domestic; and in England particularly, it included subjects from native literature. The grandly heroic and tragic subjects that Hook had taken on as a student – the finding of the body of King Harold and the biblical story of Rizpah – now gave place to scenes from Shakespeare, particularly the courtships, and to historical romance. Hook’s subject painted in Italy for the 1848 academy exhibition was from the Italian chronicles of Villani. The Emperor Otho IV was so impressed by the princess’s modest refusal to kiss any man but her husband (whenever she might have one) that he urged her virtues on a young aristocratic colleague, who promptly married her. This painting is lost to sight, but the subject has a certain romantic appeal, and it allowed for plenty

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4.2 / Othello’s First Suspicion, 1849

of the expressive gesture that Hook was to develop so effectively. The Art Journal critic complained, however, that “the subject is too remote to be generally interesting.”17 For the pictures painted in his first year home from his travels, Hook had to gain more recognition, and he moved to more familiar subject matter. Othello’s First Suspicion (1849) certainly captures the attention (see figure 4.2). It is based on the “almost unbearable scene,” as Altick calls it, “in which Iago reduces Othello from a strong man serenely confident of his wife’s fidelity to a groveling victim of pathological suspicion.”18 Othello, presented in full figure in profile, has collapsed, covering his face with his hand. Desdemona sinks on the ground before him, looking solicitously up into his face. The colouring, as we have seen, is richly Venetian. Ellen Tree, a famous Desdemona of the day, attended the Private View at the Royal Academy that year, and she sought Hook out to congratulate him for the Othello scene.19 Hook was never much impressed by professional critics, but hers would have been praise he appreciated. They were fellow artists, even if their mediums were different. Meanwhile, at the British Institution, he exhibited Venice 1550 (1849), a decorative take on lovers in a gondola.

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Hook’s work had now attracted the attention of the dealer Thomas Miller. He snapped up Othello’s First Suspicion very soon after the opening of the 1849 exhibition. The price was a modest £42, but Hook soon found he could ask more. As the winner of two medals at the Academy Schools, as well as the prize-winner for the best history painting and the Travelling Studentship, he was recognised as an up-and-coming young artist, a man to watch. In the same year, he exhibited two subjects from the history of the Chevalier Bayard, the knight who was famously “sans peur et sans reproche.” At the Royal Academy appeared The Chevalier Bayard Wounded at Brescia (1849), which is now untraced; and at the British Institution appeared The Departure of the Chevalier Bayard from Brescia (1849), which might be called a sequel. This one was engraved, with strong commendation, for the Illustrated London News. It is a colourful production, and the two girls who have tended the wounded chevalier, and who present him with the bracelets and a purse they have made for him, are ample beauties worthy of Veronese. The details of the bracelets and the “purse of crimson satin most curiously fashioned” show that the version of this chivalric story that Hook drew on was probably The Life of the Chevalier Bayard (1847).20 There is a certain urgency of departure in the composition, as a page busily kneels to buckle the knight’s shoes, and the chevalier himself is partly turned towards his destination even as he pauses to don the girls’ tokens. An ornamental sculpture of a lion in the top right corner comes straight from Hook’s Italy Sketchbook. The dealer Thomas Miller bought a Bayard picture too, and now Hook confidently raised his price to eighty guineas – the change from pounds to guineas being another indicator of increased status. It seems that he now had the satisfaction of finding more buyers than one eager for his work. “Your picture of Bayard is a favorite,” he wrote to Miller of the purchase. “Lord Northwick, Mr Wilmott and several others applied for it.”21 The subject of Hook’s third picture of 1849, Bianca Capello (now untraced, though an old black and white photo survives), was again drawn from Venice, and it referenced Samuel Rogers’s Italy (1830), the long poem that the Hooks had taken with them on their travels. The beautiful young Bianca, having sneaked out for a gondola assignation with her low-born lover, on her return finds to her dismay that her father’s door is locked. Hook showed her with her hand clutched to her face before the unmoving door, and her lover eagerly persuading her to elope. The story is historical, and the beautiful Bianca in due course became the mistress and then the wife of Francesco, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. It was a familiar tale at the time, “oft-told” as one reviewer noted.22 It was probably a point of tactics for Hook to produce paintings that evoked Venice and European romance, as a kind of acknowledgment of the academy’s Travelling Studentship. He was announcing to his sponsors that he had profited in direct and visible ways from their investment in him. And the reviewers were getting the message. Of

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The Chevalier Bayard Wounded at Brescia, the Athenaeum critic noted that “in the selection of his theme Mr. Hook reminds us in no slight degree of the time when it was the wont of Mr. Eastlake to recur to the page of the Italian historian of romance. His mantle, since he has all but abandoned our Exhibitions, has fallen on no unworthy shoulders.”23 Charles Lock Eastlake was about to become president of the Royal Academy at the time, but his many administrative duties, including being a commissioner for the upcoming Great Exhibition of 1851, had interfered with his work as a painter, and for several years he had exhibited only a single painting, frequently a subject from Italian history. Whatever his reservations about art critics, Hook must have enjoyed hearing that he was inheriting Eastlake’s mantle. “Mr. Hook will be one of the prominent men of his day,” the same critic predicted. Perhaps the Athenaeum review spurred Hook on to a more conscious emulation of Eastlake, for in the following year, 1850, he exhibited another subject from Italian history, Francesco Novello di Carrera, and the Lady Taddea. This was hardly one of the tried and true subjects like the finding of King Harold’s body – which one would expect to recur often. But indeed Eastlake had exhibited a painting of the very same episode in 1834. Hook was consolidating his reputation, and his production of these years might be called his “Venice period.” A Dream of Venice (1850), now in Museums Sheffield, is sumptuous in the manner of Veronese, with brightly clad ladies on a balcony serenaded by a group of young bucks in a gondola, one of them handing a rose up to one of the girls, and glowing draperies connecting the two levels. Again, it is a period piece, but Hook has abandoned the “history” aspect. We have no identifiable historical characters, no dramatic moment, no armed knights, no suspenseful escape. Instead, we have elegant young people in easy circumstances, pursuing the enjoyable leisure activity of courtship (see figure 4.3). Hook was evolving away from the heroic history painting in which he had been trained, where conflict, masculine activity, and threatened tragedy were the norms, and towards secular and pleasurable occupations among men and women – especially women. Hook’s own work was now paying off. In this year, 1850, he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy – not bad for a man who had only just turned thirty.

4.3 (facing) / A Dream of Venice, 1850

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It is interesting to compare Hook’s professional success with that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who were his fellow students in the Academy Schools and his close associates. Hook was abroad when the seven members were forming their principles, and though he had returned when the Brotherhood itself came into being, he was not among them. He was slightly older than these young men (ten years older than John Everett Millais, but then Millais was a wunderkind), and being married, he was not inclined to share their kind of bachelor intensities. But his principles and practice in painting at this time were quite close to theirs, and when the Brotherhood drew hostile criticism, he was their staunch supporter. As we have seen, he and Millais were lifelong friends and associates – as students who won the medals for best historical painting in consecutive years, and exchanged dog models. Millais joined the Etching Club soon after Hook in 1850, and they shared in the club’s social and professional activities in each other’s houses over many years. William Holman Hunt, the next most famous of the seven Pre-Raphaelites, was also a close associate, first as a fellow member of the Etching Club and then as Hook’s tenant in Tor Villa, the house that he built on Campden Hill. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who stood aside from conventional paths to success such as the Royal Academy, and never exhibited there, nevertheless generously recognised Hook’s outstanding talent. Of his The Departure of the Chevalier Bayard from Brescia (1849), Rossetti wrote, “The general arrangement of colour in this picture is very brilliant and delightful ... as indeed it could scarcely fail to be when the work of a very accomplished young artist, as Mr. Hook incontestably is, is surrounded by the incompetence which predominates among the figure-pieces here.”24 That is Rossetti taking his swipe at the establishment. He was bowled over by the prominent female figure, with her “exquisite grace and beauty; the head and bosom perfectly charming.”25 Strong praise from a connoisseur of female beauty like Dante Gabriel. As I have noted, F.G. Stephens, another original member of the Brotherhood, became a close friend of Hook’s in later life, his biographer, frequent visitor, and staunch supporter. The relation was long and friendly, as the many Hook letters to Stephens testify.26 While Hook was painting for all he was worth to “keep the Chimney smoking,” as his father would say,27 the Pre-Raphaelites were launching the early paintings that were soon to become iconic. In 1849, the year Hook exhibited his three subjects of Othello, Bianca Capello, and the Chevalier Bayard, Millais’s history contribution to the academy’s exhibition was Isabella, from Boccaccio via Keats, which memorably included portraits of four Pre-Raphaelite brethren, Stephens, the two Rossetti brothers, and Walter Deverell;28 while Hunt exhibited Rienzi, a subject from Edward

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Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Rienzi (1833); and Rossetti showed his Girlhood of Mary at the Free Gallery. The academy’s exhibition of the following year included Hook’s A Dream of Venice and Francesco Novello di Carrera, and also Millais’s notorious Christ in the House of His Parents – notorious because of the chorus of attacks on it, one of which came from Charles Dickens. Whereas the critic for the Art Journal patted Hook on the back for “remind[ing] the spectator of Veronese” – he would have liked that – and for his “surpassingly brilliant” colour, the same critic excoriated Millais for his “asceticism ... coarsest representation of humanity ... a resuscitation even more revolting than that of a flayed Marsyas.”29 In the nine years between 1846 and 1854, which span most of Hook’s time as a historical painter, he exhibited seventeen paintings at the academy, to Millais’s sixteen and Hunt’s twelve. That is a crude quantitative measurement, and besides, the academy was by no means the only venue for exhibition for any of them; but it does give some sense of how Hook was throwing himself into the business of art, even before he had found what was to be his true métier. If we turn to measurements of fame, however, it must be conceded that among Millais’s productions of these years were not only Isabella and Christ in the House of his Parents, but also other such classic favourites as Mariana (1851), The Return of the Dove to the Ark (1851), Ophelia (1852), and The Order of Release (1853); while in the same period, Hunt produced Claudio and Isabella (1850), The Hireling Shepherd (1851), The Awakening Conscience (1853), and The Light of the World (1854). But then the best of Hook was yet to come. Although he did not join the Brotherhood, there are certainly strong Pre-Raphaelite features in Hook’s work of the time. The square-on architecture in A Dream of Venice (1850), with the consequent shallow perspective, recalls the Pre-Raphaelites’ mediaevalism, with its characteristically processional presentation. Hook’s The Defeat of Shylock (1851), another subject from The Merchant of Venice now in Manchester Art Gallery, has a similar frieze-like layout; and the attention to detail in the depiction of the fabrics, carpet design, and money bags, as well as the expressive gestures frozen in the moment, also recall familiar features of Pre-Raphaelitism (see figure 4.4). The Defeat of Shylock is a striking and crowded canvas. It presents the highly dramatic scene from The Merchant of Venice; and it demonstrates again Hook’s skill in expressive pose and gesture. Shylock, stunned by Portia’s brilliant legal analysis – which allows him his pound of flesh, but not a jot more or less, and no blood – is thrown back on his heel, while Gratiano crows triumphantly about “A Daniel come to judgment!” Other figures are readily recognisable, including Bassanio comforting Antonio, who stands ready to surrender the pound of his flesh. The embroidered tablecloth, carpet, and mural decorations provide a richly suggestive surround. Some apparently throw-away elements add to the authenticity of the scene: behind Shylock, for instance, stands an “extra,” an old man

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4.4 / The Defeat of Shylock, 1851

with his cloaked back to the spectator; there is character in every line of his knobbled ankles and slippered feet. These are the gratuitous but effective touches that Hook could have learned from Carpaccio or Veronese. Hook did not entirely escape the critical outrage that his friends the Pre-Raphaelites gathered. As late as 11 May 1858, he was taken to task by the Morning Chronicle reviewer for his “Pre-Raphaelite absurdities.”

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As an up-and-coming young artist still in his thirties, and with the Associateship of the Academy already achieved, Hook had time to look about him and consider his professional strategy. The decisions he took showed foresight and initiative. As we have seen, having completed his Italian travels, he and Rosalie first rented a house in South Kensington, home to a number of their artist friends, including Richard and Samuel Redgrave, Charles West Cope, John Phillip, Samuel Palmer, and others – many of them members of the Etching Club, which he was soon to join. And then he made the shrewd professional move of designing a house with a studio, with his brother as architect – Tor Villa on Campden Hill. In fact, he built two houses there, one to live and paint in, and one to rent out. He and Rosalie moved into Tor Villa; and the second house, 2 Tor Villas, was rented by another Etching Club colleague, John Callcott Horsley. It proved a good investment at a fortunate moment. The “Captains of Industry,” newly enriched, were developing a taste for the arts; and they preferred pictures of people and places they could recognise, signed by a chap they knew, to the dubious paintings by “Old Masters” of saints and historical figures traditionally favoured by the nobility. Living painters prospered accordingly. Hook took advantage of this promising situation. His house included “a studio on the second floor covering the whole space within the walls, having a large window facing north.”30 He was ahead of the game: the more famous studio houses – Leighton House, Sambourne House, and Millais’s Palace Gate – were yet to come. “What a comfortable thing a painting room is!” he wrote cheerfully to Horsley, now his tenant.31 If he was not a full card-carrying brother of the Pre-Raphaelites, Hook was soon inducted into a different society that he found highly congenial, the Etching Club. Since his connection with the club was to last many years, and to bridge his changes of address and subject matter, I devote a separate chapter to it. But his Etching Club cronies, including the two principal Pre-Raphaelites Millais and Hunt, became his lasting professional friends. So did Charles West Cope, who wrote affectionately of the club in his memoir.32 Richard Redgrave was also a member, and that friendship was to comprehend artistic sympathy and a long-time mingling of families. Samuel Palmer was another, elected to the club in the same year as Hook, and a staunch ally in the various issues that exercised the club about what constituted the best etching. And later Hook’s close friend Thomas Oldham Barlow, the engraver, took over both as the club’s secretary and as a friend in London who would co-host the important Studio Sunday entertainments, where select members of the public could get a preview of paintings before they were sent to the academy’s annual exhibition.

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4.5 / The Rescue of the Brides of Venice, 1851

Hook had not yet finished with Venice. In 1851, in the same exhibition with The Defeat of Shylock, came The Rescue of the Brides of Venice (see figure 4.5), based on a story from the Italian historian Jacopo Sansovino. Samuel Rogers had popularised the story in Italy (1830), the book that first introduced John Ruskin to J.M.W. Turner’s work. “The subject of the poem and the picture is one of the most romantic in Venetian history,” wrote Hook’s son Bryan many years later, during his own visit to Venice with his wife and daughters; and he told the legend from AD 959.33 A group of Venetian brides, on the very day of their communal wedding, were kidnapped, along with their dowries, by a band of pirates, who triumphantly “carried off both wealth and beauty.” Hook’s action-packed canvas shows the moment when the outraged bridegrooms overtake the pirates. This is not the stately processional composition that we find in The Defeat of Shylock, but more like Keats’s vision in Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819): “What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?” The viewer is set in the ship of the bridegrooms as it rams the pirate vessel – an intimation of later compositions like “Luff, Boy!” (1859) and Crabbers (1876) – and the most prominent male has a bride in his arms, hoisting her into his own ship. The many other brides, in rich silks and satins, are variously disposed in the crowded scene; one of them holds a shield over herself and others that already has an arrow stuck in it. Another bridegroom is aiming an arrow at the fleeing pirates. Bryan Hook regaled his children with an account of this picture’s reception, years before Bryan was born, an incident that his father must have narrated proudly: “At the Private View of the Royal Academy, the poet [Samuel Rogers himself ], then aged and infirm, was wheeled before the picture in his chair, and expressed himself much pleased with it, saying it vividly expressed his ideas.”34 It is no surprise that Hook should have regaled his sons with the praise of the famous poet of Italy, a work he had treasured. In 1852 Hook returned once more to the Moor of Venice, with Othello’s Description of Desdemona, a peaceful composition showing Desdemona as “an admirable musician,” playing the lute. The same model, and even the same bodice, are recognisable in Pluming the Helmet (c. 1852), now in the Worcester Art Gallery and Museum, another appealing composition (see figure 4.6). The beautiful lady, herself an artist, leans back gracefully to gain the full effect of her own act of decoration. And at the British Institution, also in 1852, appeared another Shakespearean subject, Olivia and Viola. Here again Hook showed his power in expressive gesture, as Olivia piquantly removes her veil to show her face to the page Cesario. Examination and comparison of some of these historical pieces show some reuse of props and costumes, as well as of models. The page Cesario, for instance, sports the same textured brown coat and red tights as the Othello of Othello’s Description of Desdemona. The paraphernalia for Hook’s historical scenes would have been hard to procure and

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4.6 / Pluming the Helmet, c. 1852

probably expensive too. No doubt his new studio home had closets for period dress and other props, and it was merely good economy to reuse some of them. The most important painting of 1852 was Signor Torello Goes to Fight the Turks, from a story in The Decameron (1353) – Hook’s first use of Boccaccio since the Pamphilus of his student days. Unfortunately, the original is now lost, but an engraving in the Illustrated London News suggests that it was one of Hook’s best essays in storytelling (see figure 4.7). Torello, having left his wife and two children to go to the Crusades, is reported dead. In due course, his grieving widow is persuaded to remarry; and Torello returns just in time to attend the wedding feast before the ceremony. This is a recurring story, where the preferred suitor ousts the interloper bridegroom, as in Sir Walter Scott’s ballad “Lochinvar” (1808) – or indeed like Odysseus returning from the Trojan War to find Penelope besieged by suitors.

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4.7 / Engraving of Signor Torello Goes to Fight the Turks, 1852

Since Torello is now dressed like a Turk, in turban and beard, his wife does not recognise him. But when he puts a ring she gave him into a cup of wine for her, the truth is out, and at the same time Torello removes his turban disguise. This is the moment that Hook chose for his picture. There are many Pre-Raphaelite features to the work, besides the mediaeval setting. The table is presented exactly at right angles to the viewer, and the characters, like those in Millais’s Isabella, also a story from The Decameron, are minutely individualised: Torello with his expectant gesture, the servant looking towards him as he follows orders in presenting the goblet with the ring, the two little boys intently engaged in their own activities, while the young woman on the right, perhaps their aunt, reaches to hand one of them some token. The bridegroom, who will soon yield graciously to Torello’s prior claim, gazes rather blankly into space as he holds the hand of the bride he is about to lose. “The bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume,” goes Scott’s version of the parallel tale in “Lochinvar.” The wife/bride, sumptuously dressed, has just recognised the ring in the goblet. In Boccaccio, at this moment she springs joyfully to her feet, almost overturning the table.

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Although in the engraving much of the fine detail of the painting is lost, along with the colour, we can nevertheless recognise much of the same kind of packed and closely observed chronicling of physical appurtenances that we find in Pre-Raphaelite painting, including the decoration on the upholstery and the creases in the drapery. The two children, who in Boccaccio are said to look like angels, are a new departure for Hook. In his surviving work so far, he had included no children since his portraits of his sisters and brothers in his early student days. But these two little boys are forerunners of the many children that continued to appear in Hook’s paintings, after he left behind historical work and turned to contemporary scenes. His own two boys, who were soon to arrive, became his frequent models; and in due course, grandchildren too would be called into service, besides many a little girl and boy of the fisher families who became his models. In 1852 Hook exhibited another Bayard picture (“from a remote source,” the Art Journal noted, somewhat disparagingly),35 and one titled Queen Isabella of Castille, but both are untraced. His subjects from Romeo and Juliet and the life of Christopher Columbus were not exhibited at the Royal Academy. Hook was not quite finished with history painting yet. But a subject in 1854, Time of the Persecution of the Christian Reformers in Paris, may have put him off it somewhat. This painting too survives only in an engraving, but it falls far short of Signor Torello in interest. It shows a Huguenot family in Paris who have enraged the Catholic population by not kneeling to a statue of the Virgin. A guardsman has pierced the Huguenot’s hat with his pike. The Athenaeum critic wrote, “Mr. Hook’s idea of persecution consists in an immense toasting fork, some fourteen feet long, being run through a respectable man’s hat, just as we should pierce a muffin.”36 The attempt at high seriousness could not survive the mocking imagery of toasting fork and muffin. Moreover, there were problems with the sale of this painting, as Allan Hook recorded.37 Hook sold it promptly from the exhibition to a collector from the north; but the purchaser then realised that the very Protestant subject was likely to antagonise some Catholic neighbours, and he backed out of the deal. So Hook found the painting back on his hands, and at a season when people were no longer buying. It took a long time to find another purchaser. The experience must have turned him off religious controversy, and possibly history painting too. The last history canvas he exhibited was a subject form the Old Testament, The Gratitude of the Mother of Moses for the Safety of Her Child (1855), and it drew favourable attention from Ruskin. He comments that the many prior treatments of this episode focused on Pharaoh’s daughter, pleasantly surprised at finding the baby in the bulrushes; and he congratulates Hook for focusing instead on the rapturous relief of the mother at being employed as the wet nurse for her own son. “The modern painter is to be deeply thanked for his true and earnest thought; above all for the little Miriam trotting by her

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4.8 / John Leech, “Scene in a Modern Studio,” Punch, 19 April 1855

mother’s side with her rough harp ... looking back, in her childish wisdom and fear, to see that the princess is not watching the burst of passion which might betray her mother.”38 Perhaps the fact that Rosalie had given birth to the Hooks’ first son, Allan, on 8 March 1853 had enlarged Hook’s sympathy for mothers and children. During the summers after their return from Italy, James and Rosalie took further holidays in the country. In the summer of 1850, they joined Richard Redgrave, a colleague from the Etching Club, in renting a cottage in the Quantock Hills in Somerset, “the scene of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s early life,” as Hook noted.39 It was not far from the home of Hook’s uncle Joseph Clarke of Bagborough, and perhaps on this visit James and Rosalie completed the painting of the room there – if they had not already done so. There were to be further summers spent in the country with Redgrave and his “Rose,” as well as cheerful country excursions with the Etching Club each April, when they were in holiday mood after the stress leading up to Sending-in Day. In fact, though born in Greater London, Hook was succumbing to the call of the country. A pictorial joke by John Leech appeared in Punch on 19 April 1855. It is set in an artist’s studio, during Studio Sunday. Two fuzzy-headed artists are examining a picture on the easel, while its painter stands by (see figure 4.8). The caption reads:

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Jack Armstrong has painted a modern subject, from real life, and painted it uncommonly well. – Strange to say, he has sold his picture. Messrs Feeble and Potter (very high-art men, who can’t get on without mediaeval costume, and all the rest of it) think it’s a mistake – curiously enough, their pictures are unsold. It is one more sign that historical painting had had its day. Indeed, Hook was soon to become the Jack Armstrong, launching into his own modern subjects, from real life, and painting them uncommonly well too.

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5 “ SEA C HANG E” Clovelly and After, 1855–1860

the shiF t away from grand historical subjects and towards genre scenes of contempo-

rary and relatively humble life, from the heroic to the domestic, and from the aristocratic to the demotic, was a major development in British art of the nineteenth century. In his essay “From History to Genre,” in The Royal Academy of Arts: History and Collections (2018), Simon Poe charts this progression. A salient moment in the gradual change was David Wilkie’s painting of 1822, Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of Waterloo. This time the Battle of Waterloo itself, that grand historical occasion that inspired dozens of depictions, including some by the Keeper of Hook’s day in the Academy Schools, was not the subject. There is no heroic action on the battlefield, no famous hero such as Wellington or Napoleon, but rather a bunch of worn-out veterans in retirement, in familiar Chelsea. But the news that they are avidly reading and discussing is of the great engagement. Waterloo still sheds its reflected glory on the familiar pub scene. Wilkie’s painting was one of those which – like William Powell Frith’s Derby Day of 1858 and Elizabeth Thompson Butler’s Roll Call of 1874 – needed a rail in front of it, or an attendant policeman, to protect it from the overeager crowds viewing it at the academy’s annual exhibition. Its success showed a representative transfer of interest. And as the grandly inspiring mode of history painting gave place to these scenes of everyday life, so the moral force that academy president Joshua Reynolds believed was invested in the heroic historical action was brought home and domesticated in the new genre scenes, which show ordinary men and women and families going about their daily business with loyalty and compassion. Hook’s history paintings – except for those set in the Academy Schools, which show us Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost (1667) or the finding of King Harold’s body – had not been of the grand heroic mode. He had found his subject matter in scenes of lovers in Shakespeare and chivalric episodes of courtship. But these paintings had still been

period pieces, based on scenes of literature and romance, and set in a past more or less remote. However, he too was gravitating towards the contemporary scene, and inventing his own subjects of domestic affection and workplace integrity. His development was part of a gravitational shift in British art history; but there were also personal and individual influences at work in his life, which partly inspired the change.

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“My longing for the country,” Hook later told his biographer A.H. Palmer, “was simply ravenous – an almost painful craving, and if I had resisted, it would have ended in some silly action.”1 Young Herbert Palmer, the son of Hook’s friend and Etching Club associate Samuel Palmer, was himself a close friend of the Hook family. He attended the Academy Schools with Hook’s sons Allan and Bryan, named his own sons Bryan and Allan, and haunted the Hook estate Silverbeck. He was a great admirer of Hook’s work, and a conscientious biographer. He would have taken notes from his interviews with Hook, and his anecdotes and quotations can be trusted. Hook did indeed move to the country, and the move confirmed the change in the subject matter of his paintings. But the change did not happen all at once. The professional wisdom of the day decreed that successful painters needed to live in the metropolis, at least during the winter months and well into spring. During the winter, they would be busy painting and finishing their pictures, and models were best found in London. The climax of their work came in early April, with Studio Sunday, where informed members of the public and prospective buyers would do the rounds of the studios to see the pictures before Sending-in Day, when London streets would be cluttered with cabs and carts carrying art works of all sizes to be submitted to the Royal Academy for the summer exhibition. Then, if you were an academician yourself, you might be summoned to serve on the Selection Committee, followed by the Hanging Committee, which decided which pictures should hang where – a crucial matter. To have your picture hung “on the line” was the most desirable outcome. You hoped that in the crowded wall spaces it would not be “skied” or, worse still, “grounded.” Soon would come Varnishing Day, when you had the chance to touch up your colours according to your picture’s placing. And come early May, the exhibition would open, first with the Private View, followed by the academy dinner for academicians and “the nobs” – often including prime ministers and royalty. It is hard for us today, saturated in visual media such as television, the Internet, movies, social media, and video games, to imagine the intense excitement generated in the Victorian populace by the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy, and by the work

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and doings of academicians. Fifteen-year-old Richard Doyle, in his journal for 1840, gives us some idea of it. In the days before the exhibition’s opening, he is scouring the newspapers to discover in advance something of the big pictures by the big artists of the day – his favourites being Daniel Maclise, David Wilkie, and the Landseer brothers Edwin and Charles. On opening day itself – “It has come at last!” he crows – he and his brothers arrive early. “Exactly at twelve the door burst open and in we rushed,” he writes. “There was a great scramble to pay first and then off we rushed up the stairs” – to be the first to find and gaze at his chosen masterpieces.2 Reviews of the exhibition in newspapers and journals would continue for weeks, and dealers could be influenced by them, and make purchases accordingly. And one could not expect a dealer to traipse off to the country to consult a painter about his painting. For all these reasons, a London residence was deemed necessary. And Hook had taken such matters into account in building Tor Villa. Professionally established, and settled in his well-built house, Hook was now well qualified to “keep the Chimney smoking,” in his father’s phrase.3 It was time for a family. The Hooks’ elder son, Allan James, was born at Tor Villa on 8 March 1853. This event too was to mark a major development in Hook’s career as well as in his life. After the heavy duty of Sending-in Day and all the rest, the new parents, Rosalie and James, deserved a holiday in the country; and they took the baby with them. They went to Abinger, a village in Surrey, and stayed close to their friend Richard Redgrave and his wife – who happened to be another “Rose.” They were congenial company, and the weather favoured them. “We were often all together,” Redgrave recorded in his overview of 1853, “sketching at the little springhead of the Tillingbourne ... the two Roses, Hook and myself ... Sweet, sunny hours we had! How can life afford anything happier? ... The pleasant hours passed in painting out of doors, with the wife reading a good novel in the intervals of her own sketching, a few minutes’ chat with a passing farmer or labourer ... a luncheon of hard-boiled eggs in the open air ... then a stroll up to Lieth Hill with the children.”4 The idyllic scene appealed to Hook too; and though he had gone to the country intending to take a holiday, he couldn’t resist painting what was before him. The pictures he exhibited the following year included A Few Minutes to Wait before Twelve O’clock (1854), which shows Rosalie in a wheat field at harvest time, holding baby Allan, who is reaching for a passing butterfly (see figure 5.1). The scene is of a wife bringing his dinner to her husband, who is working in the field. The alfresco meal – whether of hard-boiled eggs or more – became a recurring feature in Hook’s paintings. It was to appear again in The Acre by the Sea (1862) and From under the Sea (1864). The midday reunion of a working man with his wife and children clearly had an ongoing appeal for Hook. Sometimes the semi-glazed brown pitcher reappears among the picnic accoutrements.

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5.1 / A Few Minutes to Wait before Twelve O’clock, 1854

It was not only the sojourn in the country that changed Hook’s subject matter so profoundly. Fatherhood too played a major role. Children – often his own – became major players in his compositions, parenthood a recurring concern. The Hooks returned to Abinger in the summer of 1854, Allan being now a toddler. And again the idyllic life that Redgrave described furnished matter for paintings. “A few minutes’ chat with a passing farmer or labourer” seems realised in Colin Thou Kenst, the Southerne Shepheard’s Boye (1855) – the title a scrap from Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar (1579). A comely wife sits with her little boy – Rosalie with Allan – to listen to the smocked labourer on Lieth Hill in a restful moment (see figure 5.2). The pastoral setting, with Colin the shepherd’s boy lying at his ease to chat, eliminates the social distance between gentleman’s wife and agricultural labourer. Another picture exhibited in 1855 was The Birthplace of the Streamlet, surely “the little springhead of the Tillingbourne” that Redgrave wrote of. And recently, two paintings that were not exhibited, one signed by James and the other by Rosalie, came up for sale at a Surrey auction house. Hook had dated his 1854, so these paintings too probably resulted from the Hooks’ stay in Abinger. Rosalie’s shows a pool in a bosky wood – perhaps

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5.2 / Colin Thou Kenst, the Southerne Shepheard’s Boye, 1855

again the “springhead of the Tillingbourne.” Their Abinger sojourn seems to have been highly productive. Also exhibited in 1855 was Market Morning. There was an engraving of it in the Art Journal, but I have no access to the original. However, Hook described it fully in a letter to a buyer, and produced a pen-and-ink sketch (see figure 5.3). His description makes clear how important the narrative element in a picture was to him, and how much thought and skill he put into realising the scene and its expressive characters: “You will be able to make out that it is quite an English rural scene one I found in a green nook in Surrey ... A mother, with her eldest boy as Pioneer, is going to market on her pony freighted with fowls and eggs – the old granddam has followed ... with the youngest of the family attracting his Mother’s attention by its little farewells – a little girl and boy near the stump of an old tree are trying to get their share of attention also.”5 To us this scene may be static and frozen in time. But Hook’s description makes it clear that to him these characters are living, breathing people in the midst of absorbing ongoing action. And that was how his pictures came across to his contemporaries. The wares carried to market, the three generations of the family, the actions of the children, the cottage, the slope, even the trees – larch and ash – all are specified, so we know how attentively the painter has pondered over the scene and its personnel in this “green nook

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5.3 / “Market Morning,” 1854, sketch of the painting Hook was to exhibit the next spring

in Surrey.” Did he really find this very scene, ready-made, in all its detail? We can’t know. But his response feels genuine, as though from an actual experience. And the models – or personnel – were presumably readily within reach, being real local people, already dressed in appropriate wear, not bored city models who would have to be posed in the studio and dressed in correct costume for some past period of history. In his time as a history painter, Hook had concentrated on romance. Like Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1596), he made it his business to “sing of Knights and Ladies gentle

5.4 / A Fracture, 1855

deeds” – of Signor Torello returning from the Crusades to his wife, or the Chevalier Bayard, “sans peur et sans reproche,” or the brides of Venice, or Othello and Desdemona, Portia and Bassanio. Now his business was less with courtship than with the family. Hook was finding many ways to bring his subjects home: from far-off Venice or Tuscany to rural Britain, from long-past historical or literary figures to local associates who could play themselves, from heroes of history to his own wife and children. Allan was to furnish plenty more subject matter. The small painting A Fracture (1855) is a portrait of him lamenting a crack in the head of his elderly-looking doll. It is a very engaging piece that for obvious reasons has been kept in the family (see figure 5.4). Even in his history painting of the same year – The Gratitude of the Mother of Moses for the Safety of Her Child, the last such work that he was to exhibit – a child is the focus of attention; and as we have seen, John Ruskin was particularly charmed by “the little Miriam, trotting by her mother’s side.”6 Many more children were yet to come. Hook has sometimes been scorned as “sentimental” for his frequent depiction of children and their doings – a slur that was part of the wholesale dismissal of the Victorians in the early twentieth century. He certainly responded warmly to children, as prompt103

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ed by his own experience; but his paintings show no excessive wallowing in emotion for its own sake. He habitually referred to children as “brats” – more in affection than condemnation, certainly, but still hardly a gushing expression. To dismiss all representations of children as sentimental would be to dismiss a large proportion of human life and interest. Hook represented children as important, to adults and to themselves. And important they were, despite the modern distrust of emotion. Hook did not abandon his Spenserian romances of knights and ladies all at once. In fact, Spenser seems to have furnished a means of transition. Both Colin Thou Kenst (1855) and A Pastoral (1858) come with quotations from Spenser – but these are from the pastoral Shepheardes Calendar rather than The Faerie Queene. And Colin Thou Kenst must have been lingering in his memory. In a letter of August 1856 to Thomas Miller, who had purchased The Fisherman’s “Good Night” (1856), Hook wrote, “Mrs Hook presented me with a new boy 9 or 10 days past. Colin will be his name.”7 In the event, the new baby was named Bryan; but “Colin” remained a name that the Hooks were fond of, and gave to their animals. “As he watched the groups of figures in the summer sunlight,” wrote Hook’s son Allan, “and noted how they combined with the lines and colours of the landscape, he began to see what rich material there was ready to the hand of the first painter who should try to deal with it.”8 The first painter to deal with such subjects? It is a large claim. Of course, there had been plenty of rural genre scenes before Hook came to them, by figures such as George Morland and Daniel Maclise. But they were primarily figure painters, and though their figures were set outdoors, their pictures were mostly painted in the studio. Even for landscape painters such as John Constable, the norm was to take small sketches on the spot, but to paint the final large canvas in the studio. Hook made the decision to paint his whole landscape, even large canvases, in situ. And it was a resolution he stuck to. Only that way could he have the full benefit of lighting and atmosphere. Other painters were usually either landscape painters or figure painters. Hook had been a figure painter, and a fine one. He was not about to leave those skills behind now that he was turning towards landscape and delighting in the natural scenery that he loved. The critics were somewhat bewildered. “We do not know whether to cast Mr. Hook as a landscape or figure painter, or both,” wrote the Athenaeum critic.9 And in fact he continued to be both, though through his long career the importance of his human figures, and the proportion of space they occupied on his canvases, steadily diminished. Painting for long hours out of doors has its drawbacks, and in his letters Hook frequently referred to the trials of working on a large canvas, sometimes in a high wind. Getting his gear to the site of his painting each day was its own problem; so he sometimes hired a donkey to haul his canvas, easel, colour box, and so forth. And hence, as time

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went on, we find donkeys in his paintings – as in “As Jolly as a Sandboy” (1872) and Sea Daisies (1886). The donkey and the boy or girl who tended it became convenient models. Sometimes too for his sea paintings he would go to the site by boat. Hiring the fisherman and his conveyance would provide further connection with the subjects of his paintings. A large canvas requires an easel, and easels are built to stand on even floors. Not having the advantage of an even floor – and in fact frequently painting on steep slopes or among rocks – Hook turned his hand to inventing an easel that was adaptable to rough terrain. “My easel sympathizes with your ground,” he wrote to an artist who enquired about it.10 The three long separate poles could be adjusted against each other and in relation to the canvas, which was fastened to two of them. According to his letter, he contrived this handy contraption in the 1850s, when he moved to his country subjects and outdoor painting. He did not patent it, but allowed the “colour men” to build and market it for sale as “the Hook easel,” though their version turned out to be an inferior product. As late as 1907, the landscape painter Alfred East, in the “Equipment” section of The Art of Landscape Painting in Oil Colour, recommended and described “‘the Hook easel,’ which, for large canvases, cannot be excelled.”11 Hook had set the example and created the equipment for working regularly out of doors, and he had many followers.

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Hook was not done with innovation. Having made the surprising change of subject matter in moving to the countryside, in the summer of 1855 he went – again it seems at Redgrave’s suggestion – to the steep picturesque fishing village of Clovelly on the north coast of Devon facing Lundy Island. This trip with Rosalie was to be another game changer. “We have both been most pleased with this picturesque place and I have managed to get half through two small pictures,” Hook wrote to Redgrave.12 The “two small pictures” – the first of the “sea pieces” that were to make him famous – caused quite a stir when exhibited the next year. The first was The Fisherman’s “Good Night” (1856), showing a wife and her little boy (Rosalie and Allan) sitting on the Clovelly harbour wall, while the fisherman husband, a genuine Clovelly fisherman who stands at the top of a ladder to his boat below, bestows a farewell caress on the boy (see figure 5.5). It is a tender moment, and the light, colour, and composition all conduce to a fine effect. A.H. Palmer related an incident connected with the painting.13 A taunt by a passing colleague angered the fisherman husband, who deserted his post to come to grips with him; whereupon Hook “collared and sat upon” the enraged fisherman, until peace and order were restored by the wives. Rosalie’s pose beside the fisherman husband, to say nothing of the fisticuffs, gives some notion of the familiar relation that the Hooks

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5.5 / The Fisherman’s “Good Night,” 1856

had with the fishermen and women Hook depicted. Through many following years and wide-ranging excursions, the couple lived simply alongside the working people who were Hook’s subjects. The other picture, envisaged as a sequel, was initially called The Fisherman’s Return, but was actually exhibited as “Welcome, Bonny Boat!” (1856). Again, little Allan plays an important role as the son welcoming his fisherman father home to their modest family cottage (see figure 5.6). The sites of both paintings can still be readily found and identified in Clovelly; even the cottage of “Welcome, Bonny Boat!” was still standing until recently. Hook always remained a faithful recorder of the actual scene. At the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1856, both paintings were received ecstatically, especially by Hook’s fellow artists. Ford Madox Brown was dismissive of the exhibition as a whole, but named the exceptions: “Very little good ... Hunt and Millais unrivalled, except by Hook, who for colour and indescribable charm is pre-eminent even to hugging him in one’s arms ... A perfect poem is each of his little pictures.”14

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5.6 / “Welcome, Bonny Boat!” 1856

John Everett Millais’s reaction was recorded by one “A.E.,”15 who was moved to verse on the subject. (He used Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s metre from his very popular Song of Hiawatha, published just the year before.) Look for number five-five-seven [or The Fisherman’s “Good Night”] Kneeling pause before that Picture. There I saw Millais so kneeling ... Counting over all its beauties Drinking in the home-suggestions, All the character and nature, All the matter and the manner, The dramatic truth and feeling; In his kindly admiration Eloquently, simply, speaking As he felt, and paying tribute Kindred tribute to the Painter.16

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5.7 / Bryan Hook, woodcut of Hook’s A Signal on the Horizon, 1857

Such admiration from a fellow painter – the great but still young John Everett Millais, no less – would have been a delight to Hook. And the verse shows the way people looked at pictures in that day, open to the human suggestion of the figures in the story, and not shy about responding emotionally. Millais’s admiration included his participating in the drama of the narrative. “If you cannot feel as he did / Something is the matter with you,” said this critic frankly.17 He meant it. To have empathy for figures in a situation truthfully rendered is to be fully human. It was a testament to Victorian readiness to participate in the emotion of a dramatic pictorial rendering. The versifier goes on to “two-seven-two,” “Welcome, Bonny Boat!”: “See the Sequel to the Story, / Bid your Welcome to the Morning.”18 No “aesthetic distance” called for by this critic! The little boy welcoming his fisherman father home again after his fishing sortie vividly maintains the narrative element. Hook’s “two small pictures” from Clovelly were certainly making their mark. The range and depth of the colour he had learned from the Venetian painters stood Hook in good stead, and he was able to adapt them brilliantly to English waters. He wrote enthusiastically to Redgrave, “There are two or three most wonderful points on the coast ... dark rocks and green headland above and beyond them, and the green sea washing away for a foreground.”19 Sunlit, relatively level distances, contrasting with shadowed cliffs down to the sea, were to be recurring features of his compositions. Hook found himself in what was to become his element.

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5.8 / The Shipboy’s Letter, 1857

For 23 July 1856 Rosalie recorded in her diary, “Bry born at half p. 7 morning – we were at Clovelly afterwards”20 – childbirth and painting location closely associated. And A Signal on the Horizon, exhibited the following year, shows Rosalie with baby Bryan in the foreground. I have not been able to trace the original, but I provide an engraving done by Bryan Hook many years later (see figure 5.7). It is a reasonable guess that he chose this picture to work on because of the prominent place in it of his own infant self.21 Behind the mother, on some steep Clovelly steps, an old sailor has his spyglass focused on the Union Jack signal on an approaching boat. Behind him again, a man and a boy are keenly interested. Even in the black-and-white reproduction, the vertical, inyour-face composition, and the steep steps with the unexpected little nooks for babies or equipment or whatever, capture the tight busy character of Clovelly. (Those steps are still there.) Ruskin was bowled over. “It seems to me that this is the sweetest and most poetic picture of an English boy that has been painted in modern times,” he wrote. And of The Shipboy’s Letter, of the same year, he declared, “The whole heart of rural England is in that” (see figure 5.8).22

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Hook’s new embrace of coastal sites focused at this stage on the fishermen and women and their families rather than on the sea itself; but the sea furnished the drama for his scenes – taking leave of the family, watching for signals at sea, a young lad heading off on his first voyage. But Hook remained committed to inland subjects too; and though the public came to clamour for his sea pieces, he continued to paint at least one landscape a year. The Shipboy’s Letter, showing an agricultural labourer and his wife poring over the letter from their sailor son abroad, economically connected rural and naval matters. “Take care to read the direction of the envelope ... with the Dover postmark,” Ruskin urged his readers. “‘Charles Dibble ... Ongar Hatch, Surrey,’ ... and what is legible of the beginning of the letter, ‘Off Cape Town, My dear Father and Mother.’”23 Like William Hogarth, whom he deeply admired, Hook this time included some written text in his painting. As a boy, Hook himself had been the eager recipient of letters from Africa. Now a father, he could imagine the parents’ delight in news from their far-away seagoing son. The versifying critic who praised “Welcome, Bonny Boat!” was not the only one who enjoyed “the sequel to the story.” When Hook’s friend and patron C.P. Matthews purchased The Shipboy’s Letter, he wanted a continuation of the story. He commissioned a sequel – or rather, in this case, a prequel – The Shipboy Writing His Letter (1863). In an aboard-ship composition, Hook shows the boy crouched in his sea chest, where he evidently keeps paper and pen and ink, painstakingly inditing his letter, while a fellow sailor aims his telescope on the far shore “off Cape Town” (see figure 5.9). The two paintings remained together until separated at a sale in 2022. The pairing was testimony to the Victorian public’s eagerness to grasp and follow the narrative element in their pictures, as well as in their voluminous and eagerly consumed novels. With the change of subject matter, and with both his land and sea pieces drawing such praise from such a figure as Ruskin, Hook had found his métier. Another popular picture of 1857 was A Widow’s Son Going to Sea, for which he had a special platform built within the Clovelly sea wall so that he could get the angle he wanted on the scene. I have not been able to trace the original, but fortunately among Hook family archives are preserved old photographs of a high proportion of Hook’s paintings – many of them taken by Hook’s sons, Allan and Bryan, who became skilled photographers. They were clearly not capable of photographing this painting at the time; but either they traced it and photographed it later, or Hook hired a photographer for the purpose. Photography was in its infancy in the 1850s; but Hook already saw it as a good way to preserve a record of his paintings before he sold them. It was from a reproduction of this old photograph, on a visit to Clovelly, that I recognised the interior of the Clovelly Quay Wall, and realised the full extent of Hook’s commitment to the actual scene before him. From this recognition came my research project “Hookscapes Then and Now.” I took pilgrimages

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5.9 / The Shipboy Writing His Letter, 1863

with my family to the places where Hook had painted, found if possible the very spot where he had set up his easel, and photographed the same scene as it exists now. First, of course, I had to find out where he had painted what. (He hardly ever provided the name of the place in the titles to his paintings; indeed, he tended to be fairly secretive about his locations.) Rosalie’s diaries were a major help. Today’s photographs provide a measure of change between his time and ours, and also demonstrate just how faithful Hook chose to be to the actual scene before him. Indeed, when you are on the spot, you can see that he was more faithful, since the telephoto function of the camera lens often adjusts our perception of distance. The rocky

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5.10 / Sketch in watercolour of A Widow’s Son Going to Sea, 1857

seashores have in many cases remained surprisingly unchanged. But the scenes of his inland paintings, not surprisingly, have changed much more, and so are much harder to identify. The old photograph of Hook’s painting of the Clovelly harbour wall served its purpose in identifying the site of A Widow’s Son Going to Sea, and also in alerting me to Hook’s fidelity to the actual scene he painted. It provides no colour, of course. Fortunately, Hook dashed off a watercolour for a prospective buyer; and I provide this sketch as my best record of this painting of the Clovelly harbour, which did so much to confirm Hook in his new mode (see figure 5.10).24 Again, the drama of the boy’s departure as he leaves his widowed mother – who clearly fears his fate may be his father’s – was a focus for the critics. There is a touch of autobiography too, I believe, in the painting. Hook too was a widow’s son, and he too was going to sea, in his own way, and launching on a brave adventure. The Coastboy Gathering Eggs (1858) is a striking vertical composition, showing a boy dangling at a giddy height on a cliff face (see figure 5.11). Hook later exhibited the fine

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5.11 / The Coastboy Gathering Eggs, 1858

etching based on the painting. At the top of the picture, we see the leg and foot of the man who is “spotting” the dangling boy; the rest of his body is outside the frame, so that there is an impressionist feel to the picture. (Edgar Degas, whose dancers are often similarly poised in perilous moments of balance, characteristically included partial figures in his paintings.) It was painted on Lundy Island off the north coast of Devon. On this occasion, for once, Hook went without Rosalie. He boarded in the lighthouse. And – practical as ever – he apparently ate for breakfast the eggs that had been collected for his picture. He wrote to Rosalie, “Some Lundy eggs, Puffin eggs for breakfast, tell Allan.” He was already coaching little Allan on birds, and telling him to look them up in “Bewick’s waterbirds.”25 Despite his apparent callousness in eating the puffin’s eggs for breakfast, Hook was a devoted bird man. He gathered an excellent collection of Thomas Bewick’s brilliantly illustrated bird books, and birds are frequently the principal characters in his paintings,

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5.12 / Rosalie Hook, painting of a cottage in Clovelly, 1856

as in Wise Saws (1875), which features a crow preacher, and “After Dinner Rest a While” (1885), with cormorants. And – as his instruction to little Allan suggests – he passed his interest on to his sons. Bryan Hook was to specialise in birds. As a student in the Academy Schools, he won the Turner Prize for his picture based on a bird subject; and he became a much sought-after illustrator of bird books such as William Warde Fowler’s Tales of the Birds (1888) and W.H. Hudson’s Birds in London (1898). In Clovelly, in Bryan’s infancy, Rosalie too was painting. Her picture is unnamed and unsigned. But family tradition reliably attributes it to her (see figure 5.12). It is an unusual composition, with its steep slant to the right. The set of rude steps leading up to the doorway of a fisherman’s cottage that is perched on the very brink of the sea suggests a welcome. (Until recently, the cottage was still identifiable there.) The air and sea are admirably light, bright, and sparkling. The handling of light and texture show Rosalie as a highly competent painter. Surely, she could have won a professional career for herself, despite the huge barriers against women artists. But it seems that she chose

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to give most of her time and creativity to the careers of her husband and later her sons. Allan Hook testified that her criticisms and suggestions on Hook’s work were the ones to which he paid most attention.26 Like his fellow artists, the critics were strongly in favour of Hook’s sea change – from the costumed historical Italian subjects to homegrown, modern coastal or rural scenes. The Times art critic rejoiced in the metamorphosis from “the unrealities of mediaeval masquerade into the realities of contemporary reality.”27 And two years later, the same critic (probably Tom Taylor, who was to visit Hook in later days) was still congratulating him for his bold professional initiative: “While Mr. Hook continued to deal in masquerade warehouse Venetian life of the 16th century, who cared for his pictures but the few who could appreciate their mastery of technical rule and line? He had the courage to leave Venice for Devonshire and Surrey. Straightway he revealed a power altogether unsuspected in him.”28 For all his preference for Hook’s new mode, this critic had been alert all along to Hook’s technical mastery. The rich colour that he had learned from the Venetian masters still availed him in his new subject matter; and he now made full use of the brilliant natural lighting of his outdoor scenes. Hook’s new working pattern was established. His more academic historical subjects from the past had called for a busy winter, with models in the studio, followed after academy time by a holiday in the country. Now the summer excursions, to country or seaside, became his most vigorous working time, with many of the daylight hours spent painting in the fresh air – while often exposed to wind and stormy weather. He took steps to make himself at home in Clovelly for the duration of his stays there. His son Allan recorded that Hook bought himself his own boat, and some lobster pots too, not so much to compete with the locals as to share their experience and understand their activities.29 Contending with rough sea in an open boat while plying his brush was no trouble for Hook. Some St Ives fishermen, queasy themselves, said they “would give a shilling to see him sick.”30 A Clovelly family he got to know over several visits was the Cruses – the mother served as a nursemaid to Charles Kingsley when he stayed in Clovelly to gather background for his novel Westward Ho! of 1855. Young Johnny Cruse did odd jobs for Hook, and posed for the larger lad in “Luff, Boy!” (1859) – probably Hook’s most famous painting because of Ruskin’s enthusiastic praise (see figure 5.13). There was a war scare at the time. The war that broke out between France, Austria, and Piedmont led to a passing fear of invasion. Militias were formed all over England, and the artists formed their own regiment, the 38th Middlesex (familiarly known as the Artists Rifles). Patriotism ran high. And Hook’s painting of the sailor youth and his staunch little helmsman moved Ruskin to a paean of praise for “Luff, Boy!”

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5.13 / “Luff, Boy!” 1859

War with France? It may be ... What arms have we to count upon? ... If our enemies want to judge of our proved weapons and amour, let them come and look here. Bare head, bare fist, bare foot, and blue jacket. If these will not save us – nothing will. A glorious picture – most glorious ... I wonder if Mr. Hook when he drew that boy thought of the Elgin marbles; the helmetless, unsworded, unarmoured men of Marathon ... And the quiet steersman too, with his young brow knit, to whom father and brother are trusted – and more than they. I would we had such faithful arms ... at all helms. Infinite thanks, Mr. Hook, for this.31 Ruskin went on to praise the other paintings that Hook exhibited in 1859, A Cornish Gift and The Skipper Ashore. Hook had received plenty of praise from the critics before, and from artists (whose praise meant more to him). But the clarion praise of such a figure as Ruskin (who had not yet fallen from the artists’ grace for his assault on James McNeill Whistler) undoubtedly

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added greatly to Hook’s reputation, and also to the sale value of his works – a matter he could not ignore. The composition of “Luff, Boy!” – a view from within a boat to the other end of it, with the drama of putting the viewer at sea to contend with tilt from wind and waves – is unusual in his work, though not unprecedented. The Rescue of the Brides of Venice (1851) similarly situates the viewer in the middle of the action, as do “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread” (1866) and Crabbers (1876) – which were yet to come. He did not always keep a landsman’s stance on terra firma. Ruskin’s suggested analogy of the boy in the blue jacket with the men of Marathon in the Elgin Marbles was a shrewd comparison. Hook’s years of study among the sculptures of the British Museum had indeed rubbed off on him, as had the rich colouring of Titian and the Venetian painters. Unlike the painters of genre scenes showing rural bumpkins and clumsy Jack Tars, Hook focused on the dignity, even the nobility, of his sailors and fisher families. He knew they faced danger and difficulty on every voyage – death at sea among fishermen remains frequent to this day – and he had a deep respect for them. He took a certain pride too in his own braving of the same wind and rough weather that they faced – albeit only as a painter. The elder boy in the picture, the barefoot hero in the blue jacket who balances assuredly as the boat tilts to the wind, was painted from Johnny Cruse. For another appealing painting of the same year, The Skipper Ashore, his younger brother Tom was the model. When I first began research on Hook, and visited Clovelly, I asked our landlady whether the name “Cruse” was still familiar. There was a Tom Cruse, a retired fisherman, she said, who lived in Bideford; and she gave me his phone number. “This may seem a peculiar question from a total stranger,” I began tentatively when I phoned, “but does the name ‘James Clarke Hook’ mean anything to you?” “Oh, yes,” came the genial reply. “My granddad often talked of Mr Hook.” This latter-day Tom Cruse, grandson of the model for The Skipper Ashore, became a friend, and his knowledge of the coast and of Lundy Island was invaluable to me in tracking down the sites of Hook’s paintings in the area. It was a pleasure to see photographs of Johnny and Tommy Cruse, grown old since the days when Hook had painted them as boys. The old tar giving the sailing instruction in “Luff, Boy!” was of the Beer family, Tom Cruse told me. There is no shortage of reproductions of “Luff, Boy!” in Clovelly. On a subsequent visit to Covelly, I showed Tom a reproduction of “Welcome, Bonny Boat!” (the “sequel” to The Fisherman’s “Good Night”). He told me that his greatgrandfather (the father of Johnny and Tommy) lived in the very cabin that appears in that picture. (Until recently it was still there, and it appears in my “Then and Now” for “Welcome, Bonny Boat!”) So it is entirely possible that the father of those two boys

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was the original of the “Fisherman” in the pictures, who says “Goodnight,” and is welcomed home after his fishing excursion by his devoted wife and son (played by Rosalie and Allan). I rejoice in discovering these possible connections between Hook’s day and ours. The sea was not a new thing to Hook. As a boy going with his father and siblings to visit his grandmother in Belford on the northeast coast, he had taken voyages by sailing vessel – the cheapest mode of transport for long distances – and had become familiar with seamen and sailing during trips that could last for two weeks or more. He was sturdy and adaptable, despite his relatively small stature; and though born and bred in Islington, he took to country ways while climbing the trees at his grandfather’s estate, Haydon Hall. When painting portraits and watercolours in Ireland, he took readily to riding; and thereafter he was perfectly at home on horseback. Now that the sea had become his business, his early contact with sailors and sea transport – not to mention his more recent and testing voyage in the White Mouse on the Mediterranean – made him at ease with fishermen and their boats and activities. In his paintings he addressed nautical matters as an insider. It was no doubt part of his wide appeal. The sailors and fishermen and their families who were his summertime models and associates were not gallery-goers or buyers of pictures. But for the crowds who attended the academy exhibition every year, his paintings came to have the value of bringing the sea to London. And there is frequent testimony that to many a jaded Londoner, Hook’s coastal scenes brought a revivifying breath of fresh air. They provided a vision like that of the weary office worker in Wilfrid Gibson’s poem The Ice Cart (1916), which has gained affection from many a ground-down city dweller: Perched on my city office-stool, I watched with envy while a cool And lucky carter handled ice ... And I was wandering in a trice Far from the grey and grimy heat Of that intolerable street The chunks of ice on the ice cart in a sweltering city street prompt a vision of cool green arctic waters, and the poem’s speaker imagines himself plunging about among icebergs in the company of seals. Hook’s sea paintings seem to have had that power to transport the viewer to another cooler, cleaner, fresher place. In his biography of Hook, F.G. Stephens asked, “Are there not hosts of townsmen jaded of eye, of heart, and of spirit, who have stood before Hook’s pictures and seemed to hear the far-off sea grow louder day by day, and thanked him for previsions of

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the sunlight and the coast?”32 And it became a familiar chorus among viewers at the academy’s annual exhibition that Hook’s paintings provided not only the sights of the sea, but the smells and the sounds of it as well.

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In following Hook’s change in subject matter from history and Venice to modern rural England and coastal pieces, and the pictures that resulted, I have left behind his actual physical moves of house and home. He was still living at Tor Villa on Campden Hill in 1857 when the Etching Club took its regular holiday excursion to the country after Sending-in Day – one of the occasions when practical professional men forgot their city worries and cavorted like liberated schoolboys. This time they headed for Godalming, a small town in Surrey. The occasion was marked by the incident of the yellow waistcoat, often told, it seems, by Hook himself. In a shop window in Godalming appeared a decorative yellow waistcoat, “a piece of rustic finery ... of yellow stuff, decorated at regular intervals with a printed sprig of green leaves and painted flowers.”33 In festive mood, they decided to buy the waistcoat, and buy it they did; and Thomas Creswick actually donned it, to their great amusement. Subsequently, they drew lots for who should possess it, and the lot fell to Hook. History relates (and so does Allan) that he kept the waistcoat and used it in one of his paintings as a garment worn by a guest at a wedding.34 I have failed, alas, to find that figure in his works. In A Sailor’s Wedding Party (1863), painted on the Scilly Isles, one guest attending wears a yellowish jacket, but no sprigs appear. The picnic site that Creswick had chosen was the nearby village of Hambledon. The members of the Etching Club, keen professionals even when off duty, delighted in the beauty of the place. And Hook, as A.H. Palmer related, on impulse suddenly announced, “‘I’ll leave London and come and live on this very spot, and rent my house.’ ‘If you do,’ said Mr. Holman Hunt, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘I’ll take it.’”35 And the deal was done. The very next day, Hook brought Rosalie to the place, and there and then they rented a cottage in Hambledon. In due course, William Holman Hunt rented Tor Villa and moved in. Hook’s ravenous and peremptory “longing for the country” had finally dictated action.36 With bag and baggage, children, and collie dog Wiley, who seems to have posed for Colin Thou Kenst (1855) and A Passing Cloud (1856), they settled in a modest residence. Suddenly, these city dwellers had become country folk, and their London colleagues turned to them for rural needs. William Powell Frith was working on Derby Day – the picture that attracted a huge crowd when it was exhibited in 1858 – and he

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needed an authentic agricultural labourer as a model for his varied crowd scene. Hook recommended a local man called Chitty, who had done odd jobs around his place. And Chitty was duly dispatched, smock and all, for his first and probably only visit to the big city. He appears as the tall countryman in a smock looking on at the left of Derby Day. With the first cottage that the Hooks rented, there was trouble with the landlord, so they moved to Tigbourne Cottage nearby. The Hambledon address appears for the first time in the academy’s catalogue for 1859, the year “Luff, Boy!” was exhibited; and the next year came Stand Clear! – a dramatic composition showing a boy (Tommy Cruse, I believe) hurling a rope as the prow of his boat surges shoreward on the crest of a wave. Hook did not regret the move. In the autumn of 1859, we find him rejoicing in earthy country doings in his new home. “I am now taking a fortnight’s holiday on my new territory,” he wrote to Hunt at Tor Villa, where he was busy with his “building, gardening, my cows and pigs in change for sea boys and green waves. Nothing like change. – You would not believe what calm happiness there is in lounging over your own pigstye and listening to [name illegible] enlarging on the virtues of your stock sow while her ten squeakers are tugging away for their living.”37 As Hook settled into country life and country ways, merely renting his home seemed unsatisfactory; and he looked about him for land to buy. He found an attractive plot on a Surrey hillside. Rosalie, usually so supportive of his decisions, had her doubts about this irretrievable step. And his colleagues, who had regarded his move to the country as a somewhat freakish experiment, a temporary whim, considered such a permanent commitment suicidal. “I had all of them against me,” he told Palmer, “but through the fir trees, I caught a glimpse of Chanctonbury Ring [the wooded crown of the South Downs], and I saw the whole thing finished before me.”38 He bought the plot, and proceeded to build the house he called Pine Wood,39 and to add more farm stock. Tigbourne Cottage passed on to the watercolourist Birket Foster, who later moved on to more commodious quarters at the elegant home he called The Hill. Then Tigbourne Cottage became the country resort of the Punch graphic artist Charles Keene, who was Hook’s friend and visitor over the years. The intercourse between the Hooks and the Fosters continued to be frequent and friendly. Over the Christmas season in the 1870s, the Fosters staged theatricals and dances that the Hooks attended; and Rosalie found the “Fosters all very good” in their roles.40 Their son William became a close friend of Bryan Hook and shared his keen interest in natural history. Keene would haunt The Hill as well as Silverbeck, and was a lively participant in the dances and in playing his favourite bagpipes. Photographs of Keene, as of the Fosters and many others of their spreading household, appear in the Silverbeck Album, a collection of portrait photographs collected by Allan and Bryan Hook. Witley was home to a thriving artists’ community.

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Pine Wood in Whitley, just up the hill from Whitley Station, became the Hooks’ new home, and there they were to live cheerfully for a number of years. While Hook was contentedly watching his piglets “tugging away for their living,” far from the madding crowds of London, academy business proceeded as usual. There was commonly a great stir of excitement at election time. With the number of academicians limited to forty, vacancies occurred only with the death or resignation of reigning academicians; and elections for the new academicians were fraught affairs, often going through a series of elimination ballots. Excitement was intense. Those in the running would stay home walking the floor in hopes of a rap at their door with the news they hoped for; cabbies stood ready to race each other to be the ones to get the glad tidings to the lucky man first. Richard Redgrave related how he had sprinted along the Strand and lingered in suspense by Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square – the Royal Academy was then in what is now the National Gallery – while waiting for the friend who had promised to sneak out with the word, good or bad.41 Hook, however, was away in the country, and out of reach of cabs. And though the telegraph was installed along the railway, there was no system for delivery. However, his academician friends managed to infringe the railway’s monopoly on the telegraph, as Allan Hook explained; and on 7 March 1860, a railway porter obligingly walked up the hill from Witley Station to deliver the welcome news that “James Clarke Hook, Esq.,” could now add the prestigious “RA” to his name.42

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6 “LINE MAKES LIGHT!” The Etching Club, 1838–1885

t h e e t c h i n g c l u b , a social and professional association of Victorian artists, was

remarkable among other things for its longevity. Founded in 1838, with an evolving membership, it lasted some forty-seven years, finally expiring in 1885. One member at least, John Callcott Horsley, RA, was present at both the first and the last meetings. In the course of its history, Charles West Cope wrote, “from very young men we got to be decidedly old, but yet with some friskiness left in us.”1 In recording the club’s place in Hook’s life, therefore, this chapter must spread over several decades. From the beginning, the Etching Club was to be a social as well as a professional entity. The objects of the club, as recorded in the books of minutes in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, were, “besides the enjoyment of one another’s Society,” the members’ “mutual improvement in art, and their advancement in that branch of it connected with Etching.”2 They met initially in each other’s lodgings, which were largely clustered in Kensington, for simple repasts of bread and cheese. And there, besides enjoying each other’s company, they spoiled sundry table tops with acid during the process of learning their art. As the members grew in status and prosperity, the modest suppers evolved into “dinners at an Inn [usually the King’s Arms in Kensington], and lastly, to sumptuous repasts in good private houses ... waited on by flunkeys,” as Cope wrote.3 For the visit to Hook’s home, Silverbeck, in June 1869, we even have a menu recorded by Rosalie Hook: “Dinner at quarter to five. Salmon – lobster sauce – R[oast] Lamb, R[oast] Chicken, stewed veal R[oast] ducks asparagus – cherry and g[ooseberry] pies – junket – pudding.” “All very merry,” she adds – as well they might be, with such a feast.4 The growing distinction of the membership, as well as their increasing prosperity, is suggested by the numbers of academicians among them. In the list of the first eight members in 1838, there were none. In the list of the fourteen members in 1876, ten were

6.1 / Charles West Cope, The Council of the Royal Academy Selecting Pictures for the Exhibition, 1876

Royal Academicians (RA), and one was an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA).5 In the same year, Cope exhibited a group portrait, The Council of the Royal Academy Selecting Pictures for the Exhibition – a process in which the public was keenly interested (see figure 6.1). Among those portrayed are the current president, Sir Francis Grant (seated, with hat); Frederic Leighton (far left, black beard), who was soon to succeed as president; and no less than six members of the Etching Club: Cope, the picture’s painter (at the back, surreptitiously taking likenesses), Richard Redgrave nearby (bald, white beard), John Everett Millais (foreground), with Horsley just beyond him, and – closest to the painting under discussion – Philip Calderon and Hook. Hook is the one most eagerly commenting on the canvas before them. He was an inspired judge of talent. His colleague G.D. Leslie, RA, who served with him on the council in a different year, wrote of him, “He was ... matchless at the task of selection. Truth to nature, sound workmanship, or purity of colour in any of the works that came before him never failed to catch his eye.”6 Also over time, the cluster of young artists in Kensington spread, so that by 1879 it became difficult to schedule meetings, “five of the members now residing in the country.”7 It seems that Hook had started a fashion. He himself, however, attended pretty regularly, despite living in the country. On one occasion, he returned all the way from Brittany, where he was painting at the time, to be there for a meeting.

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1 “ enj oym en t

o f o n e an ot h er ’s s o ciet y ”

2

In the records of the Etching Club, we find Hook in his relations with other artist friends of the day. He was not one of the club’s founding members; but he was elected in December 1850, shortly after Samuel Palmer, and somewhat before Millais and Hunt. This was the same year that he became an Associate of the Royal Academy. And he stayed to the end. Richard Redgrave was a founding member, and as we saw in chapter 5, he was the friend who introduced Hook to the village of Abinger and turned his thoughts to country subjects and country living. Redgrave and his brother Samuel were the authors of a useful little book of 1866, A Century of British Painting; and Samuel, though not a painter himself, did devoted work as the club’s honorary secretary until his death in 1876. A pair of brothers among the members – brothers who were very close – must have contributed to a sense of intimacy in the club’s doings. In later life Richard Redgrave’s vision was failing. He resigned from the academy in 1881 to make way for younger artists. And in 1882 he tried to resign from the Etching Club. But the members responded that they could not spare his company at “their cheerful evening meetings,” even if he could no longer contribute etchings. So he continued to attend, and was escorted home. At his last meeting, his son recorded, “Millais and Barlow kindly volunteered to see him home, but he fared somewhat uncomfortably between the very tall man and the very short one, and hardly knew how to manage his steps.”8 It is another illustration of the warm camaraderie that prevailed in the club. John Horsley was Hook’s tenant in 2 Tor Villas for several years (1855–59), and like Hook, he changed his subject matter from historical scenes to rural genre, often including courtship. He was a do-gooder, and often touched his colleagues for charitable donations. In the 1880s he took up the cause of models, declaring that posing in the nude robbed them of their female modesty. (Whether they appreciated his championship does not appear.) And as the Royal Academy’s rector, he refused the repeated requests of female students to be allowed to draw and paint from the nude. He was dubbed “Clothes-Horsley.” A more congenial friend was Samuel Palmer. “Little did I think,” Palmer wrote to Richard Redgrave, “when Hook walked into our Club meeting the first time (it was at Creswick’s) that the privilege of his friendship and that of his excellent wife would be such an item in the consolations of my future being.”9 He was particularly fond of Rosalie, who had given him a woollen garment that she had perhaps knitted herself. He wore it every day, he told her, “and the genial woollen ... is fluffy as its native lamb’s back.”10 He had been in on the choosing of the Hooks’ home (as we shall see in the next chapter), and he came there often, and called it “Elysium.”11 He and Hook agreed on etching matters too. It was Hook, he said, as he contemplated the stirring

12 4

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contrasts between the white paper and “lines full of Ink,” who had taught him that “Line makes LIGHT!”12 Two of the Pre-Raphaelite brethren, Millais and Hunt, had been Hook’s fellow students in the Academy Schools, as we have seen, and were his ongoing associates in the Etching Club. And when Hunt became Hook’s tenant in Tor Villa, after Hook’s move to Hambledon, he and Hook corresponded fairly regularly. Hunt was a tardy payer of rent, sometimes falling three quarters behind; and Hook had no scruple about scolding him. He was building a new house for himself, and he needed the money. He chided Hunt for his poor arithmetic, and humorously threatened to display his incorrect subtraction at the club meetings. At the bottom of one of Hook’s letters is written in another hand (Hunt’s own, I believe), “One of Hook’s many reproaches to the overworked and unmethodical artist concerning accounts when Hook’s tenant at Tor Villa.”13 Hook himself knew all about being “overworked,” but he would not have accepted it as an excuse for being “unmethodical.” Despite his scolding, however, he was genial and friendly. He invited Hunt and his son to visit at Pine Wood in Witley and offered to mount them if they chose to go join the hunt there.14 A friend whom Hook introduced to the Etching Club was Thomas Oldham Barlow the engraver, who regularly engraved the works of Millais, John “Spanish” Phillip, and others. It seems that when Hunt took over Tor Villa, Hook came to use Barlow’s home in Kensington, Auburn Lodge, as his London pied-à-terre. During one census, Hook was included in the Barlow household instead of in his own home, Silverbeck. With Barlow he shared the important entertainment connected with Studio Sunday, when the art cognoscenti, prospective buyers, and dealers would tour the studios to see the works of prominent artists before they were sent to the Royal Academy. For instance, in the first week of April 1869, Barlow’s wife Ellen recorded in her diary, “Gentlemen’s ‘Oyster and Picture’ party in the evening. Mr and Mrs Hook lodged here.”15 It was indeed a “Gentlemen’s” party, and Allan Hook recorded that the rooms grew thick with tobacco smoke during the course of the evening. The event that Barlow and Hook hosted was on the Saturday evening, for oysters and a good white wine, and Allan Hook recalled that invitations to the occasion were much prized. Here talk of pictures flew fast and furious: “They were discussed, appreciated, and criticized to the full by men capable of understanding what the painter had striven for, and of knowing the difficulties of realization. It was the verdict of men such as these that my father cared for.”16 Allan wrote with experience, since he and his brother Bryan had gone through the Academy Schools and become exhibiting artists themselves. They too showed their pictures and participated in the occasion. It was not only “men” who were capable of understanding such matters, since Hook recognised Rosalie as his best critic and adviser. But despite the fact that there had been

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two women among the first forty academicians at the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768 – Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser – and although some women, such as Elizabeth Thompson Butler, won huge fame, no other woman was elected to the academy until the twentieth century. For all her talent, Rosalie remained a supporter of her menfolk’s careers rather than pursuing her own. The younger generation of Barlows and Hooks were friendly too, and the Thomas Oldham Barlow Papers in the National Art Library show many visits and exchanges between the two households. In an undated letter on a visit to Silverbeck, Lucy Barlow recorded that Allan was drawing a portrait of Jenny, and she was impressed that Jenny sat so well. ( Jenny was a monkey.) And in January 1876 Ellen Barlow wrote, “Bryan Hook brought flowers and 5 Natterjacks for Lucy” – a characteristic offering from twentyyear-old Bryan, who was a naturalist, and fond of natterjack toads. An extra activity that Hook shared with Barlow was an occasional sailing trip on the yacht Dawn, which belonged to one Mr Burnett.17 In April 1875, for instance, Hook and Barlow took off with Burnett for Portsmouth on a sailing excursion that took them past Dartmouth and then to Cowes on the Isle of Wight. From the sea on that trip, Hook glimpsed the little fishing village of Hallsands on the south coast of Devon, and made a mental note to return there to paint. It turned out to be a rewarding site for his work. And no doubt his sailing excursion, though a pleasure cruise with gentlemen, was helpful in enabling him to participate in the experience of the fisher personnel of his paintings. Hook looked after Barlow’s interests too. Besides introducing him as the new secretary of the Etching Club after the death of Samuel Redgrave, he successfully nominated him for election to the Royal Academy – although engravers were rare among the academicians. Ellen Barlow recorded the happy celebrations surrounding this event, when academicians hailed their new colleagues, and the new colleagues made a point of calling on all academicians to pay their respects. For 28 January 1873 Ellen Barlow recorded, “Papa [that is, her husband] elected ARA. Joe Wall brought the news of his success. Then followed Horsley, Hook, and [Richard] Ansdell [all Etching Club members]. They scrambled out of the cab and each tried to be first to ring the bell then they rang both bells until Christine answered. There was great rejoicing for everybody was pleased!!” Her account provides a pleasant glimpse of the customs surrounding election to the academy. Hook, Horsley, and Ansdell were all academicians themselves by this time. But as they scrambled like schoolboys out of the cab, they showed, as Cope wrote, that they still had “some friskiness left” in them. Hook enjoyed such festivities, and loved to host his friends, especially after he had moved to his country demesnes. He chose June, the last meeting of the season before the summer break, to invite the Etching Club members to share a day or more with him at

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his country home in Hambledon. The club’s minutes recorded several such occasions. The first of them was in June 1858: A special meeting was held this day on the particular invitation of Hook, who entertained the Members at Hambledon near Godalming, present [ John Frederick] Tayler, Palmer, Ansdell, [Thomas] Creswick, and the Secretar y [Samuel Redgrave]. The Club started from London by the early train and were met by Hook at Godalming station – from there by carriage which Hook had provided, they followed the old Portsmouth road to Hindhead, where they partook of an ample luncheon by the way-side, and then followed the pretty country road to Hook’s house, where they dined. The secretary added, “The Club wish to record the complete enjoyment they felt in this day in the Country – and the excellent arrangements and very hospitable provision made by their Host.”18 Such an addition is unusual in the mostly businesslike record that the minutes provide. Hook would have delighted in exceeding expectations. On that occasion, the Hooks’ house was Tigbourne Cottage in Hambledon. In May 1863 he hosted the club again, this time at Pine Wood, the new house he had built at Witley. “A good dinner did not prove productive of Club business,” the secretary recorded ironically. This year, Hook’s hospitality was moved back to May, and the June meeting was held over two days at the “Cranbrook Colony,” a cluster of artists that included Horsley, George Bernard O’Neill, and Thomas Webster. They were following Hook’s lead in splendid hospitality.19 And there were to be several further gatherings of the club members once the Hooks had moved to Silverbeck in Churt – the first of them in June 1869, when Rosalie recorded the menu quoted earlier. The Etching Club was of course a gathering of men; but at least on these occasions the women too were welcomed and appreciated as part of the social scene, and as providers of hospitality – Rosalie and her mother and later Rosalie and her daughter-in-law, Bryan’s wife. The members’ pleasure in one another’s society was spreading. Besides the customary celebration at the end of the season, there was another holiday in April, immediately after Sending-in Day. When I first examined the Etching Club minutes, I was somewhat puzzled by the notable gap in meetings in April, since their holiday excursions were not recorded. That is not to say, however, that meetings did not happen. But for any record of them, we have to look elsewhere. Richard Redgrave’s memoir provides an interesting account of the April excursion of 1859. Nine club members – “Ansdell, Cope, Creswick, Cary, Hook, Horsley, G.B. O’Neill, Sam and I,” he wrote – gathered at Paddington Station and decided to dine at

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their old haunt, the Orkney Arms at Maidenhead.20 At Slough, after telegraphing the pub to order their dinner, they consulted a policeman about hiring a vehicle, and duly mounted a barouche – six inside and three on top, besides the postboy. As they progressed through the countryside, sometimes walking and sometimes riding, and then lingering over a picnic lunch, they were puzzled to encounter “so many roughs who had apparently left their usual work for some special purpose.”21 They discovered that they were being followed by taxicabs, and by a horseman who galloped across fields to beat them to the Orkney Arms. It turned out that this was the day of the championship boxing match; and because of their telegraphing the pub and consulting a policeman, they had been taken for the backers, seeking a secluded site to make their bets. “‘Bless you, sir,’” the Orkney Arms landlord told the man on horseback, who had followed them all the way from Paddington. “‘I knows the gentlemen – they are none of the fancy [i.e., the boxing world]. They come here for a holiday, and to eat a good dinner’... So he lost his day, and we enjoyed the joke over dinner,” Redgrave ended the anecdote.22 It was one more piece of fun for the frisky club members on their day of relaxation after the hard labour leading up to Sending-in Day.23

1

t h e j u n i o r etch i n g clu b

2

There was a Junior Etching Club too, an offshoot that clearly pleased Etching Club members, who presented the new club with copies of their publications so far. James McNeill Whistler, the brilliant American, was a member, though his attendance was irregular. The Punch graphic artist Charles Keene (who specialised in art matters) and the political cartoonist John Tenniel (illustrator of the Alice books) were also members, as was Henry Stacy Marks, RA, who was a painter with a reputation for humour as well as a graphic artist. The Junior Etching Club proposed to make a collection illustrating British patriotic songs, including “God Save the Queen,” “Lillabullero,” and “The Burial of Sir John Moore” (Keene’s choice). But the collection did not appear, and the Junior Etching Club expired well before its parent organisation, lasting only from 1851 to 1864, when it was dissolved.

1 “mut ual

im provem en t i n

...

etch i n g ”

2

Although I have chosen to focus first on the Etching Club’s social doings and playful shenanigans, the members were of course professionally occupied too. They were serious about the objective of their “mutual improvement in art, and their advancement in that branch of it connected with Etching.” They bought themselves a press – Hook had the

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charge of it for many years – and they learned about biting-in and about proofs and printing. Then they proceeded to create projects that they could do together, print, and sell. When the club began in the late 1830s, the first projects were essentially in illustration. They began with Oliver Goldsmith’s well-known poem of 1770, The Deserted Village. Members chose subjects, announced them, and worked on them; then they produced a text with their etchings included, printed with due care, before going to market with the result. Next came Etch’d Thoughts (1844); Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1847);24 Songs of Shakespeare (1848); John Milton’s L’Allegro (1849);25 and Songs and Ballads of Shakespeare (1852). This 1852 publication was the first collection to which Hook contributed. The ties between the “sister arts” of painting and literature were well established in the nineteenth century, and painters made it their business to be familiar with Shakespeare and other major authors. As his contribution, Hook chose to illustrate a song from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, “Who Is Sylvia?” (“Sylvia” has remained a name that recurs among his descendants.) The song suited his subject matter of the time. As we have seen, he had already painted subjects from The Merchant of Venice and Othello, and he was familiar with the period costume. Such literary projects lent themselves well to team work, and the division of the labour of making the etchings. It seems, however, that these subjects in illustration were not entirely congenial to the members, perhaps because illustrations are often subordinated to the text they illustrate. Moreover, these projects did not necessarily relate to the other work the members had in hand. They gravitated towards their own individual subjects. Through the years, there were various projects for group works that would be connected by a common theme. In 1856 came a proposal, duly accepted, “to consider the subjects to arise from a ship, from its birth to its grave, for the new Etching Club work.”26 It is a reasonable guess that the idea originated with Hook. Hook wrote of it to Horsley, who had missed the meeting, “New subject proposed ... life and death of the ship, not the public of that sign but the noun ship in all its poetical length and breadth, capital subject ... for you who don’t know a bowsprit from a yardarm. Never mind, you’ll get over the nautical part somehow.”27 (Not one of Hook’s most courteous missives!) The collection on a ship, however, did not happen. Likewise, the subject of “A day in the country” fell by the wayside. A series of etchings illustrating proverbs was planned in 1862, and some proverbs were actually proposed and spoken for. Some choices seem characteristic of what we know of each member’s chosen subject matter: Hook volunteered, “Venture a sprat to catch a mackerel”; Hunt, no doubt inspired by his eastern travels, offered, “It’s the last straw that breaks a camel’s back”; and Palmer the pastoralist suggested, “Make hay while the sun shines.”28 It is amusing to project what each would have made of his chosen subject. Eventually, however, with no etchings forthcoming on these promising

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6.2 / The Fisherman’s “Good Night,” n.d.

themes, it was settled that “the subjects of future Etchings be left to each member to select.”29 The painters seem to have returned to creating etchings of their own paintings. Why produce an etching of a painting that you have already completed and exhibited? Some of the members, at least, regarded etchings as the poor man’s painting – not in a derogatory sense, but out of a liberal desire to bring original works of art within the range of modest purses. “Those who are not rich can only obtain works of art in the shape of engravings and etchings,” Samuel Palmer wrote to Hook in August 1880.30 And he suggested that the club should produce cheaper versions of their work by using less expensive paper. Engravings after popular paintings, which could be turned out in hundreds, would be cheaper still; but engravings after paintings were done by professional engravers, whereas an etching was a signature work executed by the artist himself. Hook’s finely developed etching of The Fisherman’s “Good Night” can stand in bravely, at least in the original etching with all its refinements of tone, for the painting reproduced in chapter 5 (see figure 6.2). If an etching was to serve as a kind of understudy to a painting, then it is not surprising that the painterly quality of etchings – the depth of tone and the high development achieved through a series of bitings-in and new proofs – should have been highly valued.

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6.3 / Charles West Cope, The Life School at the Royal Academy, 1865

Andrea Fredericksen appropriately subtitles her article on the Etching Club “A Taste for Painters’ Etchings.”31 These painters built up their etchings through many bitings-in and proofs, paying close attention to tone and lighting effects. In Cope’s etching of his self-conscious The Life School at the Royal Academy of 1865, done while he was the Keeper at the Academy Schools, he defined his light source, and made his light the brighter for the darkness of his darks (see figure 6.3). Palmer wrote poetically of the value of the still illuminated darks in an etching: “It seems to me that the charm of etching is the glimmering through of the white paper even in the shadows; so that almost everything either sparkles, or suggests sparkle.” “Retroussage,” he added, referring to the wiping of a plate with a cloth before printing, “extinguishes those thousand little luminous eyes which peer through a finished linear etching.”32 These are effects impossible to reproduce; but Palmer’s etching of The Lonely Tower allows us to glimpse the value of the whites that shine through the darks (see figure 6.4). The Etching Club members valued the painterly qualities in etching, and their system of evaluation recognised and rewarded such qualities. As part of their program of “improvement in art,” they actually graded each other’s performances, and awarded the

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6.4 / Samuel Palmer, The Lonely Tower, n.d.

profits from their publications accordingly. Cope explained, “To ascertain the relative value of each etching a simple plan was devised. Each etching was held up in turn to be voted for; and any number, from one to ten, might be put down as its value on a piece of paper by each member. The papers were folded up and put into a hat, and then read out ... and each contributor received his proportion of the profits accordingly.”33 To most of us, “simple” would hardly be the word, especially when it came to translating the score into a proportion of profits. But the members were used to it. It was their way of rewarding quality as they saw it. Rembrandt, the master of chiaroscuro and of etching, was inevitably a model. And Hook accumulated a fine collection of Rembrandt etchings. From such evidence as the minutes record, it seems that this system worked well. Palmer and Hook, whose etchings were very fully developed, tended to score highly. And Hook made it his business to collect Palmer etchings too. So things proceeded amicably, until a new member, Francis Seymour Haden, arrived with the apple of discord. Haden was a surgeon by profession, and a distinguished one. He numbered such people as William Thackeray among his patients. He was also a talented etcher, and brother-in-law to another, James McNeill Whistler. Whistler and Haden, initially close, etched similar subjects, and were mutually influential – until their falling-out, when Whistler knocked Haden through a plate glass window. After that, things between them were never quite the same.

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According to Whistler’s biographers, Haden in social relations had “an exaggerated pomposity bolstered by his family’s wealth and social standing.”34 Hook would have found such a bearing very irritating. In 1860, the same year that he joined the Etching Club, Haden began exhibiting etchings at the Royal Academy, under the pseudonym “H. Dean” – perhaps for fear of compromising his professional standing by visibly dabbling in the arts. Nevertheless, he considered the etcher’s needle to be particularly compatible with the surgeon’s scalpel. According to the author of A Book of British Etching, Walter Shaw Sparrow, who was clearly an admirer, “Haden’s training and practice as an excellent surgeon gave qualities of touch to his etching needle, and qualities also to his art as a master of biting.”35 To members of the Etching Club, or at least to some of them, Haden was a surgeon first, and therefore an amateur artist. In his biography of his father (and no doubt influenced by him), Allan Hook wrote of the Etching Club that “discord had been introduced in the form of a measure originated by one of its members, an amateur, Mr. Seymour Haden.”36 Whistler too refused to recognise Haden as a real artist. When Haden took it upon himself to add legs to Whistler’s etching of Haden’s daughter Annie, Whistler added a note: “Legs not by me, but a fatuous addition by a general practitioner.”37 For his part, Haden apparently looked on the club members as painters with outworn practices in etching. Particularly, he thought scorn of their process of evaluating the contributions to club publications; and he pushed for a simple alternative to their complex scoring system. In January 1871 he and Horsley proposed that in future the earnings from club publications “be apportioned in equal shares to each plate contributed.”38 Neither Hook nor Palmer was present at this meeting, and the measure passed. It was after all a move in the direction of simplicity. But to some it was a betrayal of principles that the club held dear. To Haden, at least for evaluation purposes, an etching is and etching is an etching. Why should one etching be rewarded more highly than another? Walter Sparrow, Haden’s champion, clearly repeated Haden’s view when he called the club’s means of evaluation “a blunder.” “Members agreed that profits would be shared on the visible or apparent amount of time which they put into their published plates,” he wrote.39 This version of the original system suggests a crude measurement by quantity of time spent. But to those who believed in the system as set up from the outset of the club’s existence, they were measuring by quality, whereas Haden’s system of equal payment per etching was the crude quantitative measure. Why should it have mattered? It was not as though large amounts of money were at stake: the earnings from club publications were far less than these artists could make from their paintings. But the grading system they had devised was about recognising

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the best. And historically, the difference in principle defined the two divergent schools of etching in Britain. It was an issue on which Hook was ready to take a stand. At the next meeting, in February, Hook protested against “the great unfairness of applying [a new rule] to a work completed under different and long established regulations.”40 The rule was changed back again for the present work. But Haden persisted. And in May he gave notice that at the next meeting he would propose the same measure. There was no meeting in June, nor for the rest of 1871. Perhaps members were licking their wounds. In February 1872 Haden was absent. But in April he proposed his motion again, and votes were taken: five in favour and three opposed, with Millais and Ansdell abstaining. The measure therefore passed, but at the cost of painful division among the hitherto friendly and united membership. Evidently, in some degree of shock at this state of affairs, members agreed that “formal adoption will depend upon its confirmation at the next meeting.”41 The next meeting did not happen for four years. In the interval, the secretary, the devoted Samuel Redgrave, had died. Barlow became the new secretary. And in Haden’s absence, members agreed to revert to the old system. Haden stayed on as a member for a while, but it seems that there were more rows, and on 8 April 1878 he resigned. In a letter to Cope, he lamented the “disruption of the good fellowship which had subsisted among us for so many years.”42 He complained afterwards that the club members considered him “a cuckoo in the nest,” and probably he was right.43 To some of them, at least, he was a Johnny-comelately, an amateur who presumed to tell professional artists and long-time members their business. To Haden, they were painters who were stuck in a groove and could not recognise the opportunities for the brilliant sketchiness that etching could offer. All these disagreements could be dismissed as a storm in a teacup, a kind of fever that can afflict even friendly organisations over time. But the issue has its larger implications in the history of British etching. The Etching Club was important in creating a distinctly English school in etching, a medium that had long flourished in Europe but not in England. And the fact that it consisted largely of a group of painters, with painterly principles, was part of what defined it. The newer sort of etching, as practised by Haden and Whistler and the French school of etching, set store by a more spontaneous and less laboured product, sometimes completed in a sitting, leaving “air” and empty corners – suggestive rather than finished. According to the entry on Haden in the Dictionary of National Biography, he promoted “a conception of etching as an art of ‘learned omission’ in which sparse linearity stood for intellectual thought.”44 A parodic version of such a principle asserts that the most thoughtful etching of all would be a blank page.

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In the long run, however, Haden could be said to be the winner, inasmuch as his kind of etching prevailed. Ironically, Andrea Fredericksen, though acknowledging the importance of the Etching Club in the history of British etching, writes that it was “superseded and overshadowed by Haden’s more professional society.”45 To hear the “amateur” Haden called more professional than themselves would make the Etching Club members turn in their graves! Hook believed in the club’s kind of etching, and despised the more modern forms. He wrote to Palmer, “Some etchers, nowadays, dip a daddy long-legs into the ink, and start him on an adventure across a continent of papier vergé. A glowing eulogy appears in The Times. 1st state proofs, before daddy fluttered his wings, 5 guineas! After flutter, 8 guineas!! And so on. Poor Rembrandt!”46 This fragment from Hook’s letter is provided by Palmer’s son and editor, A.H. Palmer, who knew Hook well – and was of course on Hook’s and his father’s side in the debate. He was an artist too, and an experienced printer of etchings. Modern etchings, he wrote, “do not show the true genius of an exquisite and essentially autographic art; and although they may be, as their admirers assert, ‘true etchings,’ or ‘done at a sitting,’ or done ‘with a few lines sternly clear,’ they kick the beam as works of art and love, when fairly weighed ... against such plates as Mr. Hook’s Egg Gatherers”47 – or, indeed, against his father’s Opening the Fold (1880), and other rare and beautiful etchings (see figures 6.5 and 6.6). Sharing as he did Hook’s and his father’s principles in etching, Herbert Palmer gave his own version of the difference between the club’s kind of etchings and the more recent developments: “Once a highly-finished etching, full as it ought to be of variety of tone, sparkle, shadow-transparency, and feeling, was a work upon which a man was content to dwell for day after day and week after week.” Etchings of this old school could and did represent “the glow of sunset, the flash of dawn, the pallid sheen of the moon, or the ruddy glow of firelight, by means of the skilful use of the needle and acid.” One can find these effects in his father’s etchings, which are both painstaking and brilliant. But his taste was not for Haden’s school of etching: “There arose a school who, for motives that are best left without enquiry, said these little plates were not etchings after all, thence proceeding to show the world what were.”48 Young Palmer was clearly partisan; but he was not the only one to admire Hook’s kind of layered and developed etchings. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, a notable connoisseur and historian of etching, commented on Hook’s Etching: A Sea Boy Gathering Eggs, “Etching can go no further than this in effects produced in modern painting ... We see in it the rich copal glazes and the skillful dry touching, of which, as a painter, [Hook] is such an accomplished master. This is less an etching than a translation of oil colour; but in its own way it is skillful beyond praise.”49

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6.5 / Etching: A Sea Boy Gathering Eggs, 1865

6.6 / Samuel Palmer, Opening the Fold, 1880

In the end, of course, preference for the old or the new styles of British etching must be a matter of taste. But the battle in the Etching Club over the issue of evaluating etchings has its historical place in the story of British etching. The club carried on for some years after Haden’s resignation. But its collections became fewer, the gaps between them longer. Of the 1870 production, Twenty Etchings for the Art Union of London by the Etching Club, the minutes note with dismay, “Last production dating so far back as 1864.”50 The momentum was faltering, and the collections were not selling. The Art Union turned down the 1879 collection, declaring the price was too high, and copies had to be disposed of among members. A brief revival of the old spirit of the club came with a proposal by Hunt and Hook: “The next work of the Club to be a series of portraits of its members, each Member doing his own or another Member’s portrait.”51 It could have been a successful enterprise, as there was great public interest in artists, their lives, their works, and their studios. They were the celebrities of the day, and the Etching Club included many of the biggest names among the academicians. Hunt himself seems to have begun a self-portrait; and there is a sketch of Samuel Palmer executed by Charles West Cope from memory that may have belonged to this project. Enthusiasm and energy were flagging, however; and after some meetings in 1884 with “no business” before the members, the meeting of January 1885 turned out to be their last. They ended not with a bang but a whimper. Nevertheless, they had made their mark.

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7 “ T H E I R FAVO U R I T E PA I N T E R ” The Academician, 1860–1870s

F r e sh ly e l ec t e d as an academician, James Clarke Hook had an unpleasant surprise

when it came to submitting his diploma painting – the work that every new academician was required to give the Royal Academy of Arts for its own collection. He submitted an appealing painting, true to his new sea mode, which he had painted at St Ives. It shows three St Ives fishermen hanging over the stern of their boat to see their new catch, and – on discovering only a useless dogfish – exclaiming in disgust, as per the title of the picture, “Another Dog!” (1860). Perhaps the disgust was catching, because the academy rejected it. This was an embarrassment, as Allan Hook explained.1 Hook’s other paintings of the year were sold or already spoken for. In due course, he submitted A Narrow Lane (1864) as his diploma painting, though Allan considered it “the worst picture my father ever painted.”2 Years later, when it was discovered how poorly Hook was represented in the academy’s collection of diploma paintings, he was allowed to replace A Narrow Lane with Gathering Limpets, painted at Sennen Cove and exhibited in 1886 – about a quarter century after his election. It is hard to know why “Another Dog!” should have been rejected, for it is a brilliantly fresh composition, though unusual, and the St Ives fishermen are fully characterised (see figure 7.1). Perhaps it was the difficulty of defining which genre it belonged to: was it portraiture, landscape, seascape? The unusually low viewpoint – from the water upward at a boat – may have suggested a fish’s-eye view. The academy was notoriously conservative, not to say reactionary, in some of its attitudes. Renamed Deep Sea Fishing, the picture now graces the fine collection of Hooks at the Guildhall Gallery in London. Now confirmed – but for this little bump in the road – in his new identity as an inspired painter of the sea and coastal scenes, and with the academy’s recognition, and 7.1 (facing)/ “Another Dog!” [renamed Deep Sea Fishing], 1860

numerous commissions to bolster his confidence, Hook continued a routine of work and excursions. Comfortably settled in Pine Wood, the house with studio that he had built for himself at Witley in Surrey, and with his pigs flourishing and his fruit trees growing, he was set up for work and recreation – and he engaged in both with equal energy. In the winter months, he would work on finishing the paintings done on location, sometimes adding props and fishing or sailing gear, of which he kept a useful store to hand, while making the most of all available light to complete his paintings by the deadline of Sending-in Day in April. Spring gave him time for gardening. And as the summer advanced, he and Rosalie, along with young Allan and Bryan, who flourished in their country setting, would pack canvases and painting gear and head to some remote coastal village with picturesque headlands, to paint and paint. Then they would come home with their canvases in the autumn in time for him to fit in an inland scene, and so proceed to finish the pictures that would be exhibited the following spring. The family nearly always travelled together, with schooling to be fitted in somehow. And they were intrepid travellers. Many of the villages they went to were not yet served by the railway, so various other means of transport had to be devised. And once they had arrived at their chosen painting location, they had to find accommodation – usually lodging with a local family, as few such places had anything approaching a hotel. For their 1861 excursion to Aberporth, a coastal village in Cardiganshire in Wales, they managed to find a small cottage to rent. But except for the parson and the harbourmaster, no one in the village spoke a word of English, so finding services and supplies was a problem. Rosalie became the cook herself, and hired a young girl from the village to help with cleaning.3 Available groceries were basic, so their meals were necessarily simple. One of Rosalie’s useful recipes for such occasions has survived, though recorded much later: “Mrs Hook’s dish of fish pie: Any cold fish boned and any butter left over from the day before mixed with it, salt and pepper. Add cayenne. Put in a pie dish and some mashed potato on the top. Bake until brown.”4 In such locations, getting fish would not be a problem. Fish figure frequently in Hook’s paintings, and he would probably have had to buy them in order to provide his detailed portraits of them; and “any fish” makes the recipe readily adaptable. “Any butter left over” also suggests the rough-and-ready, hand-to-mouth existence the family lived in such places. Considering the relative luxury of their accommodation and fare at home, the family members too had to be adaptable. This 1860 painting trip to St Ives in Cornwall was the family’s first professional trip from Pine Wood. Once the railway reached St Ives, the town was to become a frequent resort of painters, and it still has a vigorous resident artistic community. It was no doubt Hook who helped to show the way. There – besides “Another Dog!” – he painted Leaving Cornwall for the Whitby Fishing (1861), showing a fisherman parting from his family, with all his gear to hand for the long trip around Land’s End and up the east coast of England.

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7.2 / “Compass’d by the Inviolate Sea,” 1863

The route was long-established among fishermen, even if the genteel population who travelled by land had hardly yet discovered this picturesque western fishing centre. Another painting from St Ives was “Compass’d by the Inviolate Sea” (1863). The title is a line from Alfred Tennyson’s Dedication to the Queen (1851), and it sounds a characteristic note of British patriotism. (Prompted by Hook’s painting, David Tovey used the same line as the title for his 2016 exhibition of paintings from St Ives.) It is another family piece, with the fisherman and his wife enjoying their baby, while their sturdy young son – painted from Bryan Hook – clambers up from the beach (see figure 7.2). Today the rock features have been altered for a car park, but the headlands beyond St Ives Bay, where Hook was to return on later trips, are accurately rendered. Godrevy Island appears on the skyline, but its lighthouse, which was to figure in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927), was yet to be built. The main focus of both pictures is still the seafaring family – the figures – rather than the sea itself. But “the inviolate sea” is the context; and Hook was building his skill in rendering all phases of calm and stormy waters. Being a larger centre than the villages nearby where Hook was to paint in later years, St Ives often served him for models. Although he regularly painted the background on the spot, and probably decided more or less on the human action it surrounded, he did not require his human models to pose outdoors for the time it would take to render them in situ. However, he had a sharp eye for local physiognomy; and he wanted his people to belong to their surroundings. In St Ives he could find genuine Cornish men and women to people his Cornish scenes – even if he finished details of dress and gear at home in the studio, where he collected such items. And since different parts of

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Cornwall – Gwithian, Bedruthan Steps, Mullion, Port Isaac, and particularly Sennen Cove – furnished the scenes for a large number of his paintings, the models in St Ives served him well. Some years later, we find him writing from Gwithian to his friend Alexander Macdonald, “We shall most likely go from here to St Ives for models, sailors and fisherwomen, and fish can be found in perfection there with boats and gear of all sorts.”5 He was a stickler for authenticity. Hook regularly called on a local boy – in Clovelly, Johnny Cruse or his brother Tommy – to help carry his gear, secure the easel from blowing over, run errands, or merely receive commentary. He did not like to paint alone. But since the local boys in Aberporth, his destination in 1861, spoke only Welsh, they could not serve. So Allan, only eight at the time, was called on to be the boy assistant; and he served many years in that capacity, like the apprentices of earlier times. In due course, Bryan took over.6 Rosalie also regularly set herself up nearby, with a novel or letters, and often with an umbrella to serve in either sunny or rainy weather. And from Allan’s youthful pencil, we have a sketch of her on duty in this way. Since the Hook family, a company of painters and painters-to-be, regularly travelled and sometimes worked as a unit, it is natural enough that many of Hook’s paintings are family scenes. At Aberporth, Hook painted Sea Air (1862), showing an ailing mother enjoying the benefits of fresh coastal air as she rides in a cart that is attended rather casually by her young sons. There too he painted The Acre by the Sea (1862), returning to his theme of a working family’s midday meal outdoors (see figure 7.3a). A mother, with her sickle at her side, has been harvesting the wheat alongside the menfolk, and she pauses in that labour to take on the next job, feeding the baby that her daughter has been tending. It is a hot day, and one of the men is mopping his brow. On the ground, with the rake and other harvest implements, appears the same stoneware vessel that figured in A Few Minutes to Wait before Twelve O’clock (1854) and The Shipboy’s Letter (1857). It seems Hook was a thrifty painter as well as an accurate one. The “acre” under cultivation is indeed very near the sea – on the very edge of a cliff, in fact. For such subsistence farmers, every square yard was put into service for cultivation. A modern photograph of the same site shows the same cliff edge overgrown with brambles (see figure 7.3b). Time and habits of cultivation change, but the cliffs and headlands endure. My project of visiting the sites of Hook’s paintings, and producing the series I call “Hookscapes Then and Now,” is revealing, both for recording change – though often the physical features of rocks and headlands have remained astonishingly stable – and for demonstrating Hook’s fidelity to the actual scene before him. “Poetic licence” was not a privilege he made use of. A meticulous attention to what was actually before him, with a full appreciation of its beauty, was a leading principle, almost an article of faith. “[I] stick as near as possible to our Father’s lovely creation,” he wrote to a fellow Methodist.7 In this painting the

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7.3a / The Acre by the Sea, 1862

7.3b / The site at Aberporth of The Acre by the Sea

figures were not fisher families but farmers, and he chose to show them in the heat of the day, with the deep blue of the summer sea as part of the scene. After Aberporth the Hooks revisited Clovelly, where Hook could always find a good subject. But he was eager for new sites to paint too, and he kept exploring. The next May, Rosalie recorded quite a West Country odyssey while they sought a suitable place to settle for the summer’s painting. “To Brixham, Dartmouth, Hey Tor, Mortonhampstead, Tavistock, Plymouth, St Austel, Mevagissey, Gorran, Penzance, Land’s End, Mousehole, Newlyn,” she wrote.8 Finally, they took ship for the Scilly Isles, which were still very far off the beaten tourist track. And on Tresco, they stopped and painted through June and much of July. From there Hook wrote enthusiastically to William Holman Hunt, “I am painting here against wind and weather, having found out that it is of no use waiting for either out on the Atlantic. These islands are very beautiful, the color of the water is marvelous over the white sand of the most brilliant green, over the dark rocks a purple – and where the deep water is a blue, which you even you wd not believe in.”9 His “you even you” recognises Hunt’s famously vivid colouring – for instance, in Christ in the Temple (1860) – which Hook had recently seen and commented on. His appreciation of colour was strong and instinctive, almost an appetite. Leaving at Low Water (1863), painted on Tresco and now at Royal Holloway College, shows a woman pulling off her shoes preparatory to wading to a nearby boat, while a sturdy little boy, probably Bryan again, investigates a bulging wicker hamper full of her effects. The mother’s moment of shaky balance as she removes her shoe, and the boy’s delving arm and braced bare foot, give a certain intimacy to the scene. And beyond the figures stretches that deep blue sea Hook described to Hunt (see figure 7.4). In the summer of 1863, Hook turned (surprisingly) to industrial matters. Although famous for its sea and its fishing communities, Cornwall was also a mining centre, and the chimneys of the old tin and copper mines are still a feature of the Cornish landscape today. The Botallack Mine at St Just was in the news as a remarkable feat of engineering, since it featured a steeply sloping shaft that took miners down under the sea to work on seams of tin and copper ore previously deemed inaccessible. On a tragic day in April 1863, the chain that held the skip broke, and nine miners plunged to their deaths. The accident was still fresh in local memory when Hook came again to West Cornwall and painted his picture From under the Sea (1864), which is certainly a dramatic one. The vertical composition (unusual for him) emphasises the steepness of the slope down to the cavern in the cliff and beyond (see figure 7.5a). Again, the subject of the wife and children bringing the breadwinner his noontime dinner recalls the emotional ties that bind workers and their dependent families, evoking the care and anxiety that attend working people in their sometimes fatally dangerous occupations; the death of one miner brought

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7.4 / Leaving at Low Water, 1863

disaster to his whole family. Besides the dramatic scene, Hook paid full attention to technical matters, and industrial historians have found great interest in his rendering of the mining site. In 1971 an expert on Cornish mining, John Fromiston, wrote enthusiastically about the picture to Richard Trevithick (descendant of the famous inventor of the steam locomotive): “The picture is of great technical interest ... Note the string of drills, and the drinking water ‘kag’ strung at the end of the skip.”10 The Times critic too admired the rendering of the “Botallack miners ... red with ore, the scarce extinguished candle-ends in their mining hats still smouldering.” And he drew attention to “the steep incline that leads down to the wondrous shaft, which goes down, down, who shall say how deep or how far, under the sea that lashes those cliffs.”11 One can see the chain mechanism that hauls and lowers the skip, and viewers could imagine all too readily what had happened when the chain broke, and the skip and its human cargo plunged “down, down” to destruction. Probably because Hook’s picture had kept the Botallack Mine disaster in the public eye, later in 1864 the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra, to restore confidence in

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7.5a / From under the Sea, 1864

7.5b / The site at St Just of From under the Sea

the mine, made a royal visit and descended, with due publicity, down the sloping shaft – to be entertained with a glass of champagne “under the sea,” break a token piece of copper ore, and ascend again safely to the surface. When we took our pilgrimage to find the exact site of From under the Sea, it was easy to find where the St Just mines had been, and there is a small museum there. But the mines were extensive, the cliffs steep, and all identifying machinery – the rails for the shaft, the crane mechanism on the crag, and so on – were long removed. We were almost ready to abandon the project, when I caught sight of the relatively pale rock on the cliff to the left of the shaft, and recognised it from Hook’s painting (see figure 7.5b). That pale rock once identified, everything else fell into place, including “the sea that lashes those cliffs”; and we could see the entrance to the shaft, now blocked by boulders to discourage spelunkers. I had to risk my neck, and my husband’s camera, to get down to the very site. I suspect that Hook and the miners made use of a series of ladders. Hook didn’t do things by halves. A picture he was to call Milk for the Schooner (1864) shows some seamen tethering a goat, preparatory to taking her by boat to a larger waiting craft, where she is to supply the captain and crew with milk for their tea, or possibly provide sustaining nourishment for an orphaned baby.12 Not content with borrowing a local goat for the purpose, Hook purchased a pair of female goats of a suitable breed to bring home to add to the growing menagerie at Pine Wood. “The goats arrived from Cape Cornwall,” Rosalie recorded on 12 August 1863.13 In later years Bryan Hook was

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to become an expert on goats and goat breeding, and published a book called Milch Goats and Their Management (1896).14 Hook’s popularity was growing apace, and buyers were clamouring for his next painting. Now that he had taken to sea pieces, sea pieces were what they wanted. But he liked to do landscapes too. And when the family returned from their sojourns by the sea, he would settle to doing an inland scene in Surrey. He was especially fond of the tanned arms and faces of workers in the field, and sometimes he would hurry home to catch their colours before they faded. He would never have simply invented the late-summer tanned forearms. In his book, that would have been cheating. In the late summer of 1863, Hook found an inland subject of a boy and girl getting water from a stream crossed by a simple stone bridge. The site suited him for more reasons than one. Although he liked to have a local attendant or family member on hand to run errands, he hated to be watched by strangers while he worked; and for this picture he could park his trap in the stream, let his pony graze nearby, and work isolated on his little studio island. No nosey spectators. The original of this painting is lost to sight, and I have only a photocopy from the Witt Library that is labelled “A Devonshire Stream”; but other evidence identifies it as The Broom Dasher,15 exhibited in 1864. And it was painted not in Devonshire but in Churt, where he sometimes drove from nearby Pine Wood in Witley. Down the lane towards the stone bridge trundles a donkey cart on which an old man in a red cap carries his wares – simple birch-twig brooms made and sold locally – a cottage industry long gone. The picture has its biographical significance. In painting there day after day, Hook became familiar with the country surrounding the village of Churt; and in due course, he discovered a farm there that was for sale. Witley was threatened with the building of an offshoot of Bedlam in London, and the prospect of an institutional building right across the road from Pine Wood drove the Hooks to look for another place to live. A.H. Palmer, Hook’s biographer, made quite a story of the purchase of “Bulls’ Farm,” which with a new name was eventually to become the Hooks’ new and lasting home. Hearing that there was a farm for sale in Churt, the area he had come to know and appreciate while painting The Broom Dasher, Hook went there with an artist friend who was visiting at the time – “a man as fond of a bucolic life as his host, and for ever solacing himself with Virgil’s Pastorals and other antiquated poetry.”16 Palmer did not name this artist friend, but his description clearly identifies him as his father, Samuel Palmer, famous painter and etcher of many a bucolic scene of shepherds and sheepfolds. “At the back of one of these farmhouses,” wrote young Palmer, who had clearly heard the story from his father, “the two friends sat them down to compare notes. This, all around them, was the property for sale, and they thought if they had searched the country through they could not have found a place more homely and beautiful.”17 If

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Samuel Palmer thought this of Bulls’ Farm, no wonder he referred to the developed Silverbeck as “Elysium.”18 Before he went home to Pine Wood that day, Hook struck a bargain with the farmer. Particularly attractive about the property were the springs of clear sweet water that produced a shining stream. Hook’s father was from the North Country, where they call a stream a beck. The place became Silverbeck, the gracious home that Hook built and lived in for the rest of his long life, and passed on to his sons. Now Hook was back in bricks-and-mortar mode. As always, he involved himself fully in the design and building of Silverbeck – at least while he was not off on his painting travels. The farmhouse, though serviceable, was not adequate to the family’s needs; and of course the new home was to have a splendid and spacious studio. While it was a-building, Hook rode over every day on his mare Black Bess. On Saturdays, pay day, he took a bag of cash from which to distribute wages, as well as a pistol in case of highway robbers.19 The family moved into their new home in September 1867. “You wd be delighted with this small corner of England,” he wrote later to his friend Alexander Macdonald of Aberdeen, “so near London tho’ nearly as wild as Scotland and more nestlike in its pastoral sentiment.”20 The “pastoral sentiment” recalls his bucolic friend and colleague Samuel Palmer. Many years later Rosalie recorded in her diary, “S. Palmer’s W[ater] C[olour] Drawings hung in D[rawing] room.”21 It was appropriate that Palmer’s paintings as well as his etchings should be displayed in the Hooks’ home, Silverbeck, since he had helped to find the property. Presumably, the watercolours were a gift from Palmer’s son Herbert. What has happened to them? It seems that the two Hook sons inherited one each. Bryan – probably when he moved away from Silverbeck – donated his Palmer watercolour, View at Tintagel (1848), to the British Museum, and it was on display there at the exhibition Samuel Palmer: Vison and Landscape (2003–04). And the other? There is a striking watercolour, a landscape taken between Clovelly and Mouth Mill, among the holdings of Allan’s descendants. It is unsigned and undated; but I am morally certain it is Palmer’s.22 The move to their new property did not suspend the Hook family travels, nor Hook’s painting. After the work at the Botallack Mine in St Just, they took off on continental travels for the rest of 1864 and into 1865 – first to Paris and then to Concarneau in Brittany, where Hook painted the local fishermen and women in their picturesque clothing. The women’s starched headdresses were particular to each village. Then, partly inspired by his friend John “Spanish” Phillip, the family went on to Barcelona, Valencia, and other parts of Spain. The heat turned out to be a problem; and Bryan became ill, so they retreated northwards to Brittany again, this time to Douarnenez.

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7.6 / Breton Fishermen’s Wives, 1865

The paintings subsequently exhibited included Breton Fishermen’s Wives (1865), painted at Concarneau (see figure 7.6), and Washerwomen – Brittany (1866), painted at Douarnenez. I reproduce Breton Fishermen’s Wives as the example of this phase of Hook’s work. As always, he was interested in the work in hand among his figures, whether it was men’s work or women’s. He did not subscribe to Charles Kingsley’s dictum, “For men must work and women must weep.”23 His women don’t hang about weeping. The wives here are busy separating the yarn, and from it making the sardine nets; and the warping frame for measuring the yarn is in the foreground, with a chubby child, complete with the characteristic local clogs, reaching for the goodies preserved there. The skilled activity with thread is picked up again in the intricately woven apron of the woman on the right, which is painted with Pre-Raphaelite attention to detail. The Times reviewer praised Hook for his change of scene: “The public may congratulate themselves that their favourite painter has at last shifted his painting quarters across the channel.”24 And he found that Hook had risen to the new location with no loss of the qualities that made him so popular: “It is impossible to exaggerate the freshness of the sea-side life, the smack of the sea-side air, the truth of the boats,

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7.7 / Charles C. Bennett, “Private View of the Royal Academy,” detail, Punch, 13 May 1865

the sea, the tide-bound shore.” Once more, a critic lingered over the olfactory qualities – Hook’s famous ability to convey “the smack of the sea-side air.” And Brittany had offered all the effects of light, shade, and colour that he was so good at capturing. But in fact the public was reluctant to “congratulate” Hook for his change of location. By and large, his enthusiastic admirers in England preferred “more of the same,” and wanted him to go on painting, exhibiting, and selling his recognisable scenes of British coastal life. Breton Fishermen’s Wives had the questionable distinction of being parodied in Punch, along with a caricature of the artist himself. It is a measure of the huge and growing popularity in Victorian Britain of painting, graphic work, and the visual arts in general. Not only did the public want their novels illustrated, but they also eagerly consumed papers like Punch, the Illustrated London News, and The Graphic; and they proceeded to make cultural icons of the graphic artists and painters – and particularly the academicians. An early instance of Punch’s increasing focus on art and academicians is the cut by Charles C. Bennett, “Private View of the Royal Academy.”25 It initiated what was to become an ongoing series alongside the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy, elaborate cuts designed not only to acquaint the reading public with the outstanding

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paintings of the year, but also to associate them with likenesses of the painters (see figure 7.7). The project was later to be taken over by Edward Linley Sambourne, another of Punch’s highly talented graphic artists. Here Hook, already looking a little weather-beaten, exhibits his Breton Fishermen’s Wives. Their correct Breton headgear turned into poke bonnets, the wives face right rather than left, as the parody would have been reversed in the woodcut process. Below Hook is John Frederick Lewis, famous for wearing Turkish costume; beside him is William Powell Frith, who that year exhibited a painting of the royal wedding; above is Edward Matthew Ward, with a parody of his painting The Night of Rizzio’s Murder; next comes John Everett Millais, still youthful, who exhibited The Romans Leaving Britain; then comes the Scotsman Thomas Faed with The Last of the Clan; and finally James McNeill Whistler appears, complete with monocle, with his painting The Scarf. The exhibition numbers of the paintings are supplied to invite Punch readers who happened to keep the academy catalogue on hand to look up the references. The remarkable referentiality of the cut – and I reproduce only the top half – suggests the degree to which the British reading public followed the arts and the artists. Between the two painting sojourns in Brittany, which I have treated together, the Hooks made their first experimental visit to Scotland, travelling to Johnshaven and then to Coldingham in Berwickshire. Hook clearly found inspiration there. Johnshaven afforded much to sketch as well as to paint. And from Coldingham came “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread” (1866), subsequently renamed Hoisting the Sail, which is now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. It is a notably dramatic composition. As in “Luff, Boy!” (1859), the viewer is placed in the same boat as the muscular fishermen who are hoisting the sail, the action vigorous and arresting. The tilt of the boat, with the boy pushing it off a threatening rock, the converging perspective of the planks and coils of rope, and the proximity of the sail that towers beyond the frame – all contribute to the sense of immediacy (see figure 7.8). Also painted at Coldingham was Caught by the Tide (1869), another of Hook’s best compositions. It is now in the Guildhall Gallery, which seems to have specialised in collecting Hook’s paintings of children.26 The ones shown here are not rendered as cute or pathetic, but as responsible and resourceful in an emergency, as demonstrated in the pose and gesture of the boy who vigorously waves his crab hook, with handkerchief attached, to attract the attention of the smack out to sea. The sister, who minds their little brother and the creel for their catch, is visibly under the threat of the looming rock behind her. Hook had now mastered a rough sea, and he made the most of its breaking and surging around the diminishing rock. One cannot help willing the men in that distant smack to see the distress signal and come to the rescue. In keeping with the threatening situation, the colour is more muted than Hook usually rendered it, the sea grey rather than blue or

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7.8 / “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread” [renamed Hoisting the Sail], 1866

green. The tug of wind on sail and signal, the force of the waves, and the threat of the sea are all economically realised (see figure 7.9). The decade of the 1860s was a busy one for the Hooks. They had moved into Pine Wood, which became their base for painting sorties to Cornwall, the Scilly Isles, Devon, and Wales. They added Brittany, Scotland, and then Holland – Scheveningen and Dordrecht (or “Dort”) – to the spreading variety of their painting sites. In these places, Hook painted – and then exhibited and probably sold – some thirty sea pieces, besides half a dozen inland paintings. He had found and bought Bull’s Farm in Churt, sold Pine Wood, and built and developed Silverbeck, which was to be the treasured family estate for three generations. On the family front, with Allan going to school at Winchester and Bryan at Guildford Grammar School, Hook was looked to for support. He had a hand in settling his mother and unmarried sisters in Sydenham near London. Family visits to Silverbeck – from Rosalie’s family the Burtons as well as Hook’s relations – were regular occurrences, and were convivial if sometimes chaotic occasions on which boating accidents were frequent and usually considered hilariously funny. A visit from his aunt Matilda Clarke of Bagborough, widow of the son of Adam Clarke, would have renewed

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7.9 / Caught by the Tide, 1869

memories of decorating the elegant room in Bagborough after he and Rosalie returned from Italy in 1848. Meetings and convivial outings with the Etching Club continued regularly. Samuel Palmer was a frequent visitor and regular correspondent. Fellow academician Frederick Pickersgill, married to Hook’s sister Mary Noorouz, advanced in reputation, though not as rapidly as Hook did. A friend of Hook’s student days, William Dobson, now also an academician, lived not far away, and the families exchanged visits regularly. The Hooks’ social life was wide and varied. Hook consolidated his professional practices, and established satisfactory rhythms at home too, with his gardening, his family doings, and his social life. And he honed his skills in his chosen subject matter, and had an eager following among critics and buyers. If he was indeed the public’s “favourite painter,” as the critic at The Times called him,27 it was for his brilliant and sensitive presentation of the sea and its people. Hook’s sea is seldom merely background. It is always doing something and distinctly characterised, whether in threatening mode, as in Caught by the Tide (1869), or as part of the dolce far niente surround for The Skipper Ashore (1859), where the boy rests idly in his boat in the skipper’s absence, the reflected light of the water on his face, or for Sea

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Urchins (1861), another picture in the Guildhall Gallery. Here the “urchins” loll on a floating piece of gear in a calm inlet, barefoot and indolent. (There is a certain grim irony to the painting, as some years later one of the boys, now grown up, was lost at sea with his family.)28 Aboard boats at sea, as in “Luff, Boy!” (1859) and Hoisting the Sail (1866), we are induced to feel the swell as a wave sucks and lifts; in peaceful sea pieces like Leaving at Low Water (1863) and Milk for the Schooner (1864), the sea is calm, though the surf still breaks on the shore and prompts action among the human personnel there. Painting a rough sea was clearly a challenge. In commenting later on Allan’s sea painting on hand, Hook noted, “He failed in getting a rough sea which was what he wanted.”29 So Allan would have to go back to the site, he wrote, and work on the painting again. Of course, for those who on principle paint on the spot, painting a rough sea presents more than a technical challenge. It is perfectly understandable that both Hook and his son would have found it more comfortable to paint calm seas than rough. Nevertheless, both persevered; and in paintings like Last Night’s Disaster (1891), in which a stove-in boat has been tossed far up the beach while the waves rage beyond, and Wreckage from the Fruiter (1889), now at Tate Britain, Hook showed complete mastery of the ocean in storm. The sea giveth; the sea taketh away. In his vigorous paintings, Hook pursued the theme in many variations. The sea provides food and work and a living; it enhances leisure and offers beauty. It sustains life but also destroys it. He was lastingly aware of all these functions, and he represented them with sensitivity and delight.

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8 “ T H AT F R E S H E S T A N D MOST REFRESHING OF E N G L I S H PA I N T E R S ” Fame Established, 1870–1883

“i t wou l d ta k e m r hook many years to fulfill all the commissions which he has,”

Rosalie Hook wrote to their friend Alexander Macdonald in May 1874.1 His pictures fetched good prices too, in this prosperous time for living English artists. “Gad! Sir,” exclaims a studio visitor in the satirical pages of Punch, “these Artists live on the fat of the land.”2 From being the son of a bankrupt, James Clarke Hook had painted himself into country gentlemanhood. After buying and developing Silverbeck, he bought a nearby property, Beefolds, which in due course was to become the home of Bryan and his family. Also during the 1870s he built himself another studio, bigger and better than the last; and he proceeded to build a “Sky Palace” on a high point on the estate, with plate glass windows on all four sides, for observing and painting the sky and its clouds and other manifestations. At home he was always busy with various projects. Once he had begun harvesting his own wheat, he proceeded to construct a mill on his stream to grind it. He planted orchards and made a walled-in garden and a bowling green. He considered his vigorous work at Silverbeck to be holidays.

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Being established as “that freshest and most refreshing of English Painters,” as the Times critic called him, had its disadvantages.3 It was a designation he had to live up to. On the one hand, the critics reproached him for being so recognisable, so predictable; on the other, his public and the buyers wanted him to keep producing exactly these same

recognisable “Hookscapes” that they had come to enjoy. Hook himself was eager to extend his range and do new things, hence his seasons in Brittany and Holland during the 1860s, which had, by and large, impressed people. “He renders the misty, luminous, grey skies, and the shallow, quiet, sandy seas of Holland with a vivid truthfulness rivalling the best Dutch painters,” wrote the critic at the Illustrated London News.4 France and Holland, of course, had their own established art traditions that reviewers were familiar with. But who knew anything of Norwegian painting? And the paintings from Hook’s excursion to Norway in the summer of 1870 met with almost universal hostility among the critics. “Mr. Hook’s Norway experiences ... hardly promise as good a harvest pictorially as his Dutch travels brought last year,” wrote the critic at The Times – a representative response.5 And though Hook may not have been influenced by the critics, his buyers were, so he had to pay some attention. Through the decades he could and did continue to seek out new fields, but some were uncongenial even to himself, as with the excursion to Spain in 1865. In the summer of 1878, he took a trip to Ireland, but there was not enough coastal activity among the Irish to inspire subjects; and he found “the fleas with other entomology” too numerous for comfort. “The vile Priests” were inimical to his Methodist principles. “Poor Paddy is much to be pitied,” he wrote in one of the letters that Rosalie would probably have wanted rewritten. “He will never rise above his dirt ... till he has kicked the last black coated humbug into the Atlantic.”6 So they crossed back to Holyhead and went back to Hallsands in Devon. September of 1877 saw another change of venue. The Hooks went to Italy, painted in Lerici and Amalfi, and stayed till the new year, in search of new places and new subjects, and also to acquaint Allan and Bryan with the Italy their parents vividly remembered from their time on the Travelling Studentship in 1846–48. But the single painting Hook exhibited the following spring did not impress the critics. The Times reviewer – perhaps the same one who had called Hook “that freshest and most refreshing of English painters” – poured scorn on The Coral Fisher, Amalfi, and advised, “Better he had stayed at home.”7 One cannot blame Hook for becoming fed up with the critics. To a large extent, he continued to do what he liked and was good at, which was what the public wanted: seascapes with prominent figures, mostly on British shores. But he had some preferences of his own that he would not abandon for the critics or the market. He continued to reserve time in the autumn to do an inland painting, a landscape, near home.

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Allan Hook recorded that his father painted his seascapes for other people, the landscapes for himself.8 If he spent the summers on the coast, within sight and sound of the sea, working on three or four large canvases that he would bring home to finish during the winter, he found fresh enthusiasm for painting nature in or near Churt. In September 1874, when the family came home from their coastal sojourn in Muchalls, Aberdeenshire, Hook reported on a happy tramp he had taken locally, sketchbook in hand, leaving Rosalie in the pony trap reading Middlemarch.9 His letter to Macdonald reads like a prose ode to autumn. After noting the fruit harvest at home – “Victoria [plums] quite a sight for size and quality! Green gages ... peaches and nectarines” – he proceeds, I am out all day when it is fine with my sketch book exploring a stream which runs for many miles in this country winding in and out of all sorts of land, wild and tame, wet and dry. Now and then through level rushy cow pasture where you have to jump endless dams half choked with rank growing burr reeds, mace rushes, and lovely purple loosestrife, the little river brimming over and curling along, cutting your eye with its glassy lights and making you fancy that no end of chubb and trout are doing quadrilles and ladies chains beneath.10 Intensely susceptible to beauty, Hook can hardly bear to encounter these effects without feeling the urgent need to record them. From this excursion, I believe, came his landscape for the next spring’s exhibition, Wise Saws, which shows a crow preaching to a congregation of the cattle that populate that “rushy cow pasture.” A letter from Sieverbeck in the autumn of 1882 confirms Allan’s assessment of Hook’s enjoying landscape. He wrote to Mcadonald, with some self-satisfaction, “I think this last out o’ door struggle for the year will be my best in more ways than one ... I wish to let ’em know that I can compass else than a salt breeze and brown Fisher folk.”11 He was convinced that his inland paintings were both more enjoyable to create and just as valuable as works of art. Here he was writing of the painting he called The Wily Angler (1883). Although he accepted some guidance from the critics and buyers, continuing to produce largely what they called for and what he was good at, he reserved the right to follow his own preferences at least some of the time; and he continued to relate to nature and produce the inland scenes that appealed to him most urgently.

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Despite the severe judgment of the critic of Hook’s Amalfi picture – “Better he had stayed at home” – the Hook family sojourn in Italy in 1877–78, when they regaled Allan and Bryan with their adventures in the stirring times of the Risorgimento of 1848, provided one more benefit: one of the few surviving paintings by Rosalie Hook that can be attributed to her with some confidence (besides the one of a cottage in Clovelly of 1856, shown in figure 5.12) In a letter to Macdonald from Amalfi of 28 November 1877, Hook wrote, “Our plan is to go in another day or two to Naples to see Capri taking the steamer.”12 And that must have been the occasion on which Rosalie painted A Window in Capri. It is a small picture, oil on wood, and no more than a hand’s breadth wide (see figure 8.1). A pencil inscription on the back identifies it as being “By Mrs James Clarke Hooke” – the final “e” added to “Hook” showing that it was not Rosalie who wrote it, but presumably an admiring observer who bought the painting from her. It would be characteristic of her not to sign her paining herself. But I believe the inscription is to be trusted. Like the Clovelly painting, it shows an inviting entrance to a modest dwelling; and again she captures the lighting effects – this time the brilliant winter sunlight and deep shadows of Italy. The small child lingering in the sunlight shows that Rosalie was no new hand at figure painting. The engaging little picture, which has been lovingly framed, is enough to make one wish that she had painted more – and had preserved and identified more of what she painted.

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During the 1870s Allan and Bryan reached manhood, and they proceeded to follow in their father’s footsteps, attending the Royal Academy Schools and developing their ample talents. There they met with other young artists, some of them, like Walter Horsley and A.H. Palmer, also the sons of established painters. Henry Gibbs and William and Charles Wyllie were among the up-and-coming young painters who haunted Silverbeck and found a warm welcome with the academician. Hook loved to play host; and he and Rosalie continued to entertain members of the Etching Club at Silverbeck on their annual excursions. Allan and Bryan, among other artistic endeavours, took to photography; and they collected signatures and photographs of the many distinguished painters who came a-visiting, including Samuel Palmer,13 John Evan Hodgson, RA, John Pettie, RA, William and Charles Wyllie, Birkett Foster and his son William, Charles Keene, and many others, besides their father. Some prints

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8.1 / Rosalie Hook, A Window in Capri, 1877

of these portraits they gave to the graphic artist Edward Linley Sambourne when he visited, and one can recognise their likenesses, by angle and expression, in the group caricatures of academicians that Sambourne ran in Punch at the time of the academy’s annual exhibitions.14 Patrons and dealers were likewise photographed, such as C.P. Matthews, who accumulated an impressive collection of Hook’s works, and the wool merchant David Price.

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The closest friendship of this time was with Alexander Macdonald of Aberdeen and his wife Hope, who became patrons and correspondents of the whole Hook family. Macdonald was in the granite business – a good business to be in, since Aberdeen was called “the granite city.” Hook found Macdonald a warm and congenial correspondent. And Macdonald, who was confined to a wheelchair, was keenly interested in the art of the day and the people who produced it. On principle, he bought the work only of living artists (or the recently dead). He liked to be in the know about who was doing what, and once he had established a correspondence, he urged Hook to feed him current art gossip, and also to regale him with descriptions of the work Hook had in hand himself. The correspondence, beginning in 1869 and continuing until Macdonald’s death in 1884, has been preserved, and hence I can include some of Hook’s comments and responses in his own voice; for with the voice comes character. He was a vivid and feisty letter writer, and not always a tactful one. He had no qualms about calling a spade a spade. Take, for example, a piece of political commentary that Hook wrote to Macdonald from Portsoy in Banffshire in 1878. He had been watching the fishermen come home bone-tired from waiting hours in rain and rough weather for the tide to rise and bring them into port: “How I wished to stop some of Dizzy’s income tax and with it to have run Portsoy breakwater a Quarter of a mile out seawards but the money is wanted to buy quinine for our fever stricken soldiers in Cyprus ... or to paste some more trinkets on the crown of the ‘Empress’ and all the rest of it – this is all the paper I have and a good thing too. I shall be getting into a passion for contempt of the coming Imperialism.”15 He economically disposes of his views on Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s new income tax, the wars in North Africa, England’s colonial enterprises, and Queen Victoria’s new title as Empress of India. He would like the money to be used at home to help hard-working fishermen. Allan Hook said in his biography that he hoped Hook’s correspondents had taken care not to preserve his letters. Rosalie, he wrote, was “often dismayed at the want of tact and prudence” in them, and sometimes asked him to rewrite them.16 But who wants to

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read mealy-mouthed letters? Macdonald certainly enjoyed Hook’s missives, and sometimes shared them with other correspondents, though with strict instructions to return them. For the biographer, of course, the frank and sometimes tactless pronouncements are a boon. Rosalie’s diaries, as published in Woman behind the Painter (2006), furnish a valuable chronology of the Hooks’ lives and doings over many years. But their letters, especially those of Hook himself, put flesh on the bones of the diaries’ summaries, acquaint us with some nitty-gritty of their day-to-day lives, and dramatise Hook’s vigorous responses.

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In 1871, perhaps a little chastened by the critical response to his Norway pictures, Hook returned to Clovelly, safe and well-known ground. “The change of scene was a delight to all of us,” Allan wrote. “We were back among familiar faces, among the cliffs and houses that had a home-like association for us.”17 And sure enough, the two paintings produced there found favour with the critics, especially Gold of the Sea (1872), painted at nearby Mouth Mill. On this visit to Clovelly, they met Charles Kingsley, famous author of the novel Westward Ho! (1855), which is initially set in Clovelly. Rosalie called him “Canon Kingsley,” for by this time he was the personal chaplain to Queen Victoria. Clovelly had brought a degree of fame to both men. And in the public’s eye both men were connected with the sea – though one in fiction and verse, the other in painting. The Hooks already knew Johnny and Tommy Cruse, sons of the Kingsleys’ nurse. It would have amused Hook that his first introduction to Kingsley was through the sons of his children’s nurse – whom Hook would probably have considered a better contact than the queen. Kingsley’s famous poem The Three Fishers (1851) takes a tragic view of the sea and its human victims. Hook’s take on the sea was more cheerful. But he was ready to use a line from Kingsley’s poem as the title for one of his paintings from Portsoy, “Little to Earn and Many to Keep” (1879). He owned a copy of Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863), with Samborune’s illustrations, and perhaps alluded to the story in his painting from Bedruthan Steps in Cornwall, Are Chimney-Sweepers Black? (1868). The next year, 1872, Hook ventured to new territory again, though this time technically still on British shores, travelling all the way to the Shetland Isles in the far north, where his grandfather Adam Clarke had preached and was fondly remembered for his many services to the islanders. Macdonald had recommended Hillswick; and after a long journey on a rugged track by dogcart – the usual transport by Highland pony would not suffice for their painting gear – they found that the only local accommodation was

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8.2 / The Bonxie, Shetland, 1873

afflicted with measles. This was the occasion on which Hook’s self-identification as the grandson of Adam Clarke, famous scholar and beloved patron of Shetland islanders, gained the whole family a warm welcome with one Mr Sutherland, the local minister. The painting that Hook worked on there was called The Bonxie, Shetland (1873) – “bonxie” being the local name for the skua gull. Again, it concerns the resourceful work of children. Here a girl holds onto the waistband of her brother, who reaches down to steal the seagull’s eggs, while another boy fends off the enraged parent bird with a lance he has made by fastening his pocket knife to a stick (see figure 8.2). As usual, the scene was painted on the spot. The figures would have been added later, perhaps from local models. But the bonxie itself – which gave its name to the painting – did not get finished before the Hooks had to leave. What was to be done? Hook turned for help to Macdonald. And Macdonald, delighted to be of service in completing the painting, procured and sent a dead skua, which Hook had skinned and duly mounted in an appropriate pose for his purpose.18 The inland painting of the same year, Fishing by Proxy, raised considerable interest. One Captain Salvin had trained cormorants to fish for him in a Surrey trout stream;

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8.3 / Under the Lee of a Rock, 1874

and to prevent them from swallowing their catch, he collared them and then recovered the trout. As with The Bonxie, Shetland, Hook wanted authenticity; and one of Salvin’s trained cormorants, called Hobble Gobble, became a guest at Silverbeck while Hook completed his picture. Keenly interested, Macdonald commissioned a small replica of the painting for his collection. In 1873 the Hooks returned to Cornwall, this time to a village near St Ives Bay called Gwithian – “as fine a piece of coast as ever I saw,” wrote Hook, “both for form and color and it must be kept snug till I have had a few shots at it.”19 He was now famous enough that painters and tourists were apt to follow him to his painting locations, and as usual he hated to be watched by strangers. He was very cagey about the remote special places he discovered. Mindful of his friend’s request to hear about his most recent works, Hook provided a description of Under the Lee of a Rock (1874) (see figure 8.3), which had already been examined by the Yorkshireman who commissioned it: “In the foreground a fishing line boat has been run into a quiet rocky pool and is landing a few fish to sell at Gwithian, a pony with panniers is being laden by a sailor in his sea boots.” Hook explained that “a Yorkshire man who has this picture told me last year ‘noo mind a wunt a wee bit fish’” – and the painter obliged with baskets of fish, with a gleaming

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pile in the foreground (a kind of still life he excelled in). He added. “After he had seen the pictures as he was going away he told Allan ‘Go you and paint like Father, Father puts weft in his pictures.’”20 “This last set me up for the winter,” Hook chortled.21 He clearly enjoyed dramatising the comments he received, accent and all. He was not above being elated by a comment from a down-to-earth Yorkshire industrialist. Eastward from Gwithian along the coast, in a cove between deep cliffs, Hook and Allan painted side by side. Allan had been admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1872, and was testing his powers. Early Efforts, the painting he did there that summer, has a touch of autobiography. Two boys are playing on a beach, the elder drawing in the sand; and his rude picture shows a full-rigged sailing ship. This “early effort” predicts Allan’s career as a painter of boats and the sea, like his father. In due course, Macdonald bought Early Efforts for £20. It was Allan’s first sale. Not many yards away, Hook himself was painting the picture that he was to call Jetsam and Flotsam (1874). The human scene is touching. A seaman’s chest from a wreck has been washed up on a rocky shelf above the cove; and local people, always alert to what may be gleaned from accidents at sea, have come to investigate its contents (see figure 8.4a). The Times reviewer noted, “One girl, with a natural feminine curiosity, examines a photograph of sister, or wife, or sweetheart; another seeks in a Testament for the name of its owner. We are looking over their shoulders, and would like to know all we can about the poor fellow, while half ashamed at thus prying into his poor remains.”22 Such comments show the extent to which Hook managed to involve his viewers in the narrative element of his paintings. Hook described the site of this painting to Macdonald: “Allan and I get down to our work by a cliff path cut out sideways along the face by pilchard fishers ... but they have now given up their stations as the seals broke their nets. One of these creatures appears sometimes as we sit quietly at work, staring with its glassy eyes at us and darts off.”23 When I was in quest of a photograph of the site for my series “Hookscapes Then and Now,” I negotiated that very “cliff path cut sideways along the face.” There were no seals on view. However, I did encounter some human wildlife. It turned out that this picturesque cove is now a nude beach. Armed as usual with a reproduction, I proceeded to align the rocks and cliffs in order to pinpoint the spot where Hook had set up his easel. Right where I needed to be was a well-tanned nude chap sunbathing. I apologised and explained that I was trying to locate the site of a painting. “Let’s have a look,” he said, and soon called a friend over, and all three of us – one clothed, two nude – proceeded to examine the angles. Presently, the two wives rose like a pair of Venuses from the waves. And we all put our minds to the task. We found the right lateral angle, but not the right height – for the tide was too high to get access to that rocky shelf. I took my

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8.4a / Jetsam and Flotsam, 1874

8.4b / The site near Gwithian of Jetsam and Flotsam

picture at the correct lateral angle, and prepared to leave. “Why not take a dip before you go?” asked my new friend. “We think it’s paradise here.” I am no spring chicken to be flaunting my curves. But it would have been prudish to refuse. And indeed I found when swimming that I could get to the very shelf where the seaman’s chest in the picture was opened. But damn, I had no camera. Before I left, though, I gave him my reproduction; and in due course, he emailed me the “Now” photo – taken from the shelf – that appears for Jetsam and Flotsam in my photo series (see figure 8.4b). Research provides its adventures. And I have found that “following the Hooksteps,” as I call it, has enabled me to share some of the experiences of my biographical subject, and so shorten the distance between us. The incident is a reminder that in his vigorous outdoor activity Hook had not only the vagaries of the weather to cope with, but also the changes of the tide (which were fortunately more predictable). If the site where he painted Jetsam and Flotsam was accessible only at certain phases of the tide, what did he do when it was not accessible? No doubt this issue was one reason that he kept two or more paintings “on the stocks” at a time: he could work at one or another as time and tide allowed. Hook’s landscape of 1874 was a bright engaging piece that he ironically called Cow Tending, which is not unlike The Wily Angler (1883), already discussed. Here a boy is wading back through a shining stream to his fishing rod and his boots. He took them off in order to raid a waterhen’s nest of its eggs, which he carries back in his hat. The point of the title is that he is not tending the cows as he is meant to. In the background, across a lush green meadow, the cows have got into somebody’s cabbage patch, and the lady homeowner rushes out with a broomstick to chase them off. The picture is filled with light and moisture and the boy’s delight in snatching opportunity out of toil (see figure 8.5). Hook liked to supply a little twist to his titles. I could follow the long sequence of Hook’s painting excursions year by year; but instead I supply their locations, if I have discovered them, in the list of works he exhibited at the Royal Academy (see appendix 1). Here I restrict myself to chronicling some of the more salient trips, as examples for the rest. In May 1875 Hook went with his friend Thomas Oldham Barlow on Mr Burnett’s yacht Dawn along the south coast. From the sea, he spotted the little fishing village of Hallsands nestled against a cliff, and he committed it to memory as a promising site for painting. When it was time for the Hooks’ summer travels, Hallsands was the destination. The artist and his family became well known to the little community. The women there worked as hard as the men, and were known for carrying their menfolk on their shoulders to a departing boat, so that their husbands would not have to spend the voyage in wet boots.24 And when the boats came home, the women hauled them in through the surf, as Hook shows in “Hard Lines” (1876), now in the Walker Art Gallery.

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8.5 / Cow Tending, 1874

The villagers had trained dogs – probably Newfoundlands – to swim out in rough weather to a boat in trouble, and bring back a line by which the boat could be hauled safely through the dangerous surf. Hook sketched the process, and then showed it in a painting that he called Friends in Rough Weather (1877), which is now in an art gallery in Florida. On one stormy night, however, when a boat was indeed in trouble, the dogs refused to perform this heroic duty because of the lightning. The reporter for the Western Weekly News wrote up the story dramatically: “It was only when the lightning flashed that the storm-tossed little craft could be seen. It appeared only too certain that, unless communication could be established ... the two poor fellows must be drowned ... when a young artist ... appeared upon the scene. Quickly making himself master of the situation, he took off a portion of his clothing and plunged into the sea.”25 “He proved himself a magnificent swimmer,” the report continued. He swam to the boat and brought back the line, and the boat was hauled to safety. The “young artist” was Bryan Hook. He was twenty.26 Hook’s harvest of paintings from Hallsands and nearby Hope Cove was a rich one. Crabbers (1876) is one of Hook’s most effective and arresting compositions. It shows a

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8.6 / Crabbers, 1876

fisherman father and son, two members of the Hope Cove Life Boat crew, in their own boat, which has just risen on one wave to smash down on the next. While the son at the oars keeps her on course, the father is just removing a huge king crab from the trap, affording an astonishing centre of attention. Other boats in the background are scudding along on the wind (see figure 8.6). As in “Luff, Boy!” (1859) and Hoisting the Sail (1866), the viewer is in the same boat with the fishermen. It is a tour de force of vigorous and characteristic marine action. If you look long at it, you may get seasick. Another painting from the Hallsands sojourn was Word from the Missing (1877), full of light and discovery (see figure 8.7). A barefoot boy on the beach has just found a bottle that appears to have a message in it. Entranced, he holds it up to the light; and his sister, crouched to get the right angle, looks up at it with awakened curiosity. The mother is gleaning other tidal leavings; and behind her is an old lime kiln, the remains of which can still be seen in a recent photograph. The match between “Then” and “Now” in this Hookscape is almost perfect. In between the two sojourns at Hallsands came the abortive trip to Ireland. The Hooks returned with relief to the south coast of Devon. Hallsands has a sad history. During the later nineteenth century, heavy-duty dredging was carried out there, and the shingle was removed to help build a dock at Devonport.

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8.7 / Word from the Missing, 1877

The villagers protested urgently that the dredging was removing their necessary protection from storms; but officials assured them that the sea would restore the shingle. It did not. Bit by bit, in one storm after another, part of the village was washed away. And in a huge storm of 1912, the village was altogether destroyed.

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Among Macdonald’s many generous presents to the Hooks – he was constantly sending them hampers of fresh fruit and green vegetables, very acceptable in the remote places they went to – was a granite pillar of his own making. He had no pretensions to being an artist himself, though he helped so many; but, limited in motion though he was, he liked to turn vases and platters of fine granite on a lathe. As a gift to Silverbeck and the Hooks, he produced an elegant pillar designed to hold up a fine piece of bronze sculpture. (Photographs of the Silverbeck drawing room of later days show that Frederic Leighton’s fine bronze of 1886, Needless Alarms, graced the pillar. It has stayed in the family.) A granite pillar takes some muscle power to move; and when the gift arrived, Hook wrote to Macdonald, “You would have been amused to see the group which welcomed

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the 7 cwt case: four sucking painters myself and ‘Blessing’ as you have dubbed her – Young Horsley, d[itt]o Palmer, d[itt]o two Hooks, with two laborers, ran the case in to the foot of the stairs.”27 And indeed, as time went on, the “sucking painters” were more and more active, and the family of painters were a considerable unit. Allan was accepted as a probationer at the Royal Academy Schools in 1872, and Bryan in 1874. For some of Bryan’s student days, Rosalie moved to lodgings in London to make a home for him and some of his fellow students. (It seems that she and Bryan were close, as Hook and Allan were often a pair.) Sometimes, as in Muchalls near Aberdeen, all four were painting side by side. Likewise, all four shared lodgings at the little Muchalls Post Office. Hook’s painting from Muchalls is called Hearts of Oak (1875) – a sufficiently patriotic title. Near a curious vertical rock (which is still there), a fisherman is carving a small boat for his little boy. A story about a piece of fishing gear that appears in the painting comes from Hook’s friend Charles Keene, the Punch graphic artist. Keene used Tigbourne Cottage in Hambledon as a summer residence; and from there he attended an auction in Godalming. The sale was of the effects of a local “Piscator,” and Keene snapped up one cheap miscellaneous lot that included, among other gear, “a Brobdingnagian fishing basket, almost two or three feet wide.” He continued, “Hook, the painter, disregarded the Tenth Commandment [‘Thou shalt not covet ...’] openly in respect of this basket; part of it was a little broken from wear. ‘For God’s sake don’t get it mended!’ he implored. He is borrowing it, and it will be immortalized in his Canvas, I have no doubt.”28 I believe that this very creel, still unmended, is the one that appears in Hearts of Oak. The anecdote gives some idea of Hook’s passion for authenticity in his paintings, and of his desire to use not merely the correct gear, but gear that had its own history of use. Silverbeck must have included many capacious cupboards to store the miscellaneous equipment he collected. In 1875 it was Hook’s turn to be the “Visitor,” the temporary instructor for the students at the Academy Schools; so the family were all in London, with lodgings in Kepple Street. Hook was very conscientious about his duties; he had already had plenty of practice in training his own sons. For instance, shocked to see the filthy state of the students’ brushes, he bought a whole new set to give them – on condition that they kept them clean. (It had long been Rosalie’s chosen task to clean the family’s brushes each evening.) The Keeper of the day, or principal instructor, was Frederick Pickersgill, the boys’ uncle by marriage. So the Royal Academy Schools were quite a family affair at the time. Exhibiting your first painting at the academy’s annual exhibition was a kind of coming-of-age for a painter. Allan exhibited his – a portrait of his mother, which is still in the family – in 1876 (see figure 8.8). It is a successful portrait, executed with affection, and it provides a rare image of Rosalie at this stage of her life. Bryan’s was a picture of

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8.8 / Allan Hook, portrait of his mother, Rosalie Hook, 1876

a heron near a waterfall, which Macdonald bought. (Bryan was to specialise in birds, as Allan specialised in boats.) They were both deeply invested in the art world; and in due course, their paintings would be shown alongside their father’s at the wine and oyster occasion at Barlow’s during the Studio Sunday entertainments. They regularly went on the family painting excursions, but sometimes branched out on their own. In 1879 Bryan’s artist friend Henry Gibbs won the Academy Schools’ coveted Turner gold medal for landscape. His painting was engraved for The Graphic; and I was intrigued to recognise in one of Bryan’s sketchbooks that he had been working on his own sketch right beside Gibbs at Mullion, a picturesque Cornish location where Hook was soon to paint Love Lightens Toil (1883). The angle on the scene in Gibbs’s painting and Bryan’s detailed pencil drawing is almost identical. On the schools’ prize-giving day two years later, 10 December 1881, Bryan himself won the Turner gold medal. “It was a stunning surprise,” he told Macdonald, writing the very next day.29 His painting is untraced, but it was another bird subject, based on a scrap from Macbeth, “Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood.”30 Allan was taking his own initiative. Still determined to be a painter of boats at sea, it was his plan to set up a studio in his own small yacht; and in 1882 he oversaw the building of his studio boat, the Puffin, to his design, at the Chant boat-building works

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at Salcombe in South Devon. While he waited, of course, he painted. And I have been able to identify the site of three of his paintings as done at Salcombe – including one that has been mistakenly attributed to his father. His studio yacht being once completed and launched, he proceeded to paint from it. His father’s sea pieces, often of deep bays between craggy headlands, are usually painted from terra firma, or at least from one end of a boat looking at the other. But in Allan’s paintings, typically, the sea reaches even to the bottom frame of his canvas.31 He was visibly painting at sea. In 1883 he took his parents on a short voyage to Portholland on the Puffin. The Hooks of the next generation were making their mark.

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Portsoy, in Banffshire, was a congenial location in the summer of 1878. The Hooks took lodgings with a Miss Winters, a milliner. Macdonald offered to furnish Hook with letters of introduction to his local friends, but Hook would not take advantage of them. “This would ruin us,” he wrote. “The fisher folk wd think we were swells, now they treat us as honest folk who have to work hard for a living and will do anything in civility for us.”32 The last thing he wanted was to be taken for a “swell.” And his comfortable relation with the fishermen and women as an apparent equal was no doubt part of the appeal of his pictorial representations of them. To Macdonald’s request to see his current work when he came visiting, Hook responded that the pictures were as yet “disjointed ... for the subjects of them will be but faintly adumbrated – figures roughly sketched in with now and then a face painted in, bits of distance, a sea quite or almost finished without more than a hint of the color of the sky.”33 It is a revealing passage about Hook’s painting process. The occasional “face painted in” would be done to capture the local physiognomy. And with the skies left to the last, it is clear that the “Sky Palace” at Silverbeck was to be a boon. Hook was admired, among other things, for his skies. He never became blasé about his subject matter; he continued to be stirred and delighted by the coastal and landscape scenes that he painted. He couldn’t resist the Portsoy children. “The boys are fine, and rare pickles too,” he wrote to Macdonald. “Some of them tumble in the quay pool each day and it is a wonder they are not crushed or drowned.” And his spirit lifted at the busy harbour scene: “There are now crammed into the pool seven or eight schooners, they with the thirty or more fishing boats make a delightful tangle full of color ... women and brats, barrels of herrings rolling about, all this with the silver twinkle of the fresh herrings so that a man is all of a work to sketch and try by memory to secure all he can.”34

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He had an unfailing appetite for such scenes of light and colour and activity. There is an amusing exchange of notes in Notes and Queries about one of Hook’s paintings from Portsoy, Mushroom Gatherers (1879), a view from a high cliff overlooking the sea, with children carrying trays of fresh mushrooms. (Hook painted a small replica of it for Macdonald.) A critic in the Pall Mall Gazette had challenged Hook’s accuracy – he claimed that mushrooms would never be found so close to the sea – and another critic argued that “mosses and mushrooms shrink from sea air.” But in Notes and Queries one Cuthbert Bede leapt to Hook’s defence, citing mushrooms he had gathered very close to the sea;35 presently, other contributors joined in the discussion, citing excellent mushrooms grown very close to the sea; and Hook’s accuracy was fully vindicated. He clearly had an eager following of fans. After Portsoy the Hooks visited the Macdonalds at Kepplestone and were made much of. Hook was always happy to return hospitality. The following May, he procured Macdonald a coveted ticket for the dinner after the Private View at the Royal Academy, and the Macdonalds subsequently visited the Hooks at Silverbeck. One of the presents that Macdonald loved to give was dogs. And Hook put in a request for a dog himself, “a lurcher of deerhound cross.” The lurcher he had owned before, he said, had served John Everett Millais as a model in his famous painting of 1853, The Order of Release. It features Effie Millais as the triumphant wife who hands the order of release to the jailer – while her kilted husband staggers out to embrace her. Hook’s dog has a prominent place in the painting, as it ecstatically licks its master’s hand. Only too glad to oblige, Macdonald sought out and sent the lurcher to Silverbeck, and the Hooks called him Donald. Not long afterwards, Rosalie received a collie from their generous friend, which she called Mac – so that the names of the two dogs, Mac and Donald, honoured the donor. The story of Donald was picked up by George Reid, RA, another friend of Macdonald’s, who was later to become president of the Royal Scottish Academy. Reid wrote to ask Hook if he could come visiting, and bring his friend Tom Taylor with him. Taylor, who was famous on many fronts and had been the art critic for The Times, was probably the author of a number of the lively comments on Hook that I have quoted above. Also an actor and a noted playwright, he was currently the editor of Punch, and keen to meet Hook in his own domain. With Rosalie in London looking after Bryan and his fellow students, Hook was for the time a bachelor host. But as usual, he welcomed a visit. Reid afterwards wrote an amusing account of the occasion to Macdonald, complete with sketches (see figure 8.9). The visitors were greeted by Donald, “a most affectionate gentle brute who stands up and puts his forepaws on JCH’s shoulders as if he wished to kiss him. JCH made his appearance ... in blue beret and knickerbockers. He was very hearty and kind.”36

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8.9 / George Reid, ra, sketches of Hook at home in Silverbeck, 1879

Hook made up for the bachelor food with the number and quality of the drinks, Reid reported. Then, although it was pouring rain, Hook insisted on clothing his guests in improvised raingear and giving them a tour of his property. Reid’s account provides an engaging picture of Hook at home in Silverbeck. One somewhat abortive project Hook undertook was to develop a herd of Highland cattle in Churt. Being enamoured of things Scottish, he joked that he wanted to become “a lowland Laird with a Highland haird.”37 And sure enough, Macdonald procured and sent four young Highland cattle to Surrey – “Sandy, Maggie, Jenny, Grummie.”38 Hook was delighted with the contrast between his sleek Jersey cows and the shaggy Highland ones. “Donald ... bounded round in a challenging manner quite forgetting his ain country folk and evidently looking upon the newcomers as queer customers. How much comedy there is in Nature,” he wrote to Macdonald.39 Bryan duly painted a Highland cow and calf to send to Macdonald. But the herd did not prosper in Silverbeck, and the animals moved on. Other guests from time to time were the watercolourist Alfred Hunt and his wife the novelist Margaret Hunt, with their daughters, Violet, Venetia, and Sylvia. They had become Hook’s tenants at Tor Villa after William Holman Hunt’s departure, and Hook was fond of the family of daughters, who, like his sons, were soon to make their own mark. Violet Hunt, in particular, achieved fame as a striking example of the “new woman,” leading an adventurous life and writing about it in her autobiography, The Flurried Years (1926).

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A significant Scottish gathering happened at Kepplestone in August 1881, after the Hooks’ weeks of work at Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye. Macdonald gathered some of his artist friends, including Hook and George Reid. And he commissioned a portrait of Hook by Reid, who painted it there and then. Reid had already executed a portrait of Millais (in which Millais himself collaborated). Both were in a modest oval format. The portrait project took off. And while he pondered portraits of his favourite painters, Macdonald hatched a scheme with Rosalie for a full-size portrait of Hook by Millais. Millais’s paintings commanded higher prices than Hook’s, and the Hooks would not have put out the big money for a commissioned portrait. But according to this scheme, Hook could pay for the portrait in kind, with a Hookscape of his own. Millais cheerfully agreed; and Macdonald and Rosalie were triumphant. Hook began his sittings for Millais the following year, during visits to London. And now Macdonald was pursuing a bigger plan still. He wanted to get self-portraits of all his favourite artists, and build his own collection. It was a massive enterprise, as can be seen from the voluminous correspondence, still preserved. Macdonald would write to commission the portrait, sending the canvas with the oval already marked out on it, as he wanted the portraits to match in format. He offered £15 – a modest price according to what these men would usually get from a commission, but he could count on good will among his artist friends. If a given painter was unwilling or unable to do a self-portrait, Macdonald would commission some up-and-coming painter to take on the job, thus supplying opportunities for some younger talents, as he had for Allan and Bryan Hook. He was full of his scheme, and told Hook about it. Hook himself was sceptical at first, and hedged about contributing. “I’m no go at a portrait,” he protested,40 and he set aside the canvas with the oval. Perhaps he felt that as he had sat to Reid and then to Millais, his phiz had currency enough. But Macdonald’s enthusiastic accounts of the portraits he was accumulating got Hook interested too. “I should indeed now like to see the Collection of Brither Brushes,” he wrote. “You will have to get a Gallery built if you go on at this rate.”41 In May 1882 the Macdonalds came to Silverbeck, and at the same time the landscape painter H.W.B. Davis, RA, and the Punch graphic artist Edward Linley Sambourne also visited. Sambourne was by this time regularly doing his large group portraits of academicians for the May exhibition of the Royal Academy. Macdonald had bought the original of his Punch cut for 1881; and Hook followed suit by buying the original of Sambourne’s cut for 1882, “Sunday Review of the Royal Academy.” That original has descended to me. And fortunately, it came with a clipping from the printed version, the typed names of all the academicians pasted in. This key enabled me to identify the personnel in Sambourne’s many other cuts done at exhibition time, and to trace the allusions.42

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8.10 / Bryan Hook, photograph of (left to right) Fanny Burton, H.W.B. Davis, ra, Rosalie Hook, James Clarke Hook, Alexander and Hope Macdonald, Edward Linley Samborne, Allan Hook, the dogs Mac and Donald, and Marion Sambourne, 1882

The acquisition of this graphic work gave Hook occasion to invite the Sambournes to Silverbeck, at the same time as the Macdonalds’ visit. Allan and Bryan Hook photographed the auspicious occasion (see figure 8.10). Macdonald’s gift dogs, Mac and Donald, were of the company. Sambourne, intrigued by the young Hooks’ photographs, took prints of the portraits of artists to use for his own drawings; he also proceeded to invest in a camera of his own, which became a very useful tool for his graphic work.43 The Millais portrait scheme was pursued. At an Etching Club meeting of 1881, as Hook told Macdonald, “Johnny was very genial and joked about ‘taking my head off.’”44 Hook sat to Millais during his trips to London. He was somewhat daunted by the other self that was emerging. “Master J[ohn] E[verett] has not spared me,” he wrote. “Folk will say I’m a savage ’un” (see figure 8.11).45 At the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition of 1883, however, the public and the press responded ecstatically to the portrait of one of their favourite painters by another. “No finer portrait has ever come from the hand of Mr. Millais than this of his old friend and fellow-Academician,” wrote the Times critic.46 The critic for the Illustrated London News asserted, “The figure in the portrait [holds] us, like the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ with

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8.11 / John Everett Millais, Portrait of James Clarke Hook, 1883

his glittering grey eyes.”47 (The Ancient Mariner analogy was apt, as Sambourne often depicted Hook in a sou’wester.)48 “It is without exception the finest picture in the entire Show,” declared Punch.49 Sambourne’s cut for the academy group portrait of 1883, “Royal Academy Maypole Dance,” shows Millais – flanked by Frederic Leighton the president, Lawrence AlmaTadema, and G.F. Watts – at the top of the Maypole, holding up the mirror to Hook (see figure 8.12). Hook had reached the top of the tree.

8.12 / Edward Linley Sambourne, “Royal Academy Maypole Dance,” Punch, 12 May 1883

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9 “ T H E V E T E RA N M R . H O O K” Towards Sunset, 1884–1907

“doe s hook k now h e h a s gon e to cou rt ? ” James Clarke Hook’s friend Barlow

wrote to Alexander Macdonald,1 the friend he shared with Hook and John Everett Millais. Barlow did not mean that Hook himself had been summoned to attend the Queen at Osborne House – where he was not likely to comport himself very graciously. It was Millais’s portrait of Hook, which Her Majesty had heard so much about, that she wanted to see. The fame of the Millais portrait did not die with the year of its exhibition; in subsequent years the art reviewers still harked back to it.

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Hook had yet to fulf ill his part of the bargain by paying for the portrait with a “Hookscape” of his own. The matter was much on his mind during his painting excursions of 1883, after the huge success of Millais’s portrait of him. He spent most of July and August in a Cornish village called Gorran Haven; and he was clearly excited about what he accomplished there. He felt he was breaking new ground. Enthusing to Macdonald about his work there, he broke into Scottish brogue: “Every thing will be very different but I never found you slacken off towards novelty so perhaps ... you’ll say ‘Weel done Southern Laddie. Ye put the curb on her belly an’ tossed the reins on the neck o’ your gude mare.’” On rereading his letter the next morning, Hook apologised that “it smells of swagger.”2 His excitement, however, did not wane. “The folk here are ... fine fellows,” he wrote, “the men I am to paint some of them such color! Like Titian’s Satyrs” – a reference to Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1523) in the National Gallery.3 Nevertheless, Macdonald clearly enjoyed the letter and sent it to Millais, who responded warmly. Some of the work Hook described, of course, was for Millais himself.

After a trip with Allan on the Puffin, the Hooks went on to Sennen near Land’s End, the site of many of the paintings of the 1880s. And back home in December, Hook wrote again to Macdonald to describe the pictures he was getting ready for the 1884 exhibition – from which Millais was to have his pick. Hook was still excited. “I have been working hard to arrange my figures something near the mark to give a notion how the different subjects will be arranged,” he wrote. (The “subjects,” of course, were determined not by the setting but by the figures.) On the inland piece, The Stream, he worked hard through November, adding that the frost gave his knuckles “a stinger.”4 From Gorran Haven came the subject of “Girls digging out launce” – and he had clearly watched them keenly – exhibited that spring as Catching Sand-Launce (1884). Another subject was “the same Village seen from the beach with two or three girls ... climbing down into a bit of the bay, the Village which stands high against a blue Cornish sky and bright clouds.” And the third subject from Gorran Haven shows “a Stretch of Coast [where] some men are adzing on the deck of a newly built 12 ton boat ... The figures for the foreground are to be large.”5 This painting is clearly A Jib for the New Smack (1890), to which I shall return. Then there were two pictures from Sennen: Wild Harbourage (1884), with middledistance figures and a pile of fish in the foreground, “pollock, ling and bream” – Hook was specific about kinds of fish, as he was about species of seagull – and another showing the Cowloe Rock, a marker for Sennen. He was evidently quite proud of the array of six canvases from which “Mr. J.E.M.” was to make his selection. “I intend your word in the management of this swap to be duly honored,” he told Macdonald, “and if it cannot be in the best specimen ... why then Johnnie must wait another year that’s a’ aboot it.”6 But he was confident that the specimens were good ones. However, in the event, Millais declined to choose. He specified only that he wanted a Hookscape with no figures. No figures? It must have come as a blow to Hook, after he had worked so hard to get his figures all in a row, so to speak. Their mutual friend Barlow was called on to make the selection. And Barlow duly visited Silverbeck for the purpose. To Macdonald, Hook had described the picture Barlow chose: “The Cowloe rock in the distance near the horizon. The day is blue and calm. ‘This is one of the Painter’s peacock seas’ [he parodies the critics] ... This one has a blue and purple distance green middle distance and light sandy foreground with water coming in in lapping rings ... I have ready for it a sunned lassie sitting idly with her bare legs in the pool.”7 But now the “sunned lassie” became redundant. A seagull was called in to provide the narrative interest; and the picture was called The Mirror of the Sea-Mew (see figure 9.1). Millais was pleased with it, Barlow reported to Macdonald.8 And the painting was duly exhibited at the 1884 exhibition before proceeding to Millais’s home, Palace Gate. The Millais portrait and its complement were still news; and it seems that word spread about Millais’s preference for a Hookscape without figures. The Times critic (who

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9.1 / Engraving of The Mirror of the Sea-Mew, 1884

was no longer friendly Tom Taylor) provided double-edged praise for the figureless picture for Millais: “Mr. Hook’s ‘The mirror of the sea-mew’ ... must surely rank as the most beautiful example of sea painting that this great artist has sent to the Academy in recent years. There are no figures in it, and we own to a feeling that it gains immeasurably from this omission.”9 The same critic wrote that it was “no secret” that this was the painting Hook had exchanged for the famous Millais portrait of the previous year. It was presumably also “no secret” that Millais had asked for no figures. This requirement seems to have led to something like open season for putting down Hook’s figures. The same critic at The Times wrote in 1887 of Hook’s Fresh from the Waves and Young Dreams, “The two shore pictures of Mr. Hook would be delightful if it were not for the intruding figure in one of them.”10 Even a staunch supporter like F.G. Stephens pronounced his reservations in his ongoing reviews in The Athenaeum. Hook’s usual practice of painting the seascape on the spot and then adding the figures later did sometimes result in some lack of due proportion between figures and ground. Stephens with his trained eye – he too had gone through the Royal Academy Schools – sometimes noticed the discrepancy. And no doubt so did Millais, his brother Pre-Raphaelite. But once word got out about Millais’s preference for a Hook painting without figures, other critics took up the cry.

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To return to the painting from Gorran Haven that Hook was so proud of after his sojourn there, the one that he was to call A Jib for the New Smack: the figures are there with a vengeance. He had described it to Macdonald: “A Stretch of coast ... of manytinted rocks from the distance up to the old Village where you look down on red brick chimneys ... some men are adzing on the deck of a newly built 12 ton boat ... The figures for the foreground to be large perhaps a Council of experts sifting over the proper ‘cut’ for the rudder of the aforesaid boat.”11 That painting, however, although the background was already done and the thinking on the figures so far advanced, was not exhibited until 1890. Why? I surmise that Millais’s implied rejection of his figure painting, exacerbated by the critics’ chorus, came as a serious blow to Hook’s confidence. He was not one to whine. But his practice was affected. Of the vaunted six canvases ready for Millais in 1884, The Mirror of the Sea-Mew and Wild Harbourage from Sennen and Catching Sand-Launce from Gorran Haven were duly exhibited that spring; the landscape, The Stream, came the next year. But A Jib for the New Smack, with its large foreground figures, had to wait seven years before it was completed and exhibited (see figure 9.2a). And another Gorran Haven one, showing the “blue Cornish sky,” was apparently abandoned altogether, though there is an old photograph of it among family records. A sad end to Hook’s “swagger.” He soldiered on, and kept producing. A Jib for the New Smack remained long unfinished. But the time came when he regained enthusiasm for his “Council of experts” discussing the equipment for the new smack a-building below them, and completed and exhibited the painting, prominent figures and all. The three fishermen in the lower left had long been unfinished. A recent photograph of Gorran Haven verifies the site (see figure 9.2b). The piece of equipment under discussion among the fishermen changed from a rudder to a jib sail. But even here, there was some evolution. When Stephens saw the painting before Sending-in Day in 1890, the sail under discussion was brown, tanned in the process that Hook had shown in Tanning Nets of 1879; by exhibition time, it was white, as Stephens noted.12 Many of Hook’s figures at this stage of his career could be sufficiently described as “figures in a ground.” They have activity and function in the context, but not much individuality. The figures in this picture, though, are full of character and individual energy. The mother with her baby at her breast, somewhat outside the male sphere of business, but a reminder of the necessity for devoted work for the family, is lovingly represented too. Even the lilies, in the bit of still life on the right, have a contribution to make. In his review of the painting in The Athenaeum, Stephens testified to the notable success of Hook’s figures here. His Cornishmen “look like what they are, strong, civil, sober, and independent; owners of their own boats, and builders of their own harbours ... Notice the colours of their faces, hair, and hands, and the deliberate gravity of their

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9.2a / A Jib for the New Smack, 1890

9.2b / The site at Gorran Haven of A Jib for the New Smack

expressions and attitudes.”13 These were the Gorran Haven men of whom Hook had written, “such color! Like Titian’s satyrs.”14 He could relate to these sturdy personnel engaged in considered work over their professional equipment. I like to think his change from tanned to white canvas was to mark his kinship with them; he too used white canvas in his trade. A Jib for the New Smack, however, in the prominence and success of the figures, remains an exception among Hook’s exhibited paintings of this period. There was one more sign of his resistance to the pressure to concentrate on the background rather than the figures. Late in the day, for a while at least, he proposed to go back to his old historical mode. In the summer of 1886, he and Rosalie went sightseeing on the Continent, travelling to Paris and across the Alps to Italy, as in the student days of their early married life. And this time they stayed at Pieve di Cadore, where Titian was born and grew up. He wrote to Stephens, “I have been getting materials for a picture I wish to paint from the life of Titian and have done two small pictures (to serve in my background) of the Cadorine Alps and vallies. This Cadore is a lovely place.”15 And much later in the summer of 1896, he wrote, “I am making up my mind about work for the next year and think of sending ... portrait of Allan, a sea bit rather small but bright ... of Aveton Gifford 4.6 × 3 and an Italian subject of my early sort – 4.6 × 3 – large figures hilly background.”16 The portrait of Allan and the Aveton Gifford piece, Low Water at the Tidal Crossing (1897), as well as a Dutch scene and a Cornish one, were duly exhibited; but no picture survives of his “early sort,” with “large figures.” It is intriguing that he was, even if only temporarily, harking back to his early days of historical painting, with large figures. The dream of a historical painting of Titian, who was his most admired Venetian painter and to some extent his role model, persisted for a long time. It seems that he had some lingering hankering to prove himself to those who doubted his powers in figure composition, even his history painting. As late as 1901, he was asking Stephens for research materials on Titian. Having been to Titian’s birthplace in Pieve di Cadore, and made preliminary landscape background studies, he was now zeroing in on his principal figure, the painter himself, and on his equipment. “I am thinking of doing a subject from the life of Titian. Did he carry a thumb palette in his left hand as we do or had he a slab with his various colors upon it?” He wanted to get it right, by way of forestalling objections by “the blooming Critics.”17 Hook’s sons may have been slightly embarrassed by this lingering bee in his bonnet. Although many of his drafts and sketches have been lovingly preserved in family archives, I have found no trace of a Titian subject. The progressive retreat of the figures remained the general rule. The number and prominence of the figures diminished as the years went on. Moreover, Hook produced more pictures with no figures at all. Wise Saws of 1875, a humorous composition in

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9.3 / Wreckage from the Fruiter, 1889

which a crow is addressing a solemn congregation of cows, was unusual at the time in having no human figures. But following on Millais’s Mirror of the Sea-Mew (1884) came “After Dinner Rest a While” (1885), showing cormorants only, bought by the Duke of Westminster; The Stream (1885), bought for the nation by the Chantrey Bequest, which features mainly cows; and The Broken Oar (1886), The Feast of the Osprey (1888), and Waders (1899), all with no figures. And in many other paintings yet to come, there appeared only a single figure, comparatively distant. In some matters – for instance, in his ability to render a rough sea dramatically – Hook was actually gaining in strength. Wreckage from the Fruiter of 1889, now at Tate Britain, is a splendid dramatic scene, with the radiant luminosity of the huge wave on the skyline, the vigorous action of the men hauling in the crate of fruit, and the thrifty work of the two women making useful gain of someone else’s loss as they collect the oranges bobbing in the shallows (see figure 9.3). It is a tour de force that no one else could have painted. As we learn in some of his letters to Macdonald, Hook was worried lest with the years his powers should be failing. But he continued to discover new and impressive effects in lighting. The Close of Day (1885), also painted at Sennen, presents a sunset scene. The figures, a resting mother and child, are not prominent, but the distinctive local rock formation, which Hook also sketched, provides an unusual identifying interest

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9.4 / The Close of Day, 1885

(see figure 9.4). (Hook’s rocks often have the individuality of portraits.) Stephens was bowled over by it,18 and another critic likened this work to that of J.M.W. Turner. Hit but Not Bagged (1891) – one of his teasing titles – also has a high viewpoint and a shining sunset sea (see figure 9.5). The single figure is small and distant, but the quaint title – this marksman has successfully shot his quarry, but it seems to have fallen out of his reach down the cliff – gives it character and identity. And over many years, he had learned to make the most of the contrast between the bright sunlight on land and sea, emphasised by the shadowed cliffs that divide them. “One is amazed at the ease with which the veteran Mr. Hook turns out his four or five pictures a year,” wrote the critic for The Times, “retaining after all these years his freshness of vision and freedom of hand.”19 As the figures diminished in size and importance, it became harder to differentiate Hook’s still abundant paintings. Gathering Limpets (1886), which late in the day became his diploma painting, Searching the Crab-Holes (1887), and The Seaweed Raker (1889) all feature a single rather distant female figure doing something not very distinguishable by the sea. It is hard to remember which is which. And the critics found it hard too. The diminution of the figure content in his paintings was not all gain. There are exceptions. Good Liquor, Duty Free (1893), a humorous title to go with the recovery of a keg of brandy, has not only a splendidly rough sea, but also bracing and effective action among the figures wading in the waves (see figure 9.6). In his Athenaeum review, however, Stephens called the figures “unusually fortunate.”20

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9.5 / Hit but Not Bagged, 1891

9.6 / Good Liquor, Duty Free, 1893

Practising without Diploma too, Hook’s inland piece of 1894, painted close to Silverbeck, returns to a prominent and engaging human scene, as a girl removes a blackberry thorn from her young brother’s finger, while he shrinks from the expected pain. I take this young female practitioner to be a reference to the controversy of the 1890s, as women clamoured to be allowed to enter the medical schools. It seems Hook was paying attention to the agitation among women for higher education. He called his engaging picture of a girl reading while she dries her abundant auburn hair along a rock An Undergraduate (1886). Activities such as removing a thorn from a little brother’s hand, and reading while drying your hair, were probably as far as Hook would go in supporting women’s higher education. He was far from approving of women’s attempts to join the professions. Notwithstanding his respect for Rosalie’s judgment on his own work, he advised Macdonald to pay no attention to certain art criticism, since much of it was by women. “The Critics Day at the R.A. ... finds the rooms half full of petticoats taking notes and this will account for much of the tall talk in the journals.”21

1 f. g .

steph ens , criti c an d frien d

2

Alexander Macdonald, family friend and Hook’s “Scottish crony,” died in December 1884, and all the Hooks mourned him. They stayed in contact with his widow, Hope Macdonald, and exchanged visits with her. Allan named his daughter after her. She kept going with the collection of portraits of artists, and finally succeeded in getting Hook to contribute his own self-portrait, in the familiar oval shape. Fortunately for the biographer, another large collection of Hook correspondence has been preserved, from which I have already been quoting – that with F.G. Stephens.22 His work as the author of the 1888 biography of Hook, and as the art critic for The Athenaeum, already made him an indispensable source for Hook’s life and work. The correspondence with Hook and his family, now preserved in the Bodleian Library, provides further rich documentation for the latter days of Hook’s life. Though trained at the Academy Schools, as we have seen, Stephens did not find success as a painter, and turned to writing. He became a prolific author of works about art and artists, as well as a close friend of Hook and his family. As a young man, he was very handsome, and famously served as the model for Jesus in Ford Madox Brown’s Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet (1856) and as Ferdinand in Millais’s Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1850). He married beneath him, as the saying went, and taught his illiterate wife to read and write; and it seems this episode was part of the quarrel with William Holman Hunt, who had been his close friend. It is to the Hooks’ credit that they were very fond of Clara Stephens, who gained the nickname “Her Valiancy” among them.

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Stephens approached Hook in 1884 about writing the biography that would be published as the Art Annual for 1888, J.C. Hook, R.A.: His Life and Work. He remained keenly interested in Hook’s paintings, and would visit before Sending-in Day to see the work in progress and to give advice. Like Macdonald, he proceeded to make friends with the whole Hook family, visiting often and always interested in their work, and also in the growing tribe of grandchildren. He and his wife often went with Hook and Rosalie on their visits to the Paris Salon in the spring, and sometimes joined them on painting excursions. Macdonald had been a patron and a “Laird” as well as a crony. Hook seems to have regarded Stephens more as a disciple than a patron, and sometimes treated him cavalierly, calling on him for errands to London shops and occasionally mocking him for highfalutin language in his criticism. But the intercourse was warm and friendly. The Hooks would offer Stephens and his wife hospitality, while Stephens could supply Hook with advice on completing and naming his paintings, and valuable recognition when they were exhibited. The commentary in his many reviews for The Athenaeum was often informed by Hook’s own explanations of his aims in this or that work. Stephens’s very detailed descriptions of Hook’s work have often enabled me to identify Hook paintings that come up for sale from time to time at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. And Stephens’s generous interest in the whole Hook family is demonstrated in the correspondence that he maintained with many of them and faithfully preserved, providing glimpses of the Silverbeck doings not otherwise available.

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Allan and Bryan Hook, already launched on painting careers, proceeded to get married and raise families of their own. In April 1887 Bryan married Catherine Moseley Dewrance, daughter of John Dewrance of the engineering firm Babcock and Wilcox; and they moved to Beefolds, an adjoining property Hook had bought some years previously. In July of the same year, Allan married Janet Matthews of Aberdeen. And a house, Sandbrow, was built for them on another part of the Silverbeck estate. After that, the grandchildren came thick and fast. The Beefolds household expanded, between 1888 and 1902, with Logan, Una, Raymond, Oliver, Valentine, Sylvia (my mother), Hereward, and Christopher.23 And at Sandbrow, between 1888 and 1894, Allan and Janet produced Duncan, Robin, Hope, and Geoffrey – just half the number of the boys and girls in the Beefolds family. According to family tradition, Allan’s four were known as the “Good Hooks,” while Bryan’s more numerous brood became the “Bad Hooks.” Allan and Bryan still sometimes travelled with their parents to painting sites, but they

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took painting excursions of their own too, and continued to exhibit, though never on the scale of their father. The grandparents, of course, were fully involved with this growing number of descendants. An entry in Rosalie’s dairy on 1 August 1893, for instance, reads, “Bry and Kate and Logan to Tor Cross – 2 goats and 1 dog.”24 Bryan was now a skilled breeder and shower of goats, and he gave lectures about them. The dog was named Chase, and he figures in Bryan’s painting of 1885 Gathering Eggs on the Cliffs of Lundy, to which I shall return. Rosalie added, “3 maids 2 bairns left at Silverbeck.”25 The “bairns” would be Una and Raymond, and further entries record that Una came down with some infection, and needed medical care.26 Rosalie was well experienced in child care, not only from bringing up her own sons, but also from amusing the painter’s many child models over many years. Hook kept a store of toys in the studio, and would mostly let the children play at will (though under her supervision, clearly), asking for stillness only when sketching in the pose. And Rosalie would supervise, and then keep the posing child interested in the works of a striking clock or the musical box.27 It was probably Rosalie too who chivvied Hook into painting his self-portrait for the Macdonald collection of portraits and self-portraits of artists. Initially, he had been sceptical of the project; and having already sat to George Reid for the collection, he pleaded, “I’m ‘no go’ at a portrait.”28 When approached by an official of the Uffizi Gallery, however, he could not refuse. The Uffizi was developing a famous collection of self-portraits by the best painters of Europe, and it was a great honour to be included. So he overcame his scruples, and painted a self-portrait – a rather dour and formal one – and exhibited it at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1892 before dispatching it to Florence. Perhaps the exercise drove him to recover Macdonald’s old canvas with the oval for the portrait already marked on it. But he could not face the “ugly dog” who confronted him in the mirror.29 At last, however, in 1895, when he was seventy-six, he provided the portrait of himself in a beret, white beard, sidelong glance, and sea-green neckcloth (see figure 9.7). It is a much more engaging image than the one he painted for the Uffizi. Hope Macdonald was delighted with it, and it stands alongside Millais’s self-portrait at the head of the collection. We know that Allan and Bryan as little boys had been models for Hook in earlier days. Now Hook had the growing tribe of grandchildren to draw on. And it is notable that at this stage a number of naked or near-naked toddlers appear in Hook’s paintings, often bathing in the shallows of his seascapes – for instance, in The Bauble Boat (1888), Summer Pleasures (1891), A Dish of Prawns (1896), and Idlers (1898). We cannot know which grandchild posed for which painting – nor indeed in most cases whether these were the grandchildren at all. But in one case Hook wrote to Stephens, “The flower of the Bryan Hook lot is Oliver, a most lovely brat. I must get a pair of blue tit’s wings,

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9.7 / Self-portrait for the Macdonald Collection, 1895

fix them to his shoulder blades and paint forth a Cupid as naked as he jumped from his birth place.”30 And sure enough, family tradition records that Oliver is the scantly clad little boy in Idlers. My mother, Bryan Hook’s second daughter and sixth child, was born on 21 November, Hook’s own birthday. And she remembered that on that day “Doubleda,” as he was known among the grandchildren, would walk over to Beefolds, and the distinguished academician and the little blond girl would execute a dance together on the lawn, after which her mother would serve him a celebratory glass of cherry brandy. Stephens, being also fond of children, cultivated these ones and gave them presents. Valentine, Bryan’s fifth child, became his godson; and Stephens preserved the letters of Logan, Duncan, Una, and Valentine, in their childish script, as well as those of their parents and grandparents. Allan and Bryan continued in their careers. Their father’s influence on them was strong – so strong, in fact, that paintings by each of them have been sold, with forged signatures, as their father’s work. Hook signed his paintings with a monogram, “JCH,” in which the crossbar of the “H” is a fishhook, so that the monogram became a sort of rebus (see figure 9.8). And, fortunately for the art historian, he included a date – not of when he painted the background, but of the year that he exhibited the painting.

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9.8 / Hook’s monogram

In 2002, at the Christie’s sale of the Forbes Collection, a painting said to be A Gull Catcher, by James Clarke Hook, was sold for £32,000 – the highest figure a Hook painting has ever fetched. I was puzzled, since I had seen a painting said to be A Gull Catcher, dated 1877, in Brighton Museum, and it was entirely different. I knew it had been painted at Hallsands; but the painting sold at Christie’s looked as though it might have been painted on Lundy Island. I knew from the academy catalogue of 1885 that Bryan Hook had exhibited a painting called Gathering Eggs on the Cliffs of Lundy. That title certainly fitted the Forbes painting better than A Gull Catcher. Could this be the Forbes picture? And if so, how could I prove it? Fortunately, I discovered that Bryan had included a drawing of this very painting in a little publication of 1885 called Academy Notes. So I was able to prove beyond doubt that the Forbes painting (a splendid one) was by Bryan Hook.31 Allan Hook too could paint very like his father. Christie’s consulted me about a painting supposedly by James Clarke Hook that was up for sale in June 2004. Christie’s had no title for the picture, but it was dated 1883. The painting did not match any exhibited titles for that year, and anyway those were all otherwise accounted for. It was

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perfectly possible that Hook could have sold this one without exhibiting it. Could the site give a clue? I consulted my fisherman friend Tom Cruse, who identified the site as Salcombe Cove in South Devon. And the local paper ran a little article about it. But this raised doubts in my mind, since Rosalie’s diary records no stay in Salcombe long enough for painting a picture. So I remained suspicious. It was only later that I learned of Allan Hook’s prolonged stay in Salcombe during the building of the Puffin, and that he indeed exhibited other paintings set there. I am morally certain – though I cannot prove it – that the painting sold at Christie’s as Unloading the Catch, by James Clarke Hook, is actually by Allan Hook – probably Waiting for a Chance to Launch, exhibited in 1882.32 “Like father like son” is a saying all too true in this case.

1 “a

peo ple ’s pai n ter ”

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“Hook is essentially a people’s painter,” claimed an article in London Society, “and his fame dates from the year in which he diverged from historical grandeur ... to those transcripts from real humble life which have been his great triumphs.”33 As we have seen, his genuine sympathy and respect for the working people he depicted do indeed inform his best work. He had a certain scorn for luxury and fastidious habits, and he took pride in his own ability to lead a hard life and to exert himself physically. From his painting location in Sennen, he wrote, rather rudely, to his fellow etcher John Horsley, “I am hard at it ... You London swells in your velvet slippers know nothing of really rough work. – Last Satdy you might have seen me balancing myself for nine hours on some granite boulders painting and sketching on a 5th picture.”34 It was not affectation. He and Rosalie, when on location, lived lives as hard and as simple as the fisher families who peopled his canvases. A.H. Palmer lived for some years at Sennen, and he observed the Hooks in their tightly cramped quarters living alongside the fisherman and his wife in a room no larger than theirs, and sharing their kitchen. “We found him, this evening,” wrote Palmer, “sleeping on the hard cottage bench after his journey; but to-morrow (if the weather moderates) we shall see him in his warm Jersey on the sea-sand, with the breeze whistling between his easel poles, and his whole mind fixed with intensity on his work.”35 And while he was so occupied, Rosalie, on the watch for curious spectators, was “sitting comfortably in the hollow of a rock, and deep in Victor Hugo.” Presently, an unruly wave flooded the hollow, soaked her, and carried away some of Hook’s equipment. “With more amusement than dismay,” she walked home to hire a boat to recover the equipment.36 It is a vivid picture of the Hooks at work. Though at home managing a teeming estate – with dozens in their employ, a farm to run, varied visitors coming and going, and

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dinners to throw for distinguished visiting academicians, or clamouring grandchildren, or busy staff – here on location they settled cheerfully to working elbow to elbow with other labourers. Allan Hook, and Herbert Palmer too, were emphatic that Hook was no “socialist,” no leveller. The meaning of the term “socialist” varies with the writer. Hook was certainly outspoken in his liberal views. His fellow academician G.D. Leslie recorded that when he and Hook served together on the academy council that selected the pictures for the coming exhibition, “I was greatly amused by coming suddenly upon Hook with four carpenters around him, to whom he was expounding the doctrines of his political creed ... ‘I tell you what, you men, you have the right, etc. etc.’”37 Probably, the other academicians on the council would hardly have noticed the attendant workmen, far less talked to them of their rights.

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“In the nineteenth century,” records the Churt historian Olivia Cotton, “Churt villagers spoke of ‘the county of Surrey and the county of Silverbeck.’”38 The multiplying Hook grandchildren, as well as the busy estate with all its activities, employees, and livestock, must indeed have seemed a populous county of its own. As the 1890s advanced, Rosalie’s diary entries lengthened. The Hooks spent less time on location and more time at home. And the family fulfilled the many and various duties of community participants and leaders. In her diary entry for 3 July 1893, for instance, Rosalie recorded a special entertainment for tenants and staff: “Rearing Feast – 22 guests tables in living and piano [rooms] 17 lb roast beef – leg mutton – pies raspberry gooseberry custards – fruits – 3 brewings of punch in each 1 bottle spirits – 1 bottle gooseberry wine – 1 quart hot water half pint tea – 3 lemons – sugar.”39 Rosalie was slowing down, however. During 1896 she was afflicted with what was diagnosed as “rheumatism” in her right arm, and her last diary entry is dated 18 September 1896. The story is taken up in the Hooks’ correspondence with Stephens.40 Allan’s wife Janet seems to have taken on the job of nurse, though they hired a professional too. Rosalie became progressively worse, and took to her bed, where, when simply rolling over, she broke her leg. She developed bowel obstruction, probably from the morphine that was used to quell her pain; and she died on 27 February 1897. Her death created a yawning vacuum. Hook was stricken. In so many ways, Rosalie had been the one to keep the elaborate Silverbeck show on the road, so to speak. Palmer deeply admired Hook’s character and his work, as well as his astonishing ability, after the luxuries of Silverbeck, to adapt to the hard and simple life he led on his coastal

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excursions; and Palmer attributed these powers not only to Hook’s own “mental quietude” and “sterling qualities,” but also to “his wife’s devotion, wisdom, and tact.”41 Allan and his family moved into Silverbeck to keep things going and to look after the veteran painter. Bereft as he was, Hook instinctively turned, for health and comfort, to work. Aside from one plea for a visit after their “terrible blow,” Hook did not mention Rosalie or her death in his ongoing letters to Stephens. The rhythms of his professional life mercifully reasserted themselves. Allan, sometimes with wife and family, now took him to his locations. That summer, they travelled to Portknockie in Cornwall: “I have by this time three 4-ft pictures on the stocks and am working away as hard as I can.”42 In 1898 they went to Trefyn in Wales: “I have now three canvases on the stocks and will soon have a fourth if the weather keeps fine.”43 In 1899 their destination was Portwrinkle in Cornwall: “All four canvases are now going in rotation.”44 And then in 1901 they went back to Gorran Haven: “I have three canvases ... getting well forward.”45 It is a remarkable record of continuing energy. And the pictures were exhibited too – four each year. They did not have to go through the rigorous selection process, since as an academician Hook had a right to exhibit up to five pictures a year. But it would be hard to demonstrate a diminution of skill. Several of these late paintings remain in family hands, which suggests that they failed to sell. But that was less because they were not as good as before than because fashions had changed, and Hook was now the painter of yesteryear. Impressionism had arrived. And Allan and Bryan, trained in part by their father, felt the brunt of the change in fashion too. There are still flashes of the old feisty Hook in his letters, which continue to be entertaining to read. From Trefyn he wrote an amusing verbal self-portrait: This place is bracing, 200 ft above the sea ... The walk to one of my sea bits is a mile all the way up a hill. – We have a donkey and boy and the ROYAL ACADEMICIAN [special script] sits in the car with his bag on his lap and all the little boys and all the pretty Welsh gals do wonder so and all the folk say nothing so wonderful was ever done in this place since the flood. Allan brings me my dinner in a basin and I generally have an admiring congregation all wishing they had their basins too.46 (A picture of the midday meal brought to the academician in the midst of his labours would make a pleasant commentary on his own compositions of the kind.) Apparently he did not mind being watched and admired by the local children as he rode to work and ate his dinner. Perhaps if they had stayed to watch him paint, it would have been another story.

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Hook enjoyed the company of family too. He joked about Allan’s mishaps with a hammock “which ingloriously nearly broke down. People laughed. Folk are inhuman ant they.”47 As he watched his son and grandchildren swimming, “They put me in mind of an old otter and pups. I see them in the distance playing and blowing.”48 He could still revel in the effects of light on water. From Portwrinkle he wound up a letter to Stephens, “Full moon right over the Eddystone, a golden stream of glory right up to our beards.”49 He was well looked after by his affectionate family. But it could not go on forever. It seems that in 1902 Allan persuaded his father to resign from the academy. It cannot have been easy to break the routines of a lifetime. And when the time came for Stephens’s usual visit to discuss the paintings before Sending-in Day, Allan wrote with a caution: “As to the pictures, about which you ask, the best thing we can hope is that the R.A. sending in period may be quietly ignored.”50 Hook had exhibited his last picture.

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Allan’s wife Janet, besides her part in running Silverbeck and educating her children, made herself responsible for the care of her father-in-law; and she kept a diary record, much of which is devoted to “Father.”51 For a while the family still headed to coastal locations for painting expeditions in the summer, although for Hook exhibiting pictures was now a thing of the past. But even while at home “Father” continued to sally forth into nature, to look greedily and study its beauties, and sketch and paint them. He kept several works “on the stocks,” as he would say. “Gipsy picture,” “Gate picture,” and “Flagstaff picture” figure often, and also “Titian picture” – so he was still contemplating a return to his old historical subject matter, in which his favourite painter, envisioned at his childhood home in Pieve di Cadore, would figure prominently. Then on Sunday, 14 April 1907, came the diary entry, “Father died peacefully at 2 a.m. Allan and I were with him. Bry came up for tea.” Hook was buried beside Rosalie at Brookwood Cemetery. The gravestones are granite, perhaps in remembrance of Alexander Macdonald of “the granite city.” Although he had worried, as he got older, lest he might lose his touch, he wanted to keep working, for better or worse. “Certainly I have no higher earthly ambition,” he had written to Macdonald in 1875, “than to die a Student with a pencil in my hand.”52 That was an ambition he achieved.

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P O STSCRI PT

s i lv e r b ec k a n d i t s c us to m s a n d h e r i tag e did not die with its first developer.

Allan and Bryan Hook disseminated their talent and experience there to far reaches of the world. After his father’s death, and seeking “fresh woods and pastures new,”1 Allan and his family emigrated to Vancouver Island in Canada, and developed a property with silver becks running through it. Now trained as engineers, the talented sons, who as boys had built a small-scale railway on Silverbeck grounds, helped in establishing the railway system on the island, before enlisting in the army in 1914. All three sons were tragically lost to the First World War. Allan soldiered on, with his daughter Hope, and wrote the Life of his father,2 a major document for my own biography. One of Hope’s grandsons is a brilliant painter of sea otters, salmon, orcas, and other denizens of northern climes. Bryan and the “bad Hooks” moved to Silverbeck, and during the First World War, he put his painting skills to use in camouflaging British ships. He took trips to the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya (as the country was called then), and painted zebra, oryx, and rhino in that magnificent scenery, becoming among the first of many painters of African wildlife. Some of his pictures have been used to illustrate an edition of Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. For his sons, he bought land fed by streams off Mount Kenya. Raymond Hook, a naturalist like his father, trained and raced cheetahs, and became an authority on East African fauna and culture. Logan Hook established a hotel right on the equator, where you could choose to have your beer in the northern or southern hemisphere. He called it the Silverbeck.

APPENDIX 1 Paintings by James Clarke Hook Exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, 1839–1902

Compiled from the catalogues of the Royal Academy of Arts, as recorded by Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors from Its Foundation in 1769 to 1904, 4 vols. (London: Henry Graves and Co. and George Bell and Sons,1905), vol 2, 145–8, with some additional references. Included here are Hook’s changing addresses, but not the exhibition numbers for each painting. If I have discovered the site where a picture was painted, I include it in parentheses after the title, adding a question mark in slightly doubtful cases.

1839 The Hard Task 1842 Portrait of Master John Finch

18 South Lambeth, Surrey

58 Newman Street

1844 4 Sidmouth Street, Regent Square Pamphilus Relating His Story “And they went into a meadow of grass and sate down, as the Queen had commanded, when Pamphilus, in obedience to her wish, and being well heard, spoke to this effect.”

– Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (1353) 1845 Portrait of A. Elmslie, Esq. The Song of Olden Time “Theyr song so sweete brought again the dayes Of his love to Sir Rowland’s mynde.”

1846 70 Newman Street The Controversy between Lady Jane Grey and Feckenham, who was sent to her from the Queen, two days before her death, to convert her to Romanism Feck: “Doth not Christ speak these words, ‘Take, eat; this is my body?’ Doth he not say, it is his body?” Lady Jane: “I grant he saith so; and so he saith, ‘I am the vine,’ ‘I am the door.’ Doth not St. Paul say, ‘He calleth things that are not, as though they were?’ God forbid that I should say that I eat the natural body and blood of Christ.”

– John Foxe, Book of Martyrs (1563) 1847 Bassanio Commenting on the Caskets

6 Manor Road, Holloway

– Shak espeare, Merchant of Venice, act 3, scene 2 1848 “When the Emperor Otho IV came to Florence, the beautiful women of the city being assembled at Santa Reparata to do him honour, the maid Gualdrada pleased him most; and her father saying of her to the Emperor that he was at liberty to kiss her, the damsel replied, that no man living should kiss her unless he were her husband; for which words the Emperor commended her much; and the count Guido was taken so much in love with her, for her grace, that, with the counsel of the Emperor, he made her his wife.” – Chronicles of Giovanni Villani 1849 15 Thurloe Place, West The Chevalier Bayard Wounded at Brescia “The damsels were fair, virtuous, and well trained, and had afforded much pastime to the Chevalier during his illness by their choice singing, playing on the lute, and their much cunning needlework.” – William Gilmore Sim ms and Samuel Putnam Avery,

eds, The Life of the Chevalier Bayard (1847) Othello’s First Suspicion Bianca Capello “The young Bianca found her father’s door, The door so often with a trembling hand, So often – then so lately left ajar, Shut; and all terror, all perplexity, Now by her lover urged, now by her love, Fled o’er the waters, to return no more.”

– Samuel Rogers, Italy (1830) 1850 / Elected ARA Francesco Novello di Carrera, and the Lady Taddea escape from the emissaries of Galeazzo Visconti, who are in pursuit of them “A thicket afforded them shelter till their company had passed by, and Carrera then cheered the drooping spirits of his lady by assuring her that certain succour was at hand.”

– Chronicles of Gataro

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A Dream of Venice. “Si costume andado altorno in gondola, Concerti di musinche di cercarli per sollazzo.”

– Jacopo Sansovino 1851 The Rescue of the Brides of Venice “Having surprised the pirates at Caorli, where they were dividing their booty, the youths made great havoc among them, and regained the brides and their marriage portions.”

– Jacopo Sansovino The Defeat of Shylock Portia: “Therefore, prepare thee to cut off the flesh. Shed thou no blood: nor take thou less, nor more, But just a pound of flesh; if thou tak’st more, Or less, than just a pound, – be it by so much As makes it light, or heavy, in the substance, Of the division of the twentieth part Of one poor scruple, – nay, if the scale do turn But in the estimation of a hair, – Thou diest, and all they goods are confiscate.”

– Shak espeare, Merchant of Venice, act 4, scene 1 1852 Othello’s Description of Desdemona “An admirable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear! Of so high and plenteous wit and invention!”

Tor Villa, Campden Hill

– Shak espeare, Othello, act 4, scene 1 Signor Torello Goes to Fight the Turks, and is made prisoner; his wife, supposing him to be dead, is persuaded by her family to marry again. Torello returns and appears in disguise at the marriage feast, when he makes himself known to his wife by dropping his ring in a pledge cup.

– Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (1353) 1853 The Chevalier Bayard, “sans peur et sans reproche,” confers the order of knighthood on the infant son of the Duke of Bourbon, when visiting this prince, on a journey through Moulins. Queen Isabella of Castille, with her daughters, visited many of the nunneries, taking her needle with her and endeavouring by her conversation and example to withdraw the inmates from the low and frivolous pleasures to which they were addicted.

– William H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (1838)

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1854 A Rest by the Wayside (Abinger, Surrey?) A Few Minutes to Wait before Twelve O’clock (Abinger) Time of the Persecution of the Christian Reformers in Paris “The Papists assembled in the streets, and sung canticles before the images of the Virgin that were then exposed at the corners of the houses. Those who passed were invited to join in the chorus, and if they refused to do so, they were insulted and beaten.”

– Jules Michelet, History of France: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (1845) 1855 Market Morning (Surrey) “There’s a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s, The only one dwelling on earth that she loves.”

– William Wordsworth, Poor Susan (1798) A Fracture Colin Thou Kenst, the Southerne Shepheard’s Boye (Abinger)

– Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) The Birthplace of the Streamlet (Abinger) The Gratitude of the Mother of Moses for the Safety of Her Child “And the maid went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it.” – Exodus 2:8–9 1856 The Brambles in the Way A Passing Cloud “Welcome, Bonny Boat!” (Clovelly, Devon) The Fisherman’s “Good Night” (Clovelly) 1857 A Signal on the Horizon (Clovelly) “Her Union Jack is at the fore.” A Widow’s Son Going to Sea (Clovelly) “Sail forth into the sea, O ship! Through wind and wave, right onward steer! The moistened eye, the trembling lip, Are not the signs of doubt or fear.”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Building of the Ship (1869) The Shipboy’s Letter 1858 “Children’s Children Are the Crown of Old Men, and the glory of children are their fathers”

– Proverbs 17:6

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A Pastoral “Then blow your pypes, shepherds, till you be at home: The night nietth fast, yts time to be gone.”

– Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) The Coastboy Gathering Eggs (Lundy Island) 1859 The Brook “And out again I curve and flow, To join the brimming river; For men may come, and men may go, But I go on for ever.”

Hambledon, Near Godalming, Surrey

– Alfred Tennyson, The Brook (1886) “Luff, Boy!” (Clovelly) A Cornish Gift The Skipper Ashore (Clovelly) 1860 / Elected RA “Whose Bread Is on the Waters” Stand Clear! (Clovelly) The Valley on the Moor “O well for the sailor lad / That he sings in his boat on the bay.”

Pine Wood, Witley, Godalming

– Alfred Tennyson, Break, Break, Break (1842) 1861 Leaving Cornwall for the Whitby Fishing (St Ives) “Compass’d by the Inviolate Sea” (St Ives)

– Alfred Tennyson, Dedication to the Queen (1851) Sea Urchins (St Ives) 1862 The Acre by the Sea (Aberporth, Wales) The Trawlers “A net that was cast into the sea, And gathered of every kind.”

– Matthew 13:47 Sea Air (Aberporth) 1863 The Prawn Catchers (Scilly Isles?) A Sailor’s Wedding Party (Scilly Isles) Leaving at Low Water (Scilly Isles)

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1864 The Broom Dasher (Churt) From under the Sea (St Just, Cornwall) Milk for the Schooner Cornish Miners Leaving Work (St Just?) A Narrow Lane (diploma work, later replaced) 1865 Breton Fishermen’s Wives (Concarneau, Brittany) The Mackerel Take The Sardine Fleet The Seaweed Gatherer Etching: A Sea Boy Gathering Eggs (Lundy Island) 1866 Landing Salmon Washerwomen – Brittany (Douarnenez, Brittany) “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread” [renamed Hoisting the Sail] (Coldingham)

– Matthew 6:11 Baiting for Haddock 1867 Digging for Sand-Eels (Gardenstown, Banffshire) “Mother Carey’s Chickens” A Cowherd’s Mischief (Churt?) Herrings from Banff: Fishers Clearing Their Nets (Gardenstown) 1868 The Lobster Catcher The Morning after a Gale Are Chimney-Sweepers Black? (Bedruthan Steps, Cornwall) 1869 Cottagers Making Cider The Boat “It served them for kitchen and parlour and all.” Caught by the Tide 1870 Fish from the Doggerbank Brimming Holland Sea Earnings (Bedruthan Steps)

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Silverbeck, Churt, near Farnham

1871 A Thorn (Churt) Salmon Trappers, Norway Norwegian Haymakers Market Girls on a Fjord 1872 The Oyster Severals of Hampshire Gold of the Sea (Mouth Mill, Clovelly) Between the Tides “As Jolly as a Sandboy” 1873 The Fishing Haven Song and Accompaniment “I cast my line in Largo Bay, And fishes I caught nine; They’re three to roast, and three to boil, And three to bait the line.”

– Anonymous, “The Boatie Rows” Fishing by Proxy (near Churt) “A modern master of cormorants at work in a Surrey stream. A small strap is fastened round the neck of the bird to keep the fish in the jugular pouch, from which the sportsman obliges the cormorant to discharge the live prey from time to time.”

– Description of Captain Salvin’s operation with cormorants The Bonxie, Shetland (Hillswick, Shetland) “They who are about to rob their nests hold a knife or other sharp instrument over their heads, upon which the enraged bird precipitates and transfixes itself.”

– Thomas Bewick, History of British Birds, vol. 2 (1804) 1874 Kelp Burners, Shetland Under the Lee of a Rock (Gwithian, Cornwall) Cow Tending (Churt?) Jetsam and Flotsam (Gwithian) 1875 Hearts of Oak (Muchalls, Aberdeen) “ ... that England, hedged in with the main, The weather-walled bulwark, still secure And confident from foreign purposes.”

– Shak espeare, King John, act 2, scene 1

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Wise Saws (Churt) “Am I both priest and clerk? Well, then, amen.”

– Shak espeare, Richard II, act 4, scene 2 Land of Cuyp The Samphire Gatherer (St Agnes, Cornwall) “And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low.”

– Shak espeare, King Lear, act 4, scene 6 1876 Seaside Ducks (Hope Cove, Devon) A Little Blue Bay (Hallsands, Devon) Crabbers (Hope Cove) “Hard Lines” (Hallsands) 1877 Word from the Missing (Hallsands) A Gull Catcher (Hallsands) “He Shot a Fine Shoot” (Churt?)

– Shak espeare, Henry IV, part 2, act 3, scene 2 Friends in Rough Weather (Hallsands) “In some of the small fishing villages on the coast of Devon, dogs are trained to swim through the surf to boats returning in rough weather, and to bring to land a rope by which those on the shore haul the boat to the beach.” 1878 The Coral Fisher, Amalfi “You do as chapmen do, Dispraise the thing you desire to buy.”

– Shak espeare, Troilus and Cressida, act 4, scene 1 1879 “Little to Earn and Many to Keep” (Portsoy)

– Charles Kingsley, The Three Fishers (1851) Mushroom Gatherers (Portsoy) Tanning Nets: Witches and Cauldrons from the Macbeth Country (Portsoy) 1880 “King Baby”: The White Sands of Iona Home with the Tide (Findochtie, Banffshire) Sea-Pools Mussel-Gardens (Findochtie)

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1881 The Nearest Way to School (Sennen, Cornwall) Diamond Merchants, Cornwall (Sennen) Past Work (Hallsands) “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” – Ecclesiastes 1:4 1882 Castle Building (Kyleakin, Skye) “Caller Herrin” Devon Harvest Cart: The Last Handful Home 1883 Catching a Mermaid (Sennen) Love Lightens Toil (Mullion, Cornwall) “As looks the mother on her lowly babe.”

– Shak espeare, Henry VI, part 1, act 3, scene 3 The Wily Angler (Churt?) “But bite the perch well, and that very boldly.”

– Izaak Walton, The Complete Angler of Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton, vol. 2 (1824) Carting for “Farmer Pengelly” (Mullion) 1884 Wild Harbourage (Sennen) The Mirror of the Sea-Mew (Sennen) Catching Sand-Launce (Gorran Haven) “At low tide the fisher-girls sweep the wet sand with small blunt sickles.” 1885 The Stream / purchased by the Chantry Bequest for £1,100 “Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge ...”

– Shak espeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, act 2, scene 7 “After Dinner Rest a While” “The hote cormeraunte ful of glotony.”

– Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Foules (c. 1382) The Close of Day (Sennen) “The weary sun hath made a golden set.”

– Shak espeare, Richard III, act 5, scene 3 “Yo, heave ho” (Sennen)

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1886 Sea Daisies (Sennen) “While I thy amiable cheeks do coy, And stick musk roses in thy sleek smooth head, And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.”

– Shak espeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 4, scene 1 The Broken Oar (near Sennen) “Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave.”

– Shak espeare, Titus Andronicus, act 3, scene 1 The Salmon Pool An Undergraduate (Sennen) Gathering Limpets (Sennen) (became diploma painting) 1887 Fresh from the Waves (Porthdinllaen, Wales) Young Dreams (Porthdinllaen) Tickling Trout (on the Tamar, Devon) Searching the Crab-Holes (near Sennen) 1888 Low Tide Gleanings The Bauble Boat (Sennen) “The sea being smooth, How many shallow bauble boats dare sail?”

– Shak espeare, Troilus and Cressida, act 1, scene 3 The Feast of the Osprey (Sennen?) The Day for the Lighthouse (near Gwithian) 1889 The Seaweed Raker The Fowler’s Pool (near Sennen) Wreckage from the Fruiter (Sennen) 1890 Last Night’s Disaster (Sennen?) A Jib for the New Smack (Gorran Haven) A Dutch Pedlar Breakfasts for the Porth (Sennen)

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1891 Hit but Not Bagged (Trevone, Cornwall) Portrait of the Painter / painted by invitation for the collection of portraits of artists painted by themselves for the Uffizi Gallery, Florence Willing Helpmates: Fishing Station on the Maas Summer Pleasures “On the beached margent of the sea.”

– Shak espeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 2, scene 1 1892 Nereids (Port Isaac, Cornwall) The Sea-Mew’s Nest (Port Gaverne, Cornwell) 1893 Good Liquor, Duty Free 1894 Seed Time “Let not ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys and destinies obscure, Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor.”

– Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) Practising without Diploma (Churt) Herring-Packers “As honest maids as ever broke bread” Before Sundown 1895 Finnan Haddie “Hey, Ho, Seely Sheepe!”

– Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) A Harvest in the West Country 1896 A Dish of Prawns (Sennen) Breadwinners of the North 1897 From the Shore to the Field Allan J. Hook, Esq. Low Water at the Tidal Crossing (Aveton Gifford, Devon) A Dutchman’s Home

211

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1898 A Turn in the Lane: Blackberries Idlers (Sennen) “Their hour-glass was the sea-sand, and the tide, Like the smooth billow, saw their moments glide.”

– Byron, The Island (1823) Trouble with the Old Muzzle-Loader (Portknockie, Banffshire) “The sunshine in the happy glens is fair, etc.” (Portknockie, Banffshire)

– Matthew Arnold, Cadmus and Harmonia (1853) 1899 Waders Grist to the Mill “Water-Cresses!” Bryan Hook, Esq. 1900 The Goatherd (Trefyn, Wales) A New Coat for an Old Friend Once Bit, Twice Shy A Surrey Trout Stream 1901 Mending the Trammel Seaweed for the Garden Cornish Pets A Lonely Bay 1902 Where the Green Sea Meets the Shingle Home from the Marshes

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APPENDIX 2 Membership of the Etching Club, 1838–1885 Na m e

Life dates

AR A

RA

Attended

Richard Ansdell Thomas Oldham Barlow John Bell Philip H. Calderon Charles West Cope Thomas Creswick William Dyce Thomas Fearnley William Edward Frost John Rogers Herbert Francis Seymour Haden John Postle Heseltine John Evan Hodgson James Clarke Hook John Callcott Horsley William Holman Hunt John Knight Charles G. Lewis John Everett Millais George Bernard O’Neill Samuel Palmer John Pettie John Phillip Richard Redgrave Samuel Redgrave (secretary) Joseph Severn Frank Stone Charles Stonehouse John Frederick Tayler Henry J. Townsend Thomas Webster

1815–1885 1824–1889 1811–1885 1833–1898 1811–1890 1811–1869 1806–1864 1802–1842 1810–1877 1810–1890 1818–1910 1843–1916 1831–1895 1819–1907 1817–1903 1827–1910 1803–1881 1808–1880 1829–1896 1828–1917 1805–1881 1839–1893 1817–1867 1804–1888 1802–1876 1793–1879 1800–1859 fl. 1833–65 1802–1889 1810–1890 1800–1886

1861 1873 – 1864 1843 1842 1844 – 1846 1841 – – 1873 1850 1855 – 1826 – 1853 – – 1866 1851 1840 – – 1851 – – – 1840

1870 1881 – 1867 1848 1851 1848 – 1870 1846 – – 1879 1860 1864 – 1844 – 1863 – – 1873 1859 1851 – – – – – – 1846

1850–84 1876–84 1838 1876–85 1838–82 c. 1839–67 1847–48 1838 1846–57 1841–42 1860–78 1876–84 1876–85 1850–85 1838–85 1856–84 1839–46 1838 1856–85 1850–84 1850–81 1876–84 1858–60 1838–84 1838–76 1839–46 1839–46 1838–59 1838–84 1838–57 1839–58

Note: Some terminal dates are conjectural since, rather than resigning, some members simply stayed away. Source: Etching Club, Minute Books of the Etching Club (1838–85), National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, MSL 1912/150b-1524, 86.BB.57-9.

1

n ote s

2

Unless otherwise indicated, all italicised emphasis in cited quotations occurs in the original sources.

preFace 1 2 3 4

Punch, 13 May 1865, 197. Trollope, Ralph the Heir, ch. 49. Graham, It Might Have Been Raining, 257ff. Hudson, Land’s End, 292–3.

chap ter one 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 1 February 1834. Bankruptcy Directory, 209. See also A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 30. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 25. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 20 October 1843. Ibid., 13 February 1825. Clarke, Account of the Infancy, vol. 3, 241. Ibid., vol. 2, 112–13. Enclosed in J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 29 January 1843. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 1, 2. Clarke, Account of the Infancy, vol. 3, 36. The three-volume An Account of the Infancy, Religious and Literary Life, of Adam Clarke, LL.D., F.A.S., etc.: Written by One Who Was Intimately Acquainted with Him from His Boyhood to the Sixtieth Year of His Age, volumes 2 and 3, omit “Infancy” from the title and are announced as being “By a Member of His Family.” The prefaces explain that the first volume is by Clarke himself, though in the third person, and the next two are by his daughter Mary Ann Smith, based on documents that he provided (including many of his letters). His youngest son, J.B.B. Clarke, was the editor of all three volumes. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 188–9. Clarke, Account of the Infancy, vol. 3, 91. Ibid., vol. 3, 69. Ibid., vol. 2, 220.

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Ibid., vol. 3, 40–1. Ibid., vol. 3, 128. Ibid., vol. 3, 229. Ibid., vol. 3, 220. Ibid., vol. 3, 222. Ibid., vol. 3, 226. Ibid., vol. 3, 230. Ibid., vol. 3, 220–30. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 32. Clarke, Account of the Infancy. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 17 October 1817. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 3. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Earl Bathurst, 13 January 1817. I am grateful to David Westlake and his wife, Chrystel Westlake, a descendant of James Hook, for making these letters available to me. Ibid., 14 August 1818. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 13 February 1825. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 1, 2. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 2n. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 28. Norman, “Drawings of Lions,” 39. Weinreb and Hibbert, London Encyclopaedia, 413. Clarke, Account of the Infancy, vol. 3, 113. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Earl Bathurst, 3 June 1848. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 31. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 1, 3. Frith, My Autobiography, 15. Thackeray, Newcomes, ch. 23. Jackson’s portrait of Clarke of about 1823, in an engraving by William Ward, is in the National Portrait Gallery, D1456. Thackeray, Newcomes, ch. 17. Frith, My Autobiography. Ward, Mrs. E.M. Ward’s Reminiscences, 63. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 33. Dickens, Personal History of David Copperfield, ch. 11. Quoted in Wickham, “Schools and the Practice of Art,” 444. Frith, My Autobiography, 23–4. Ibid., 35. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Earl Bathurst, 25 July 1840. Ibid., 29 July 1840. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 6 January 1843. Ibid. Ibid., 9 February 1843. Ibid., 6 January 1843. Richard III, act 1, scene 1.

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57 J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 9 February 1843. 58 Ibid., 20 October 1843.

chap ter t wo 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 29. Frith, My Autobiography, 41–2. Ward, Mrs. E.M. Ward’s Reminiscences, 37–8. Greysmith, Richard Dadd. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 61. Melville, “Phillip of Spain,” 36. Ward, Mrs. E.M. Ward’s Reminiscences, 39–40. I am grateful to Fiona Watson of Northern Health Services Archives for finding and giving me this information about Maria Dadd Phillip’s long incarceration. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 2 October 1879, 152. Stephens, J.C. Hook. Valentine, “Royal Academy Schools,” 40. Ibid. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 9. Thackeray, “May Gambols,” 631. Ibid. Frith, My Autobiography, 87. Ibid., 94. Cited ibid., 38. Cited in J.G. Millais, Life and Letters, vol. 1, 27. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 1, 3. Frith, My Autobiography, 49. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 1, 4. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 44. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 1, 4. Wickham, Schools and the Practice of Art,” 436. Brontë, Jane Eyre, ch. 13. The Tempest, act 1, scene 2. For reproductions of Dadd’s Come unto These Yellow Sands (1842) and Puck and the Fairies (1841), see Greysmith, Richard Dadd, plates 26 and 24. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 10. Cited in J.G. Millais, Life and Letters, vol. 1, 28. The Times (London), 14 December 1842. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 6. The Times (London), 14 December 1842. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 23 March 1843. Thackeray, “Picture Gossip,” 650–1.

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid., 645. Ibid., 631. Greysmith, Richard Dadd, 51. Ibid., 60. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 48. John Callcott Horsley, Satan Touched by Ithuriel’s Spear While Whispering Evil Dreams to Eve (1848), reproduced in Hay and Riding, Art in Parliament, 95. Spielmann, History of ‘Punch,’ 187. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 29 June 1843. Ibid., 18 July 1844. Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 37. Punch, 14 July 1847. Thackeray, “Westminster Hall Exhibition,” 8. Thackeray, Newcomes, ch. 17. Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 44–5. Cited in J.G. Millais, Life and Letters, vol. 1, 43–4. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 7. Palgrave, History of England, vol. 1., 372, 388–9. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 43. 2 Samuel 21. In Tennyson’s dramatic monologue “Rizpah” (1880), the subject is updated to an eighteenthcentury setting where a mother collects the bones of her son as they fall from the gibbet. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 9. As late as 1893, when the women students at the Academy Schools finally won the right to draw from the male body in the life classes, the restrictions called for the male model to be clothed in bathing drawers and “a cloth of light material 9 ft long by 3 ft wide, which shall be wound round the loins over the drawers, passed between the legs and tucked over the waistband.” Valentine, “Royal Academy Schools,” 46–7. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 46. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 30 July 1847. Ibid., 9 February 1943. Ibid., 26 October 1843. Ibid., 17 January 1844. Ibid., 22 April 1844.

chap ter three 1 2 3 4 5 6

R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 27 December 1847, 99. Ibid., 3 March 1847, 29. Ibid., 25 March 47, 36. Ibid., 15 April 1847, 49. Ibid., 20 April 1847, 52. Ibid., 25 September 1846, 16.

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., 24 December 1847, 95. Cited in A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 1, 6. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 18 September 1846, 12. Ibid., 20 September 1846, 14. Ibid., 19 September 1846, 13. Ibid., 23 September 1846, 15. Thackeray, Newcomes, ch. 39. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 57–8. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 13 September 1846, 8. Ibid., 13 September 1846, 8. Rogers, Italy, 12. Ibid. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 12 September 1846, 10. Ibid. E. Ruskin, Effie in Venice, 183. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 14 September 1846, 10. Ibid., 25 September 1846, 16. Ibid., 26 September 1846, 17. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 10. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 29 September 1846, 20. Ibid., 1 March 1847, 27. Ibid., 3 March 1847, 29. Ibid., 28 February 1847, 25–6. Ibid., 22 March 1847, 35. Ibid., 28 March 1847, 39. Ibid., 4 March 1847, 29. Thackeray, Newcomes, ch. 35. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 20 April 1847, 53. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 10. Thackeray, Newcomes, ch. 39. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 28 March 1847, 309. Ibid., 10 April 1847, 50. Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 249. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 253. Ibid. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 20 April 1847, 53. Ibid., 20 April 1847, 54. Ibid., 13 October 1847, 80–1. Ibid., 27 April 1847, 58. Ibid., 1 May 1847, 60. Ibid., 24 June 1847, 65. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 65. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 8 August 1847, 67.

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51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Ibid., 25 August 1847, 71. Ibid., 12 September 1847, 73. Barrett Browning, “Casa Guidi Windows,” lines 224–59. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 61. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 15 September 1847, 75. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 67. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 27 November 1847, 85. Ibid., 7 December 1847, 90–1. Ibid., 4 December 1847, 89. Ibid., 17 December 1847, 93. Ibid., 24 December 1847, 95. Ibid., 26 December 1847, 98. Ibid., 27 December 1847, 99. Ibid. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 58–9. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 1, 6. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 28 December 1847, 100. Ibid., 6 February 1848, 106. Ibid., 13 February 1848, 107. Ibid., 9 March 1848, 108. Ibid., 6 March 1848, 107. E. Ruskin, Effie in Venice, 16. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 11 January 1848, 105. Ibid., 23 March 1848, 109. Cited in Stephens, J.C. Hook, 14. Ibid. E. Ruskin, Effie in Venice, 16. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 200. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 29 March 1848, 110. Ibid., 4 April 1848, 111.

chap ter Four 1 2 3 4 5 6

J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, c. 1849. Ibid., 30 July 1847. Ibid., 24 November 1849. Ibid., 30 July 1847. “Application Received 4 August 1848,” Foreign Office (FO), 84 711. “Application from James Hook of Sierra Leone, ‘Query’ to Lord Palmerston,” 3 June 1848, FO, 84 711. 7 A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 79.

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8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 18 July 1847. Ibid., 24 November 1849. James Hook to Lord Palmerston, 21 January 1850, FO, 84 788. Allan Hook recorded the Hooks’ arrival at Southampton on 3 June 1848. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 75. In a letter that August, James Hook referred to a letter from Rosalie “dated Bagboro the 21 June.” J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 21 August 1848. Altick Paintings from Books, 19. Haydon, Neglected Genius, 23. Ibid., 99–100. Ibid., 221. Reynolds, Discourses, 117. Art Journal, no. 10 (1848): 179. Altick, Paintings from Books, 307. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 15. Simms and Avery, eds, Life of the Chevalier Bayard. Hook to Thomas Miller, 13 July 1849, Library of the Royal Academy of Arts. Art Journal, no. 11 (1849): 174. The Athenaeum, 2 June 1849, 516. Rossetti, “Notices of Painters,” 91–2. Ibid., 92. J.C. Hook, Manuscript letters to F.G. Stephens. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 30 July 1847. Prettejohn, Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 43. Art Journal, no. 12 (1850): 175. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 16. Hook, Tor Villa, to John Callcott Horsley, n.d., author’s collection. Cope, Reminiscences of Charles West Cope. B. Hook, “Italian Pilgrims.” Ibid. Art Journal, no. 15 (1853): 145. The Athenaeum, 20 May 1854, 626. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 86. J. Ruskin, “Academy Notes,” 25. Hook to Thomas Miller, n.d., Library of the Royal Academy of Arts.

chap ter Five 1 2 3 4 5 6

A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 2, 41. Doyle, Dick Doyle’s Journal, 69–70. J. Hook, Manuscript letters/Sierra Leone, 30 July 1847. Redgrave, Richard Redgrave, 117–18. Hook to William Bower, 24 November 1854, author’s collection. J. Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures, 696.

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42

Hook to Thomas Miller, 1 August 1856, Library of the Royal Academy of Arts. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 88. The Athenaeum, 8 May 1858, 233. Hook, at “Kyle Akin” (Kyleakin) on the Isle of Skye, to Stephen Pearce, 15 August 1881, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, MSL 1979/5116/133/89, WW1. East, Art of Landscape Painting, 6–8. Hook to Richard Redgrave, [summer 1855], National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, MSL 1979/511b/129. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 2, 40. Brown, Diary of Ford Madox Brown, 174. I am grateful to Christiana Payne for sending me a transcript of these verses, which she discovered in the British Library. A.E., Marks and Re-marks, 118–19. Ibid. Ibid. Hook to Richard Redgrave, [summer 1855], National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, MSL 1979/511b/120. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 23 July 1856, 126. In a diary entry on 6 November 1879, Rosalie recorded, “Bry working at wood drawing from Signal on the horizon.” Ibid., 152. J. Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures, 19. Ibid. I am immensely grateful to Michael Londry, who kindly found and gave me this precious watercolour. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 104. Ibid., 286–7. The Times, 4 May 1857. The Times, 30 April 1859. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 4, 108. J. Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures, 26–7. Stephens, J.C. Hook, 1. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 100. Ibid. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 2, 42. Ibid., 41. Hook to William Holman Hunt, 11 October 1859, Huntington Library, RBS446653, HH 144. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 2, 42. Rosalie Hook and the present owners too call the house “Pinewood.” Hook himself, however, had stationery printed with “Pine Wood,” and his address in the Royal Academy Catalogues is also listed as “Pine Wood.” R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 1 January 1877, 149. Redgrave, Richard Redgrave. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 120.

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chap ter six 1 Cope, Reminiscences of Charles West Cope, 138. 2 Etching Club, Minute Books, 1 November 1839. I take this extract of the Etching Club’s minutes from the fair copy made in 1842 of rules accepted in 1838. 3 Cope, Reminiscences of Charles West Cope, 137–8. 4 Rosalie Hook, unpublished diary of 1869, private family archive, Surrey. 5 The Etching Club members, with some information on them, are listed in appendix 2. 6 Leslie, Inner Life of the Royal Academy, 106. 7 Etching Club, Minute Books, 4 February 1878. 8 Redgrave, Richard Redgrave, 351. 9 S. Palmer, Letters of Samuel Palmer, 807. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 802. 12 Ibid. 13 Hook to William Holman Hunt, [spring 1858?], Huntington Library, RBS446653, HH 142. 14 Ibid. 15 E. Barlow, Manuscript Diary. 16 A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 239–40. 17 Payne, Where the Sea Meets the Land, 56. 18 Etching Club, Minute Books, 15 June 1858. 19 Ibid., 6–7 June 1863. 20 Redgrave, Richard Redgrave, 210. 21 Ibid., 211. 22 Ibid., 210. 23 Ibid., 212. 24 After Gray’s poem of 1751. 25 After Milton’s poem of 1645. 26 Etching Club, Minute Books, 4 November 1856. 27 Hook to John Callcott Horsley, 14 November 1846, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS.Eng.c.2222, fols 40–74. 28 Etching Club, Minute Books, 26 April 1862. 29 Ibid., 5 November 1877. 30 S. Palmer, Letters of Samuel Palmer, 1025. 31 Fredericksen, “Etching Club of London.” 32 S. Palmer, Letters of Samuel Palmer, 931–2. 33 Cope, Reminiscences of Charles West Cope, 137. 34 Anderson and Koval, James McNeill Whistler, 15. 35 Sparrow, Book of British Etching, 188. 36 A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 293. 37 Cited in Lochnan, Etchings of James McNeill Whistler, 27. 38 Etching Club, Minute Books, 10 January 1871. 39 Sparrow, Book of British Etching, 172. 40 Etching Club, Minute Books, 14 February 1871.

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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ibid., 30 April 1872. Cited in ibid., 8 April 1878. Sparrow, Book of British Etching, 203. Hind and Chambers, “Haden, Sir Francis Seymour.” Fredericksen, “Etching Club of London,” 20. A.H. Palmer, ed., Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, 97n. Ibid., 97. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 4, 111. Hamerton, Etching and Etchers, 343. Etching Club, Minute Books, 3 June 1870. Ibid., 10 November 1879.

chap ter seven 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18

A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 124–7. Ibid., 126. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 138. Marion Sambourne, wife of the Punch artist Edward Linley Sambourne, preserved this recipe among her household effects. I am grateful to Shirley Nicholson, Sambourne’s biographer, for sending it to me. Nicholson, Victorian Household. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 20 July 1873, Alexander Macdonald of Kepplestone Collection, Aberdeen City Archives, DD391/13-6-19 (hereafter cited by date and shelf mark). In the remaining chapters, I draw on the letters in this ample correspondence mostly between the Hooks and the Macdonalds of Kepplestone in Aberdeen. I am grateful to the Aberdeen City Archives for permission to use them. A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 138–9. Cited in Beardmore, “Wesleyan Artists,” 652. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 27 May 1862, 130. Hook to William Holman Hunt, 30 June 1862, Huntington Library, RBS446653, HH 148. John Fromiston to Richard Trevithick, 1971, private collection. The Times, 30 April 1864. In 1812, on the ship Swallow, a week-old shipboard baby whose mother had been shot in a naval encounter was saved from starvation by the ship’s goat. See R. McMaster, “‘I Hate to Hear of Women on Board.’” R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 12 August 1863, 130. According to family lore, Bryan Hook was so well known as a goat breeder that when a goat-keeping acquaintance he had met abroad wrote to him as “The Keeper of Many Goats, England,” the letter was actually delivered. Allan Hook describes “‘The broom dasher,’ with its background of a Surrey stream. A cart is coming towards the spectator with its load of birch brooms.” A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 150. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 3, 77. Ibid. S. Palmer, Letters of Samuel Palmer, 802.

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 3, 78. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 27 May 1873, DD391-13-6-18. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 9 January 1890, 172. McMaster, “New Palmer Watercolour?” Charles Kingsley, The Three Fishers (1851). The Times, 29 April 1865. Punch 13 May 1865. The Guildhall Gallery also has Hook’s Sea Urchins (1861), showing two boys taking life easy, and Word from the Missing (1877), showing children discovering a message in a bottle. 27 The Times, 29 April 1865. 28 A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 204. 29 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 11 August 1878, DD391-13-6-58.

chap ter eight 1 Rosalie Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 16 May 1874, Alexander Macdonald of Kepplestone Collection, Aberdeen City Archives, DD391-13-6-25 (hereafter cited by date and shelf mark). 2 Punch, 31 March 1877. 3 The Times, 11 May 1878. 4 Illustrated London News, 8 May 1870. 5 The Times, 29 April 1871. 6 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 25 August 1876, DD391-13-6-41. 7 The Times, 11 May 1878. 8 A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 166. 9 George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72). 10 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 10 September 1874, DD391-13-6-32. 11 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 14 October 1882, DD391-13-6-133. 12 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 28 November 1877, DD392-13-6-50. 13 There is no signature with the photograph of Samuel Palmer, presumably because a signature was not available, and a Palmer expert whom I consulted about the photograph objected to the shape of Palmer’s glasses. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that the photograph is indeed of Palmer; it looks like other photographs of him, he was a frequent and fondly welcomed visitor, and who else would it be? 14 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 28 November 1877, DD392-13-6-50. 15 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 18 August 1878, DD391-13-6-60. 16 A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook, 199. 17 Ibid., 141. 18 For my study of Hook’s friendship and exchanges with Macdonald, see McMaster, “Portraits of Artists.” 19 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 28 July 1873, DD391-13-60-19. 20 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 27 February 1874, DD391-16-6-22. 21 Ibid. 22 The Times, 2 May 1874.

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23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 28 July 1873, DD391-16-6-22. Turner and Walsh, Hallsands, 8. Western Weekly News, 26 August 1876. I quote this account of Bryan’s heroic rescue more fully in McMaster, “Introduction,” lxx–lxxi. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 28 October 1874, DD391-13-6-33. In Layard, Life and Letters, 208. Bryan Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 11 December 1881, DD391-13-6-125. Macbeth, act 3, scene 2. See McMaster, “Allan J. Hook.” Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 15 August 1878, DD391-13-6-125. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 30 August 1878, DD391-13-6-59. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 30 August 1878, DD391-13-6-62. Bede, “Mr Hook’s Painting.” George Reid to Alexander Macdonald, 15 May 1879, DD391-13-5-60. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 8 October 1879, DD391-13-6-78. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 20 November 1879, 152. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 22 December 1879, DD391-13-6-84. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 27 November 1884, DD391-13-6-150. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 29 December 1882, DD391-13-6-134. See McMaster, “Introduction.” For my exploration of the referentiality of Sambourne’s Royal Academy cuts, see McMaster, “‘That Mighty Art of Black-and-White’”; or McMaster, That Mighty Art of Black-and-White. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 28 December 1881, DD391-13-6-126. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 17 August 1882, DD391-13-6-132. The Times, 5 May 1883. Illustrated London News, 12 May 1883. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Punch, 12 May 1883.

chap ter nine 1 John Oldham Barlow to Alexander Macdonald, 14 August 1883, Alexander Macdonald of Kepplestone Collection, Aberdeen City Archives, DD191-13-3-7 (hereafter cited by date and shelf mark). 2 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 19 July 1883, DD391-13-6-138, and 20 July 1883, DD391-13-6-136. A loose leaf in the Macdonald correspondence begins “next morning” and has been assigned the number “-136,” which would place it before “-138.” But that would mean it was written from Silverbeck, whereas the content proves it was written from a painting location. From internal evidence, therefore, I place it to follow Hook’s cheerful account of his new initiatives in his letter from Gorran Haven of 19 July 1884, and I date it 20 July. 3 Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 5 December 1883, DD391-13-6-142. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Ibid. Ibid. John Oldham Barlow to Alexander Macdonald, 14 August 1883, DD191-13-3-7. The Times, 3 May 1884. The Times, 30 April 1887. Ibid. The Athenaeum, 3 May 1890, 571. Ibid. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 5 December 1883, DD391-13-6-142. J.C. Hook, Manuscript letters to F.G. Stephens, 10 July 1886. Ibid., 20 August 1896. Ibid., 12 October 1901. The Athenaeum, 2 May 1885, 572. The Times, 13 April 1898. The Athenaeum, 29 April 1893, 546, my italics. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 29 December 1886, DD391-13-6-134. J.C. Hook, Manuscript letters to F.G. Stephens. After his wife, “Kate,” died of measles in 1911, Bryan married Dorothea Northcote, and had three more boys: Ivan, Stafford, and Hilary. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 1 August 1893, 182. Ibid. Ibid., 2–6 August 1893, 182. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 4, 110. Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 27 November 1884, DD391-13-6-150. Hook to Hope Macdonald, 21 October 1892, DD391-13-23-4-10. J.C. Hook, Manuscript letters to F.G. Stephens, 29 August 1896. See McMaster, “James Clarke Hook and Sons.” See McMaster, “Allan J. Hook.” A.H.W., “J.C. Hook, R.A.,” 336. Hook to John Callcott Horsley, 12 July 1882, manuscript letters, Cornell Library, 4607. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 5, 166–7. Ibid. Leslie, Inner Life of the Royal Academy, 104. Cotton, Churt Remembered, 24. R. Hook, Woman behind the Painter, 3 July 1893, 182. J.C. Hook, Manuscript letters to F.G. Stephens. A.H. Palmer, “James Clarke Hook,” part 5, 166. J.C. Hook, Manuscript letters to F.G. Stephens, 18 June 1897. Ibid., 12 July 1898. Ibid., 3 August 1899. Ibid., 29 June 1901. Ibid., 12 July 1898. Ibid. Ibid., 3 August 1899.

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49 50 51 52

Ibid., c. July 1899. Ibid., 10 March 1903. Janet Hook’s “Lett’s Diary” (1904–07) is preserved in family collections. James Clarke Hook to Alexander Macdonald, 2 December 1875, DD391-13-6-38.

postscrip t 1 John Milton, Lycidas (1637). 2 A.J. Hook, Life of James Clarke Hook.

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Redgrave, Richard. Richard Redgrave, C.B., R.A.: A Memoir Compiled from His Diary by F.M. Redgrave. London: Cassell, 1891. Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses. Ed. Pat Rogers. London: Penguin, 1992. Rogers, Samuel. Italy: A Poem. London: Cassell, 1830. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “Notices of Painters, etc.” In The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2 vols, ed. William Rossetti, vol. 1, 490–1. London: Ellis and Elvey, 1901. Ruskin, Effie. Effie in Venice: Unpublished Letters of Mrs. John Ruskin Written from Venice between 1849–1852. Ed. Mary Lutyens. London: John Murray, 1965. Ruskin, John. “Academy Notes (1855–59, 1875).” In The Works of John Ruskin, 29 vols. ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 14, 1–300. London: George Allen, 1904. – Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy, 1855. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1855. Simms, William Gilmore, and Samuel Putnam Avery, eds. The Life of the Chevalier Bayard. New York: Harper Brothers, 1847. Simon, Robin, with Maryanne Stevens, eds. The Royal Academy of Arts: History and Collections. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018. Sparrow, Walter Shaw. A Book of British Etching from Francis Barlow to Francis Seymour Haden. London: John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd, 1926. Spielmann, M.H. The History of ‘Punch.’ London: Cassell, 1895. Stephens, F.G. J.C. Hook, R.A.: His Life and Work. London: Art Annual Office, 1888. Tennyson, Alfred. “Rizpah.” 1880. In A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman, 209–11. Cambridge, UK: Riverside, 1895. Thackeray, William Makepeace. “May Gambols.” Fraser’s Magazine, June 1844. In The Oxford Thackeray, 17 vols, ed. George Saintsbury, vol. 2, 607–37. London: Oxford University Press, 1908. – The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family. 1853–55. In The Oxford Thackeray, 17 vols, ed. George Saintsbury, vol. 14. London: Oxford University Press, 1908. – “Picture Gossip.” Fraser’s Magazine, June 1845. In The Oxford Thackeray, 17 vols, ed. George Saintsbury, vol. 2, 638–59. London: Oxford University Press, 1908. – “The Westminster Hall Exhibition.” Punch, July 1847, 8–9. Trollope, Anthony. Ralph the Heir. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1871. Turner, Kathy, and Peter Walsh. Hallsands: A Partial History. Kingsbridge, UK: Turner, Walsh, 1984. Valentine, Helen. “The Royal Academy Schools in the Victorian Period.” In Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: Treasures from the Royal Academy of Arts’ Permanent Collection, ed. Helen Valentine, 9–50. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1999. Ward, E.M., Mrs [Henrietta]. Mrs. E.M. Ward’s Reminiscences. Ed. Elliott O’Donnell. London: Pitman, 1911. Weinreb, Ben, and Christopher Hibbert, eds. The London Encyclopaedia. London: Macmillan, 1983. Wickham, Annette. “The Schools and the Practice of Art.” In The Royal Academy of Arts: History and Collections, ed. Robin Simon, with Maryanne Stevens, 432–51. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018.

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index

Page numbers in italics indicate references to illustrations. Aberdeen, Lord (George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen), 5, 14 “A.E.,” 107–8 Albert, Prince, 38 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 178, 179 Altick, Richard, 79, 80, 82 Ansdell, Richard, 126, 134 Barlow, Ellen, 125, 126 Barlow, John Oldham, ra, 24, 89, 166; elected ara, 126; and the Etching Club, 124; and Millais portrait of Hook, 179–80 Barlow, Lucy, 126 Belle Poule, 19–20 Bennett, Charles C., of Punch, 150–1, 150 Bewick, Thomas, 113–14 Bible, Hook family, 12 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 86, 94; The Decameron, 37, 92 Bonifacio, 68 Botallack Mine, 144–6, 148 Boyce, Hugh Stuart, 6 British Institution, 38, 82, 91 Brontë, Charlotte, 34 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 64–5 Burnett, Mr, and the yacht Dawn, 126, 166 Burton, James (Rosalie’s father), 16, 49, 76 Butler, Elizabeth Thompson, 97, 126 Byron, George Gordon, 63

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“Captains of Industry,” 89 Carpaccio, 68, 88; Arrival of the English Ambassadors, 68, 69; St Jerome and the Lion, 70 cartoons for Westminster Hall competition, 40 Chalon, Alfred and John, ra, 16, 36 Charles Albert, king of Piedmont and Savoy, 54, 72 children in Hook’s work, 93–4, 88–103, 162 Clarke, Adam (grandfather), 5, 7–11; and Methodists, 4–5, 8–9, 16; model for Hook, 7–8; and Shetland Islands, 8, 10, 161–2; “playful disposition,” 9; last weeks, 10–11; and family, 10–11; as father-in-law, 11–12 Clarke, John, 8, 9 Clarke, Joseph B.B. (Butterworth Bulmer), 5, 77–80, 93, 153 Clarke, Matilda, 77–8, 152 Clarke, Theodoret, 8, 9 Clarke Smith, Mary Ann, 8, 37 Clovelly, North Devon, painting site, 105–8, 142, 144, 161 Congress of Vienna, 52 Constable, John, ra, 16, 27, 104; as Hook’s sponsor, 21 Cooke, E.W. (Edward William), ra, xv Cope, Charles West, ra, 16, 89; on the Etching Club, 122, 126, 137; The Life School at the Royal Academy, 131, 131; Selecting Pictures for the Exhibition, 123, 123 Correggio, 66 Cranbrook Colony, 127 Creswick, Thomas, ra, 124 Cruse family in Clovelly, 115–18, 120, 142, 161

Dadd, Richard, 22–4, 38–9; student work by, 34, 35 Davis, H.W.B. (Henry William Banks), ra, 175 Dawkins, Clinton, captain of the White Mouse, 72 Dawn, Burnett’s yacht, 126, 166–7 Degas, Edgar, 113 Deverell, Walter, 86 Dickens, Charles, 54; David Copperfield, 17; Pickwick Papers, 30; Pictures from Italy, 60–2 diligence (vehicle), 52, 54 Disraeli, Benjamin, 160 Dobson, W.C.T. (William Charles Thomas), ra, 21, 22, 27, 153; with Hook in Kent, 30–1 Doyle, Richard, 40, 41–2, 99 East, Alfred, 105 Eastlake, Charles Lock, Sir, ra president, 36, 84 Etching Club, 81, 86, 89, 93, 122–37, 153; etchings from paintings, 130; professional objectives, 122, 128–36; social gatherings, 122, 124–8 Etty, William, ra, 36 Faed, Thomas, ra, 151 Foster, Birket, 120 Fowler, William Ward, 114 Fredericksen, Andrea, 135 Frith, William Powell, ra, 15–16, 20, 22, 31 151; Autobiography, 26–7; Derby Day, 22, 97 Fromiston, John, 145 Frost, William, ra, 34 Gibbs, Henry, 171 Gibson, Wilfred, 118 Gilbert, John, ra, 59 Giuseppina, flower girl, 65 Gladstone, William, 76 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Deserted Village, 129 Grant, Francis, Sir, ra president, 123 Gray, Thomas, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 129 Gregory XVI, Pope, 59 Greysmith, David, 23, 24 Guildhall Gallery, 151, 154

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Haden, Francis Seymour, 132–6; as “amateur” artist, 133, 135 Hallsands, Devon, 166–9, 192 Harold, King, The Finding of the Body of Harold, 40, 41–3, 43, 97 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 38, 81 Hayter, Angelo, 24, 56, 58, 60 Hilton, William, ra, 27, 38; Keeper of the Antique School, 25, 80 Holland, Lady (Elizabeth Vassall Fox, Baroness Holland), 55 Holland, Lord (Henry Vassall Fox, 3rd Baron Holland), 55 Hook, Adam Clarke (brother), 5, 28 Hook, Adelaide Rosa (sister), 5 Hook, Allan J. (son), 65, 94, 98; birth, 99; Early Efforts, 164; as Hook’s assistant, 142; as Hook’s biographer, 104, 115, 121, 125, 133, 138; as model, 99, 100, 103, 103, 105, 106; as painter of boats and the sea, 154, 158, 164, 171; as photographer, 110, 120; Portrait of a Lady (his mother), 170, 171; to ra Schools, 170; studio yacht Puffin, 171–2, 180, 193; Waiting for a Chance to Launch, 193 Hook, Andrew (brother), 5, 28, 77 Hook, Andrew (grandfather), 14 Hook, Anna Matilda (sister), 3, 5, 14 Hook, Bryan (son), 91, 98; birth, 104, 199; expert on goats, 146–7; Gathering Eggs on the Cliffs of Lundy, 190; as Hook’s assistant, 142; Light Thickens, and the Crow Makes Wing, 171; as model, 108, 109, 109, 141, 141, 144, 145; naturalist, 126; paints Highland cow and calf for Macdonald, 174; performs rescue at Hallsands, 167; as photographer, 110, 120; to ra Schools, 179; specializing in birds, 114; wins Turner Gold Medal, 114 Hook, Charlotte Isabella (sister), 5 Hook, Eliza Frances (sister), 5 Hook, Eliza Frances Clarke (mother), 3–7, 11, 14, 29 Hook, Henry Ware (brother), 5 Hook, James (father), 3–7, 29; advocate for marriage, 47, 99; applications to

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government, 12–14; appointed judge arbitrator, 14, 19; bankruptcy, 3, 12, 14, 19; death, 76–7; Hook’s portrait of, 48, 49; letters to son, 5, 7, 75; lion cub episode, 13– 14; with Lloyd’s of London, 14; marriage to Eliza Clarke, 11–12; relative prosperity, 20, 47–9; rejoices in Hook’s success, 36–7 Hook, James Clarke: annual schedule, 140; appreciation of colour, 144; attitude to critics, 155–7; birth, 4, 12; builds Tor Villa, 86, 89; change to contemporary scenes, 97–121; childhood and boyhood, 3–5, 15; children in his work, 88, 93–4, 99–104; competes for Travelling Studentship, 43–6, 49, 81; in Westminster Hall competition, 39; death, 196; describes paintings of 1883, 180–1; diploma painting problem, 138–9; discovers Clovelly, 105–8; early paintings exhibited, 28; early training, 15–16; elected ara, 84, 89; elected ra, 121; and the Etching Club, 122–37; fellow students, 21–4; fidelity to the scene, 142–3; figures or no figures?, 180–5; as good sailor, 115, 118; grandchildren, 189–91; Hook monogram, 191, 192; as historical painter, 75–95, 102–3; inland scenes, 140, 147, 156–7; instructors, 24–7; involvement in political agitation, 70–2; landscape or figure painter?, 104; learning from Venetian masters, 69–70; as letter writer, 160–1; lion cub episode, 13–14; as Methodist, 144–5; move to country, 98– 105, 110, 120; move to Silverbeck, 147–8; as “Museumite,” 16–17, 20; narrative element in his work, 101–2, 108; new lighting effects, 186–7; painting outdoors, 104; painting process, 172; painting travels, 156–7; as “people’s painter,” 105–6, 172, 193–4; portrait by Millais, 175–78, 177; powers failing?, 185; progress in ra Schools, 18, 27; in Punch cartoon, 150, 151, 178; renewing historical mode?, 184; resignation from ra, 196; showing talent, 15–16; sons’ work sold as his, 191–3; student jaunt in Kent, 30–1; student “subject” pictures, 33–5; takes to

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coastal scenes, 105–11; training in painting, 17–18; travels in Italy, 50–74 (see also Italy, Hook sojourn in); trip/s to Ireland, 31–3; Venetian colouring, 108; as Visitor at ra Schools, 170; visits to uncle in Somerset, 33, 77–80; wins gold medal for historical painting, 42–4; wins silver medals, 36, 80–1 Hook, James Clarke, coastal scenes: “After Dinner Rest Awhile,” 185; The Acre by the Sea, 99, 142–3, 143; Another Dog!/Deep Sea Fishing, 138, 139; Are Chimney-Sweepers Black?, 161; “As Jolly as a Sandboy,” 105; The Bauble Boat, 190; The Bonxie, Shetland, 161–2, 162; Breton Fishermen’s Wives, 149, 150; The Broken Oar, 185; Catching Sand-Launce, 180; Caught by the Tide, 151–3, 153; The Close of Day, 185–6, 186; Coastboy Gathering Eggs, 112–13, 113; “Compass’d by the Inviolate Sea,” 141, 141; Coral Fisher, Amalfi, 156; Crabbers, 91, 167–8, 168; A Dish of Prawns, 190; The Feast of the Osprey, 185; The Fisherman’s “Good Night,” 105–8, 106; Fresh from the Waves, 181; Friends in Rough Weather, 167; From under the Sea, 99, 144–6, 146, 148; Gathering Limpets, diploma painting, 138, 186; Give Us This Day/Hoisting the Sail, 151– 2, 152, 154; Gold of the Sea, 161; Good Liquor, Duty Free, 186–7, 187; A Gull Catcher, 192; “Hard Lines,” 166; Hearts of Oak, 170; Hit but Not Bagged, 186–7, 187; Idlers, 190; Jetsam and Flotsam, 164–6, 165; A Jib for the New Smack, 180–3, 183; Last Night’s Disaster, 154; Leaving at Low Water, 144–5, 145, 154; Leaving Cornwall for the Whitby Fishing, 140; Little to Earn and Many to Keep, 161; Love Lightens Toil, 171; Low Water at the Tidal Crossing, 184; “Luff, Boy!,” 91, 114–17, 115, 151, 154, 168; Milk for the Schooner, 146–7; Mirror of the SeaMew, 181, 181–2, 185; Mushroom Gatherers, 173; Portrait of Allan J. Hook, 184; Sea Air, 142; Sea Daisies, 105; Searching the Crabholes, 186; Sea Urchins, 154; The Seaweed Raker, 186; The Shipboy Writing His Letter, 110, 111; A Signal on the Horizon, 108, 109; The

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Skipper Ashore, 153; Summer Pleasures, 190; An Undergraduate, 188; Under the Lee of a Rock, 163, 164; “Welcome, Bonny Boat!,” 106, 107, 108; A Widow’s Son Going to Sea, 110–12, 112; Wild Harbourage, 180, 182; Word from the Missing, 168, 169; Wreckage from the Fruiter, 154, 158; Young Dreams, 181; Hook, James Clarke, etchings: Etching: A Sea Boy Gathering Eggs, 135, 136; The Fisherman’s “Good Night,” 130, 130 Hook, James Clarke, historical subjects: Bassanio Commenting on the Caskets, 34, 57; Bianca Capello, 83; Chevalier Bayard Wounded, 83–4, 94, 103; The Defeat of Shylock, 87–8, 88; Departure of the Chevalier Bayard, 83, 86; A Dream of Venice, 84–5, 85; Emperor Otho, 81– 2; The Finding of the Body of Harold, 42–4, 43; Francesco Novello di Carrera, 84; The Gratitude of the Mother of Moses, 94–5, 103; Lady Jane Grey and Feckenham, 44; Olivia and Viola, 91; Othello’s Description of Desdemona, 91–2; Othello’s First Suspicion, 75, 82, 82–3, 103; Pamphilus Relating His Story, 37, 92; Pluming the Helmet, 90–1, 92; The Rescue of the Brides of Venice, 91–2, 92, 103; Rizpah Watching, 34–5, 44, 44–6, 49, 81; Signor Torello, 92–4, 93, 103; Song of Olden Time, 38; Time of the Persecution of the Christian Reformers, 94; Venice 1550, 82 Hook, James Clarke, inland landscapes: The Broom Dasher, 147; Colin Thou Kenst, 100, 101, 104; Cow Tending, 166–7, 167; A Few Minutes to Wait, 99, 100, 142; Fishing by Proxy, 162; Holywell, Ballyarthur, watercolour, 32, 33; Market Morning, 101–2, 102; A Narrow Lane, diploma painting, 138; Practising without Diploma, 188; The Shipboy’s Letter, 109–10, 109, 142; The Stream, 180, 185; The Wily Angler, 157, 166; Wise Saws, 157, 184 Hook, James Clarke, portraits: A Fracture, 103; The Hard Task, 28, 29; portrait of Elizabeth Logan Hook, 18; portrait of James Hook, 48; portrait of twin brothers, 28; Revolution, Venice, 1848, 71, 71; self-portrait for the

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Macdonald Collection, 190–1, 191; self-portrait for the Uffizi Gallery, 190 Hook, Janet Matthews (Allan’s wife), 194–7 Hook, John Logan (brother), 5, 11, 14, 29, 76–7; in Sierra Leone, 49 Hook, Logan (uncle), 49, 76–7 Hook, Mary Noorouz (sister), 5, 22, 64 Hook, Rosalie Burton (wife), 46–7; as artist, 57, 62, 100–1, 114–15, 114, 158–9, 159; attends Sass’s Academy, 16; bad sailor, 73; Clovelly painting, 114; death, 194; with Hook at work, 193; Hook’s portraits of, 47, 56, 68, 73, 78; as hostess, 122; Italy diary, 50–74; on location, 140; on Maria Phillip, 24; marriage to Hook, 49, 53; as model, 56, 57, 99, 100, 100, 101, 106, 106, 108, 109, 130, 141, 141, 144, 145; as narrator, 50–1; portrait by Allan Hook, 170, 171; A Window in Capri, 158, 159 “Hook Easel,” 105 Hook grandchildren, 189–91 Hook residences, 119–21; Pine Wood, 120–1, 127, 146, 152; Silverbeck, 98, 127, 147–8, 152–3; “Sky Palace,” 155, 172; Tigbourne Cottage, 120, 127, 170; Tor Villa, 98–9, 120, 174 “Hookscapes,” 22; exchange for Millais portrait, 179–81 “Hookscapes Then and Now,” 110–12, 142, 164–6, 168–9; The Acre by the Sea, 143; From under the Sea, 146; Jetsam and Flotsam, 165; A Jib for the New Smack, 183 Hoppner, John, 63, 65 Horsley, John Calcott, ra, 39, 89; as Etching Club member, 122, 124; Hook letter to, 129 Horsley, Walter, 170 Hudson, W.H. (William Henry), “Foreword,” 114 Hunt, Alfred, 174; tenant at Tor Villa, 174 Hunt, Margaret, 174 Hunt, Violet, 174 Hunt, William Holman, 24, 86, 129; The Awakening Conscience, 87; and the Etching Club, 137; Hook’s letters to, 144; The Light of the World, 87; tenant at Tor Villa, 120, 125

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Italy, Hook sojourn in, 59–74; ascent of Vesuvius, 60–2; crossing Alps, 53–5; Florence, 55–7, 62–5; Naples, 60–2; Parma, 66–7; political agitation, 64–6, 70–2; Rome, 57–60; Venice, 50, 62–72 Jackson, John, ra, 16 Joinville, Prince de, 19–20 Jones, George, ra, 27, 38, 43, 80 Junior Etching Club, 128 Kauffmann, Angelica, ra, 126 Keats, John, 9; Ode on a Grecian Urn, 91 Keene, Charles, 120, 128, 170 Kingsley, Charles, 115, 149, 161 Landseer, Edwin, Sir, ra, 13, 36, 99 Latilla, Eugenio, 55, 64 Leech, John, 40, 95, 95–6 Leighton, Frederic, Lord, ra president, 123, 178 Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 62, 64 Leslie, G.D. (George Dunlop), ra, 123 Lewis, John Frederick, ra, 151 Littlecourt, Somerset, 77–80, 79, 153 Logan, Elizabeth (grandmother), 14 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 107–8 Macdonald, Alexander, 155, 160–1; collection of portraits of artists, 175, 190–1, 191; as friend and correspondent, 179–80; gift of dogs, 173; gift of granite pillar, 169–70; gift of Highland cattle, 174; scheme for Millais portrait of Hook, 175–8, 179–80; visit to Silverbeck, 175–6, 176 Macdonald, Hope, 190 McInnis, Mr and Mrs, 58, 59, 60 Maclise, Daniel, ra, 36, 99, 104 Maria Louise, Empress of Parma, 66–7 Melbourne, Lord (William Lamb), 81 Melville, Mr, 19, 49, 76–7 Metternich, Klemens von, 52, 71 Michelangelo, 59; Pietà, 44 Millais, John Everett, ra, 16, 21, 22, 86, 151; Christ in the House of His Parents, 87; and the

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Etching Club, 123, 124, 134; Isabella, 86, 93; The Order of Release, 87, 173; Portrait of James Clarke Hook, 175–6, 177, 177–8, 179–81; reaction to The Fisherman’s “Good Night,” 107–8 Miller, Thomas, 83, 104 Milton, John, 39; L’Allegro, 129; Paradise Lost, 97 Misericordia, 57, 65 Mixed British and Foreign Courts of Commission, 19 Morland, George, 15, 104 Moser, Mary, ra, 126 Mulready, William, ra, 36 Napoleon, 52, 53, 66, 97 Napoleonic Wars, 7, 11, 27 Norman, Mathew, 13–14 Opie, Edward, 17, 28 Palmer, A.H. (Alfred Herbert), 98, 105, 193; as art student, 179; on etching, 135; as Hook’s biographer, 98, 105, 193; on Hooks at work in Sennen, 193; on Silverbeck, 147 Palmer, Samuel, 89, 98, 153; on etching, 131; and the Etching Club, 124, 129; The Lonely Tower, 131–2, 132; Opening the Fold, 135, 136; and Silverbeck, 124–5, 147–8; watercolours gifted to Hooks, 148 Palmerston, Lord (Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston), 76, 77 Phillip, John, ra, 22, 34, 89, 148 Phillip, Maria Dadd, 23–4 Pickersgill, Frederick, ra, 22, 33–4; with Hook in Kent, 30–1; as Keeper at ra Schools, 170; marries Mary Noorouz Hook, 64, 153; in Westminster Hall competition, 40 Pickersgill, Mary Noorouz. See Hook, Mary Noorouz Picklewicks Club, 30–1 Pius IX, Pope (“Pio Nono”), 52, 59, 66 Poe, Simon, 97 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 37, 86–9 Punch, 40, 41–2, 95, 95–6, 150–1, 155

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Radetsky, Joseph, 70 railway, 51, 53, 141 Redgrave, Richard, ra, 80, 89, 95, 105, 121; and the Etching Club, 124, 127–8; sojourn with Hooks in Abinger, 99–101 Redgrave, Rose, 95 Redgrave, Samuel, 134 Reid, George, ra, 173–4, 190 Rembrandt, 132, 135 Reni, Guido, La Fortuna, 36 Reynolds, Joshua, Sir, ra president, 40–1, 43, 80, 97 Ridway, Mr, from Naples, Dickens’s “fat gentleman,” 62 Rogers, Samuel, 38; Italy, 54, 62, 83 Rosetta Stone, 7 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 22, 86–7 Royal Academy of Arts, 42; annual exhibition, 98–9; nomination and election of academicians, 121, 126; Private View, 82, 91, 98, 150, 150, 173, 178; Selection Committee, 98, 123; Sending-in Day, 22, 95, 98, 99, 127–8, 140, 182; Studio Sunday, 89, 95, 95–6, 126, 171; Varnishing Day, 98 Royal Academy Schools, 16–28, 30; instructors, 24–6; medals, 36–7, 42–3 Ruskin, Effie, 51, 54, 72, 103 Ruskin, John, 94–5; on The Gratitude of the Mother of Moses, 94–5; on “Luff, Boy!,” 115–17; on The Shipboy’s Letter, 109–10; on A Signal on the Horizon, 109 Russell, John, Lord, 19 St Ives, Cornwall, painting location, 140–2 Salvatore, Vesuvius guide, 59, 60–1 Sambourne, Edward Linley, 161; group portraits of academicians for Punch, 175, 178; “Royal Academy Maypole Dance,” 178, 178; “Sunday Review of the Royal Academy,” 175; visits Silverbeck, 175 Sass, Henry, 21, 41; Sass’s Academy, 16 Scott, Walter, Sir, 92–3 Shakespeare, William, 81; The Merchant of Venice, 34, 75, 87–8, 103, 129; Othello, 75, 82,

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91, 103, 129; Romeo and Juliet, 94; Songs and Ballads of Shakespeare (etchings), 129; Songs of Shakespeare (etchings), 129; The Tempest, 34; Twelfth Night, 91; The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 129 Shee, William, Sir, ra president, 21, 25 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 63 Silverbeck Album, 120 slave trade, 19, 48–9, 76 Smith, Mary Ann Clarke, 8, 35 Sparrow, Walter Shaw, 133 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, 102–4; The Shepheardes Calendar, 100, 104 Stephens, F.G. (Frederic George), 24, 43, 44; art critic for The Athenaeum, 181, 186; biography of Hook, 24, 72, 118–19; as Hook’s friend and correspondent, 188–9 Sutherland, Mr, church minister, Shetland Islands, 8, 162 Taylor, Tom, 115, 173–4 Tenniel, John, 24, 128 Tennyson, Alfred, 141 Thackeray, William, 132; The Newcomes, 15, 41, 52–3; review of Hook picture, 38; on status of the artist, 15, 16, 40; on Turner, 27 Times reviews of Hook, 115, 149–50, 153, 155, 164, 180–1 Tintoretto, 68, 78; Adam and Eve, 68, 69; Cain and Abel, 68, 69; Miracle of Saint Mark, 68 Titian, 57, 78; Bacchus and Ariadne, 179, 182 Tree, Ellen, 82 Trevithick, Richard, 146 Turner, J.M.W. ( Joseph Mallord William), ra, 30, 91; as Hook’s instructor, 25–7; Liber Studiorum, 27; Rain, Steam, Speed, 26–7 Uwins, James, 60, 61 Valentine, Helen, 25 Veronese, 68, 83, 84, 86, 88 Vesuvius, 51; Hooks’ ascent of, 60–2 vetturino, 51–2, 58 Victoria, Queen, 36, 160, 179

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Ward, Edward Matthew, ra, 16, 22, 23, in Punch cartoon, 151 Ward, Henrietta, 16, 22, 23 Waterloo, Battle of, 97 Watts, G.F. (George Frederic), ra, 22, 30–1, 4, 55, 60, 178 Wellington, Duke of, 27, 97 Wesley, John, 4, 7 West, Benjamin, ra president, 15

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Westminster Hall competition, 24, 38–42, 80–1 Whistler, James McNeill, 128; and Junior Etching Club, 128; in Punch cartoon, 150, 151; and Haden, 132–3, 134 White Mouse, 72, 73, 118 Wickham, Annette, 33 Wilkie, David, ra, 97, 99 Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, 141 Wyllie, Charles and William, 158

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