Bits from Blinkbonny, Bell o' the Manse: A Tale of Scottish Village Life Between 1841 and 1851
9781465684639
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
AN eminent artist, a member of the Royal Scottish Academy, who, although well up in the seventies, and feeling many of the infirmities of advanced age, still continues to enrich the world by as charming landscapes and crisp sea pieces as he produced in his younger days, was showing me some of his sketches from nature, many of them bearing traces of repeated handling. His face brightened up when a well thumbed favourite was lighted on amongst the promiscuous contents of the old portfolio. With his eye fixed on the sketch, and his hand moving as if either the pencil or the brush were in it, he told with animation where he made this sketch or took that “bit.” “Ah!” said he, “painting is a difficult, a very difficult thing; in fact, it’s just made up of ‘bits’—just bits. A something takes your eye,—a nook, a clump of trees, often a single tree, a boulder, or rocks (grand effects of light and shade on rocks)—ay, even the shape or tinge of a cloud. Well, to work you go, and down with it.—There,” said he, as he lifted what seemed a mere scrawl on a half sheet of old note paper, “I took that at the Bank door. I was struck with the effect of the sunlight on water falling over a barrel that a man was filling in the river, and thought it would make a nice picture. I got that bit of paper out of the Bank, took off my hat, laid the paper on it, sketched it off in—oh! less than five minutes, and put it on canvas next day. There’s another. I did that bit on the leaf of my fishing pocket book at Makumrich, near old Gilston Castle. Now there,” said he, taking up a rough looking, unfinished sea scene in oil, “that has been a very useful bit. I was sketching North Berwick Harbour, when all at once I was struck with an effect of light and shade on the sea. I was able to hit it exactly;” and as he said this, he moved his head from side to side and scanned the picture, saying, “That bit has been of great use to me, although I have never made a finished picture of it. The ‘effect,’ the gleam, the tone are as nearly perfect as possible. Ah,” continued he, laying down the sketch, and turning to his easel, on which lay a snow scene,—an old thatched cottage, in my opinion quite finished,—“now there’s lots of bits to work up in that picture.” And sometimes shaking his brush, and sometimes whirling it in a very small circle close to the picture, but never touching it, he said, “There—and there—and perhaps there. Ah! nobody would believe what a labour it is to make a good picture, with all the bits and bits!” I am but an aspirant in literature, and would never presume to compare myself with the veteran artist, or think that I could ever arrange my bits of village gossip and incident with the artistic skill which has earned for him the order of merit that he has so honourably won and so worthily wears, but I confess to a desire to present some of the bits of the everyday social life of Blinkbonny in such a form as to give my readers an idea of its lights and shadows.
