CHAPTER II

ROME

20. HOWEVER dearly bought, the permission to cease reading, and put what strength was left into my sketching again, gave healthy stimulus to all faculties which had been latently progressive in me; and the sketch-books and rulers were prepared for this journey on hitherto unexampled stateliness of system.

It had chanced, in the spring of the year, that David Roberts had brought home and exhibited his sketches in Egypt and the Holy Land.¹ They were the first studies ever made conscientiously by an English painter, not to exhibit his own skill, or make capital out of his subjects, but to give true portraiture of scenes of historical and religious interest. They were faithful and laborious beyond any outlines from nature I had ever seen, and I felt also that their severely restricted method was within reach of my own skill, and applicable to all my own purposes.

With Roberts’s deficiencies or mannerism I have here no concern. He taught me, of absolute good, the use of the fine point instead of the blunt one; attention and indefatigable correctness in detail; and the simplest means of expressing ordinary light and shade on grey ground, flat wash for the full shadows, and heightening of the gradated lights by warm white.

21. I tried these adopted principles first in the courtyard of the Château de Blois:² and came in to papa and

¹ [Afterwards published in lithography, with Historical Descriptions by the Rev. Dr. Croly and W. Brockedon, as Roberts’s Sketches in the Holy Land and Syria (1842-1849). At this point the first draft has a long passage, now given in the Appendix: see below, p. 625.]

² [The editors have not traced this drawing.]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]