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CHAPTER XII
ROSLYN CHAPEL
238. I MUST yet return, before closing the broken record of these first twenty years, to one or two scattered days in 1836, when things happened which led forward into phases of work to be given account of in next volume.
I cannot find the date of my father’s buying his first Copley Fielding,-“Between King’s House and Inveroran, Argyllshire.”1 It cost a tremendous sum, for us-forty-seven guineas; and the day it came home was a festa, and many a day after, in looking at it, and fancying the hills and the rain were real.
My father and I were in absolute sympathy about Copley Fielding, and I could find it in my heart now to wish I had lived at the Land’s End, and never seen any art but Prout’s and his. We were very much set up at making his acquaintance, and then very happy in it: the modestest of presidents he was;2 the simplest of painters, without a vestige of romance, but the purest love of daily sunshine and the constant hills. Fancy him, while Stanfield and Harding and Roberts were grand-touring in Italy, and Sicily, and Stiria, and Bohemia, and Illyria, and the Alps, and the Pyrenees, and the Sierra Morena,-Fielding never crossing to Calais, but year after year returning to
1 [For an anecdote about this picture, see Art of England, §§ 168, 169 (Vol. XXXIII. pp. 379, 380). Ruskin placed it at one time in his Drawing School at Oxford: see Vol. XXI. p. 171.]
2 [President of the old Water-Colour Society, 1831-1855: compare Art of England, § 158 (Vol. XXXIII. p. 373).]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
