Chapter I: Pictures, Sketches and Drawings

BY OR RELATING TO SAMUEL BUTLER

By his will Butler bequeathed his pictures, sketches, and studies to his executors to be destroyed or otherwise disposed of as they might think best, the proceeds (if any) to fall into residue. They were not sold: some were given to Shrewsbury School; some to the British Museum; one, an unfinished sketch of the back of the house in which Keats died on the Piazza di Spagna, Rome, to the Keats and Shelley Memorial there; many were distributed among his friends, Alfred Cathie taking fifteen and I taking all that were left over. Alfred lives in Canal Road, Mile End, and, this being on the route of the German air-raids, he was anxious to put his pictures in a place of safety. Accordingly it was arranged between us in 1917 that I should buy them from him. When he heard that I was giving them to St. John's, he desired that I should not buy all, because he wished to give two of them himself to the College. Accordingly, I bought only thirteen, and the remaining two, viz. no. 28, Leatherhead Church, and no. 59, Chiavenna, 1887, were given to St. John's College by Alfred.

There are but few sketches or pictures by Butler between 1888 and 1896. This is because his sketching was interrupted by his having to take up photography for the preparation of _Ex Voto_. Almost before this book was published (1888) he had plunged into _The Life and Letters of Dr. Butler_, and in 1892 he added to his absorbing occupations the problem of the _Odyssey_. Thus he had little leisure or energy for the labour of painting; and this labour was always great. He could not leave his outline until he had got it right, and there was a perpetual chase after the changing shadows. And when he had got the outline it was so constantly disappearing under the colour that he took to making "a careful outline on a separate sheet of paper"; this was to be kept, after he had traced the drawing on to the paper which was to receive the colour, and to be referred to continually while he proceeded. When he met with the camera lucida, which he bought in Paris, and which is among the objects given to St. John's, he thought his difficulties were solved and wrote to Miss Savage, 9 October, 1882: "I have got a new toy, a camera lucida, which does all the drawing for me, and am so pleased with it that I am wanting to use it continually." To which in 1901 he added this note: "What a lot of time I wasted over that camera lucida, to be sure!" It did all the drawing for him, but it distorted the perspective so that the outlines of the many sketches which he produced with its help were a disappointment.

The camera lucida having failed, his hopes were next fixed upon photography, which, by rapidly and correctly recording anything he felt a desire to sketch, was to give him something from which he could afterwards construct a picture. So he took an immense number of snap- shots, of which many are at St. John's, but he never did anything with them. Nos. 62 and 63, which were done by Sadler from Butler's photographs, show how he would have proceeded if he had not had too many other things to do.

It was not until 1896, when _The Life of Dr. Butler_ appeared, that he was able to return seriously to sketching, and by that time he was over sixty and too old to be burdened with the paraphernalia necessary for oils; he therefore confined himself to water-colours.

Some of the pictures in this list were included in the list in _The Eagle_, vol. xxxix., no. 175, March 1918, and the remainder in the succeeding number, June 1918. In making the present catalogue I have corrected such errors and misprints as I noticed in _The Eagle_, and I have re-arranged and renumbered the items so as to make them run in chronological order. I have also amplified some of the notes. I have placed the sketches and drawings in order of date because to examine them in that order helps the spectator to realise the progress made by Butler in his artistic studies.

SAMUEL BUTLER

1. Black and white outline sketch: Civita Vecchia, 1854.

Butler went abroad with his family, his second visit to Italy, for the winter of 1853-4. They travelled through Switzerland to Rome and Naples, starting in August 1853, and Butler thus missed the half-year at school. I am sorry that I have not found any more finished drawing made by him on this occasion.

DOUGLAS YEOMAN BLAKISTON

2. Pencil drawing: Samuel Butler, 1854.

Reproduced in the _Memoir_, ch. iii. On the back of this drawing is the beginning of a water-colour sketch. It was in a book with others mentioned in the _Memoir_ as having been given to Shrewsbury School (I. 44). I have no doubt that the sketch on the back is by Butler, and represents part of the Rectory house at Langar.

The Rev. D. Y. Blakiston was born in 1832. He studied art at the Royal Academy Schools especially under W. Dobson, R.A. From about 1850 to 1865 he painted in London and at St. Leonard's, and exhibited at the Royal Academy. About 1865 he entered at Downing College, took Orders in 1869, and was presented to the living of East Grinstead in 1871, which he held till his retirement soon after 1908. He died in 1914. Throughout his life he made a practise of sketching his friends. I suppose he must have met and sketched Butler on some occasion when Butler was in London staying with his cousins the Worsleys. The artist's son, the Rev. H. E. D. Blakiston, when President of Trinity College, Oxford, gave me a cutting from _The East Grinstead Observer_ containing a full obituary of him. It is among the papers at St. John's College, and is referred to in the Postscript to the Preface to my _Memoir_ of Butler.

HENRY FESTING JONES

3. My first attempt at a drawing in pencil and ink of Butler's Homestead, Mesopotamia, New Zealand.

I did it in 1910 or thereabouts from a faded photograph taken about 1863 and lent to Butler by J. D. Enys. _Also_ Emery Walker's reproduction of my first attempt which was not used in the _Memoir_.

4. My second attempt, which was reproduced in the _Memoir_.

SAMUEL BUTLER

5. Water-colour: A view in Cambridge.

Probably done when Butler was an undergraduate, and given to St. John's some years ago. I found it in the book wherein I found Blakiston's drawing (no. 2).

6. Oil Painting: Family Prayers.

On the ceiling he wrote "I did this in 1864, and if I had gone on doing things out of my own head instead of making studies I should have been all right." (_Memoir_, I. 115.) Reproduced in the _Memoir_, ch. xxiv., and referred to, ch. viii.

7. Oil Painting: His own head.

"He painted at home as well as at Heatherley's, and by way of a cheap model hung up a looking-glass near the window of his painting room and made many studies of his own head. He gave some of them away and destroyed and painted over others, but after his death we found a number in his rooms--some of the earlier ones very curious" (_Memoir_, ch. viii.). This is one of the earlier ones. It is inscribed, "S.B., Feb. 18, 1865." We found also a still more curious one which was given to Gogin, who was interested in it as being the work of an untaught student. See also no. 36.

JOHN LEECH

8. Five pencil drawings on one card.

John Leech died in 1864, the year in which Butler returned from New Zealand. There was a sale of his drawings by his sisters, and I remember going to see them as a boy, but I do not remember when; it was, no doubt, soon after the artist's death. The house was in Radnor Place, Bayswater. His sisters afterwards kept a small girls' school, and my sister Lilian went there. I have placed these Leech drawings here in order of date on the assumption that Butler bought them at the sale. He had another drawing by Leech, which used to hang in his chambers, and was given to his cousin, Reginald Worsley.

SAMUEL BUTLER

9. Oil Painting: Interior of Butler's sitting-room, 15, Clifford's Inn.

There is something written in pencil on the panelling in the left-hand bottom corner. I believe the words to be "Corner of my room, Augt. 1865, S.B." Reproduced in the _Memoir_, ch. xv.

Here are shown Butler's books, including Bradshaw's Guide and Whitaker's Almanack, of which he speaks somewhere as being indispensable. I admit that I cannot identify them, but he used to keep them among the books in these shelves. I do not think he ever possessed that equally indispensable book the Post Office Directory. But he had more books than those shown in this painting. Between his sitting-room and his painting- room was a short passage in which was a cupboard, and this contained the rest. I do not remember how many there were, but not enough to invalidate the statement he made to Robert Bridges (_Memoir_ II. 320), "I have, I verily believe, the smallest library of any man in London who is by way of being literary."

10. Water-colour: Dieppe, The Castle, 1866.

Butler was at Dieppe with Pauli in 1866. (_Memoir_, ch. viii.)

11. Small water-colour drawing: Dieppe, 1866.

This is in the portfolio of miscellaneous drawings, etc., by Butler, Gogin, and Sadler, no. 81.

12. Oil Painting: Two heads done as a study at Heatherley's.

I showed this to Gaetano Meo, and he remembered that the man was Calorossi, a model, whose brother went to Paris and became known as the proprietor of a studio there. The woman, he said, was Maria, another model. The background is Dieppe. I suppose that Butler did this study in the autumn of 1866, using nos. 10 and 11, the water-colours of Dieppe, or some other sketch made on the spot, for the background. The idea was to make portraits of two heads with a landscape background in the manner of Giovanni Bellini.

13. Drawing of a cast of the Antinous as Hermes.

Inscribed "Samuel Butler for probationership, December 28th 1868." Done, I suppose, at South Kensington.

14. Drawing of a hand and foot.

Probably also done at South Kensington.

15. Black and white drawing of a fir tree.

This, I suspect, was made while Butler was under the influence of Ruskin's _Elements of Drawing_--say about 1870. He threw off that influence later.

16. Four water-colour notes in one frame.

One is inscribed "S.B." and another "Kingston, near Lewes." I suppose that they are all on the South Downs, and they are all early--say 1870.

JAMES FERGUSON

17. Crayon drawing: Butler playing Handel, 1870 (?).

Reproduced in the _Memoir_ (I. ix.). Ferguson was a fellow art-student with Butler.

SAMUEL BUTLER

18. Oil Painting: The Valle di Sambucco, above Fusio.

The sambucco or sambuco is the elder tree. Butler, writing of this valley (_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. xxvi.; new ed. ch. xxv.), says: "Here, even in summer, the evening air will be crisp, and the dew will form as soon as the sun goes off; but the mountains at one end of it will keep the last rays of the sun. It is then the valley is at its best, especially if the goats and cattle are coming together to be milked."

19. Water-colour: The Rocca Borromeo, Angera, Lago Maggiore. Entrance to the Castle. 1871.

The birthplace of S. Carlo Borromeo. It was over this gateway as well as over the gateway of Fenis (no. 53), that he told me there ought to be a fresco of Fortune with her Wheel (_Memoir_, ch. xx.) The Rocca Borromeo, Angera, and Arona are mentioned in _Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. xxiv. (new edn., ch. xxiii.), and several times in the _Memoir_, _e.g._ ch. ix., xvi.

20. Water-colour: The Rocca Borromeo. A Room in the Castle. 1871.

I am not sure whether or not this is the room in which S. Carlo Borromeo was born. One view of that room is in _Alps and Sanctuaries_ ch. xxiv. (new edition, ch. xxiii). This may be the same room looking towards the left and showing a piece of window-seat and shutter.

21. Water-colour: Amsteg. 1871.

22. Water-colour: Fobello. A Christening. 1871.

This was to have been a picture for the Academy, but he did not finish it. Here are shown women with short skirts and leggings. They dress like this so that they can climb into the ash trees and pull off the leaves which they throw down upon the grass to be mixed up with the hay. (_Memoir_, ch. ix.)

23. Oil Painting: Varallo-Sesia. The Washing Place. 1871.

"Butler made three oil sketches at Varallo all the same size, about 16x20. One is the washing place outside the town." (_Diary of a Journey_, p. 16). The other two were both done in the Piazza on the Sacro Monte. One was given to the Municipio of Varallo-Sesia; the other to the Avvocato Francesco Negri of Casale-Monferrato.

24. Oil Painting: Monte Bisbino, near Como. 1876.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. xxi. The white sanctuary on the summit shines like a diamond in some lights.

25. Oil Painting: From S. Nicolao, Mendrisio. 1876.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. xxi.

GEORGE McCULLOCH

26. Two lots of studies of women, about 1876.

McCulloch was a friend and fellow art-student of Butler's, and is mentioned in the _Memoir_, "an admirable draughtsman."

SAMUEL BUTLER

27. Oil sketch: Low wall and grass in front, snowy mountains behind. It must be a view in the Leventina Valley.

28. Water-colour inscribed "S.B.": Leatherhead Church.

Butler was particularly pleased with the dormer windows, an unusual feature in a church roof. This must have been done somewhere about 1877, but there is no evidence. This is one of the pictures given by Alfred.

29. Oil Painting: Montreal, Canada, from the Mountain, about 1877.

30. Oil Painting: Calpiogna, Val Leventina. 1877.

Evening, looking down the valley.

31. Oil Painting: Three sketches on one panel, scenes in the Val Leventina.

They are near Faido, but I cannot further identify them.

32. Oil Painting: Calonico.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. v.

33. Oil Painting: Tengia.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. iv.

34. Oil Painting: Prato.

Other views of Prato appear in _Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. iii.

35. Oil Painting: Lago Tom, Piora, Val Leventina. 1877.

Ch. vi. in _Alps and Sanctuaries_ is headed "Piora." "Piora in fact is a fine breezy upland valley of singular beauty, and with a sweet atmosphere of cow about it." Butler thought he knew what went on in Piora and, as he proceeds through the valley, he says: "Here I heard that there were people, and the people were not so much asleep as the simple peasantry of these upland valleys are expected to be by nine o'clock in the evening. For now was the time when they had moved up from Ronco, Altanca, and other villages in some numbers to cut the hay, and were living for a fortnight or three weeks in the chalets upon the Lago di Cadagna. As I have said, there is a chapel, but I doubt whether it is attended during this season with the regularity with which the parish churches of Ronco, Altanca, etc., are attended during the rest of the year. The young people, I am sure, like these annual visits to the high places, and will be hardly weaned from them. Happily the hay will always be there, and will have to be cut by someone, and the old people will send the young ones."

The foregoing passage throws light upon that other passage in _Life and Habit_, ch. ii., about S. Paul, which concludes thus: "But the true grace, with her groves and high places, and troops of young men and maidens crowned with flowers, and singing of love and youth and wine--the true grace he drove out into the wilderness--high up, it may be, into Piora, and into such-like places. Happy they who harboured her in her ill report."

After Ernest has received Alethea's money, and while he and Edward Overton are returning from Christina's funeral, in ch. lxxxiv. of _The Way of All Flesh_, he tells his godfather his plans for spending the next year or two. He has formed a general impression that the most vigorous and amiable of known nations--the modern Italians, the old Greeks and Romans, and the South Sea Islanders--have not been purists. He wants to find out what such people do; they are the practical authorities on the question--What is best for man?

"Let us," he says, "settle the fact first and fight about the moral tendencies afterwards."

"In fact," said I laughingly, "you mean to have high old times."

"Neither higher nor lower," was the answer, "than those people whom I can find to have been the best in all ages."

Accordingly Ernest left England and visited "almost all parts of the world, but only staying in those places where he found the inhabitants unusually good-looking and agreeable." "At last in the spring of 1867 he returned, his luggage stained with the variation of each hotel advertisement 'twixt here and Japan. He looked very brown and strong, and so well-favoured that it almost seemed as if he must have caught some good looks from the people among whom he had been staying."

We are not told what particular countries Ernest went to; Japan is mentioned, but less because Ernest went there than because the name of a distant place was wanted to justify and complete the echo of the description of Sir Walter Blunt in I. _Hen. IV._ i. 64:

Stained with the variation of each soil
Betwixt that Holmedon and this seat of ours.

Butler confided to me verbally that Ernest visited, among other places, Piora, and that he stayed there "when the mowing grass was about." {8}

36. Oil Painting: inscribed, "S. Butler. Sketch of his own head. April 1878."

This is one of the series of portraits of himself referred to in the note to no. 7. Another of these later portraits was given after his death to Christchurch, New Zealand; and another to the Schools, Shrewsbury. This one was given by Butler to me soon after it was painted, and it remained in my possession till 1911, when I gave it to St. John's College. It is reproduced as the frontispiece to vol. I. of the _Memoir_.

37. Oil Sketch: Calonico.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. v. On a panel with no. 38, Rossura, on the other side.

38. Oil Sketch: Rossura. The altar by the porch of the church. 1878.

On a panel with no. 37, Calonico, on the other side.

39. Oil sketch on a panel: Rossura, from inside the porch looking out.

"I know few things more touching in their way than the porch of Rossura church." (_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. iv.)

"The church is built on a slope, and the porch, whose entrance is on a lower level than that of the floor of the church, contains a flight of steps leading up to the church door. The porch is there to shelter the steps, on and around which the people congregate and gossip before and after service, especially in bad weather. They also sometimes overflow picturesquely, and kneel praying on the steps while service is going on inside." (_Memoir_, I. 284-5.)

In _Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. iv., is an illustration showing the people kneeling on the steps while "there came a sound of music through the open door--the people lifting up their voices and singing, as near as I can remember, something which on the piano would come thus:" and then follow a few bars of chords.

In the list which appeared in _The Eagle_, vol. xxxix., no. 175, March 1918, writing of no. 38: "Rossura: the altar by the porch of the church, 1878," I said that it had been removed. On reconsideration, I am not sure that it has been removed; but I have not been to Rossura for thirty years or more and cannot now say for certain. I believe, however, that it is still there, and that when I said it had been removed I was thinking of the alteration of an opening which there was formerly in the west wall of the porch, under the portrait of S. Carlo Borromeo, which hangs between the two windows. This opening is mentioned in ch. iv. of _Alps and Sanctuaries_, and Butler says that it had to be closed because the wind blew through it and made the church too cold. It is shown with the portrait and the two windows in another illustration in ch. iv.

The first illustration in ch. iv. of _Alps and Sanctuaries_ shows how the chapel with the altar in it (no. 38) is placed in relation to the porch. This is the chapel he was thinking of when he wrote:

"The church has been a good deal restored during the last few years,
and an interesting old chapel--with an altar in it--at which Mass was
said during a time of plague, while the people stood some way off in a
meadow, has just been entirely renovated; but, as with some English
churches, the more closely a piece of old work is copied, the more
palpably does the modern spirit show through it, so here the opposite
occurs, for the old-worldliness of the place has not been impaired by
much renovation, though the intention has been to make everything as
modern as possible."

In 1878, the first time I was with Butler in Italy and in the Canton Ticino, he talked a great deal about the porch of Rossura; there is a passage in ch. xvi. of the _Memoir_ about it. For him it was the work of a man who did it because he sincerely wanted to do it, and who learnt how to do by doing; it was not the work of one who first attended lectures by a professor in an academy, learnt the usual tricks in an art school, and then, not wanting to do, gloried in the display of his technical skill. That is to say, it was done in the right spirit. The result of doing things in this way will sometimes appear incompetent; this never embarrassed Butler, provided that he could detect the sincerity; for where sincerity is incompetence may be forgiven; but the incompetence must not be so great as to obscure the artist's meaning. At Rossura the sincerity is obvious, and the building is so perfect an adaptation of the means to the end that there is no suggestion of incompetence.

Rossura porch was thus an illustration of what he says in _Alps and Sanctuaries_ in the chapter "Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art." It was more than merely a piece of architecture. When Butler contemplated it he saw also the chapel with its altar and the people standing in the meadow during the plague; he saw the same people, after the pestilence had been stayed, kneeling on the steps in the dimness, the sky bright through the arch beyond them and the distant mountains blue and snowy, while the music floated out through the open church door; he saw through the windows the gleaming slopes about Cornone and Dalpe, and, hanging on the wall between them, the picture of austere old S. Carlo with his hands joined in prayer. All these things could be written about in _Alps and Sanctuaries_, but they could not be brought into the illustrations apart from the text; and anyone who looks at Butler's sketches of Rossura may be disappointed. If he does not bear these things in mind he will not understand what Butler meant by saying that he knew of few things more touching in their way than the porch of Rossura church. He will be like a man listening to programme-music and knowing nothing of the programme.

40. Pencil sketch inscribed: "Handel when a boy. Pencil sketch from an old picture sold at Puttick and Simpson's and sketched by me while on view. Dec. 15th, 1879. S.B."

On the same mount with the sketch-portrait of Robert Doncaster, no. 56.

41. Water-colour: Otford, Kent; from inside the church looking out through the porch. 1879.

42. Drawing in pencil and ink: Edgeware. 1880.

43. Oil Painting: Rimella, Val Mastallone; up the Valley from Varallo- Sesia.

44. Oil Painting: Eynsford, Kent.

45. Oil Painting: On the S. Bernardino Pass.

46. Oil Painting: Bellinzona, The Castle.

In the same frame with no. 47.

47. Oil Painting: Mesocco, The Castle.

_Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. xix. Butler always had this and no. 46 in the same frame.

48. Oil Painting: Bellinzona, The Castle.

He made many sketches of the Castle at Bellinzona, this and no. 46 are the only two I have found; none was quite satisfactory because there was no point of view from which the towers composed well behind a good foreground.

49. Drawing in pencil and ink: The Sacro Monte, Varese, from the seventh or Flagellation Chapel.

He intended to paint a picture this size, and started by making this drawing, which is an enlargement of the drawing reproduced in _Alps and Sanctuaries_, ch. xxiii. (1881), but he did not proceed with the painting.

50. Drawing in pencil and ink: Boulogne-sur-Mer, La Porte Gayole.

This was a favourite view which he often sketched; but I have only found this example.

SAMUEL BUTLER AND OTHERS

51. All (except a few which are lost) the original drawings for _Alps and Sanctuaries_.

Placed here in order of date because the book was published in 1881. Some of the drawings are by Charles Gogin, who did the frontispiece and the Madonna della Neve on the title page, and who also introduced the figures into those of Butler's drawings which have figures; and a few are by me. There are among this lot also several sketches, etc., by various persons which Butler collected as illustrating his "Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art." Some are published in the chapter so headed in the book, but others were not published.

SAMUEL BUTLER

52. Oil Painting: Portrait of Henry Festing Jones. 1882.

53. Oil Painting: Castello Fenis, Val d'Aosta. 1882.

It was over one of the gateways of this Castle that Fortune with her Wheel was to appear in a fresco. See no. 19.

HENRY FESTING JONES

54. Oil Painting: View from Butler's room in Clifford's Inn showing the tower of the Law Courts. 1882.

Drawn with the camera lucida. Reproduced in the _Memoir_, ch. xx.

55. Oil Painting: Unfinished sketch-portrait of Butler. 1882

Drawn with the camera lucida. Referred to in the _Memoir_, I. 135-136, in letters from which extracts are given below.

_Miss Savage to Butler_.

31_st_ _October_, 1883: I went to the Fisheries Exhibition last week
and spent a rather pleasant day. I was by myself for one thing, and,
for another, took great delight in gazing at a life-size model of a
sea-captain clad in yellow oil-skins and a Sou'wester. It was
executed in that style of art that you so greatly admire in the
Italian Churches, and was so good a likeness of _you_ that I think you
must have sat for it. The serious occupations of my day were having
dinner and tea, and the relaxations, buying shrimps in the fish-market
and then giving them to the sea-gulls and cormorants. My most exalted
pleasure was to look at your effigy, which I should like to be able to
buy, though, as I have not a private chapel in my castle, I hardly
know where I could put it if I had it. Upon the whole I enjoyed
myself, but I am glad to hear that the Exhibition is to be closed to-
day, so that I cannot by any possibility go there again.

_Butler to Miss Savage_.

5_th_ _November_, 1883: I believe I am very like a sea-captain. Jones
began a likeness of me not long since, which I will show you next time
you come and see me, which is also very like a portrait of a
sea-captain.

56. Sketch-portrait of Robert Doncaster.

On the same mount with no. 40. A tracing is among the miscellaneous papers given to St. John's. This sketch of Robert was done, I suspect, with the camera lucida, and if so its date must be about 1882-3. Robert Doncaster was the husband of Mrs. Corrie; that is to say Mrs. Corrie, who was Butler's laundress in Clifford's Inn, "lost" her husband. After a suitable interval it was assumed that he was dead and she married Robert Doncaster and was known as Mrs. Doncaster. Robert, who was a half-witted old man, used to hang about the place, do odd jobs, and make himself fairly useful. He died in 1886.

57. Water-colour: Pinner. 1883.

SAMUEL BUTLER

58. Oil Painting: Edward James Jones.

Inscribed thus: "Portrait of E. J. Jones, Esq., of the Indian Geological Survey, Aet. Suae 24, painted by S. Butler, November, 1883." The date is not clearly written, but it must be 1883, because my brother Edward, born 5th September, 1859, was twenty-four in 1883, and in November 1883 he went to Calcutta, having obtained an appointment on the Geological Survey. Butler painted the portrait just before he started.

59. Oil Painting: Chiavenna. 1887.

It looks in some lights like 1881, but in other lights 1887, and it must be 1887. Butler did not go abroad in 1881 and he was at Chiavenna in 1887. This is one of the pictures given by Alfred.

THOMAS SADLER

60. Black and white drawing: Butler and Scotto in 1888.

Sadler made this for the _Pall Mall Gazette_ from the photograph which is reproduced in _Ex Voto_; the drawing was reproduced in an article, and a cutting from the _Pall Mall_ with the reproduction is with the papers given to St. John's.

SAMUEL BUTLER

61. Oil Painting: Wembley, Middlesex. Sketch of the back of the Green Man public-house, since burnt down.

Butler intended to finish this, and send it to the Royal Academy, but he got tired of it and turned it up.

THOMAS SADLER

62. Water-colour drawing of the Vecchietto in the Deposition Chapel at Varallo-Sesia.

63. Water-colour drawing in black and white of a boy with a basket at Varallo.

Sadler made these two drawings about 1890 from photographs taken by Butler in 1888.

SAMUEL BUTLER

64. Water-colour: copy of a landscape behind a small Madonna and Child by Bartolomeo Veneto, signed and dated 1505.

I forget the precise date, but I think it was about 1898, when Butler was searching in real landscape for the original of the castle which appears in the background of one of the Giovanni Bellini pictures of the Madonna and Child in the National Gallery, the one with the bird on the tree and the man ploughing. It may now be attributed to some other Venetian painter. He would have been pleased if he could have found the original of the background of any picture by one of his favourite painters. This copy was made to fix in his mind the castle on the hill, which he hoped afterwards to identify with some real place. But he never succeeded.

HENRY FESTING JONES

65. Water-colour: Jones's chambers in Staple Inn, Holborn. 1899.

66. Water-colour: another view in the same room. 1899.

In these rooms Butler nearly always spent his evenings from 1893, when I moved into them, until the end of his life. The frames of these pictures are veneered with oak from the Hall of Staple Inn, and into each are inserted two buttons showing the wool-pack, the badge of the Inn, which is said to be named from the Wool-Staplers.

When Butler and I were on the Rigi-Scheidegg with Hans Faesch in 1900 I had these two sketches with me, and was showing them to the landlord, who spoke English. He looked at them and considered them carefully for some moments. Then he said gravely "Ah I see; much things. That means dustings; and then breakings; and then hangriness."

SAMUEL BUTLER

67. Water-colour: Meien near Wassen on the S. Gottardo. 1896.

We went often to Meien to sketch when we were staying at Wassen on the S. Gottardo. We took our lunch with us, and ate it at the fountain in the village. "The old priest also came to the fountain to wash his shutters, which had been taken down for the summer, and it was now time to bring them out again and replace them for the winter" (_Memoir_, II. 236). The house on the left is the priest's house, and the shutters are already up at one of his windows.

68. Pen and ink sketch: Trapani and the Islands from Mount Eryx about 1897.

This sketch is reproduced in _The Authoress of the Odyssey_, ch. ix. He did it to show the situation of Trapani and the Islands with Marettimo "all highest up in the sea." In the Odyssey Ithaca is "all highest up in the sea," and Butler supposed that the authoress in so describing it was thinking of Marettimo.

69. Wash drawing: Trapani and the Islands from Mount Eryx about 1898.

He wished to make a more complete version of no. 68, but this was as far as he could get; there was not enough time and there were too many interruptions.

70. Pencil sketch inscribed, "Calatafimi, Sund. May 13th, 1900. 2 hours. Eleven a.m. is the best light."

I added "S. Butler." He could not continue because there came on a terrific scirocco which lasted two or three days.

71. Water-colour: Taormina, the Theatre and Etna. 1900.

This shows the fragments of the stones that are strewn about in the orchestra which Butler said were like the fragments of My Duty towards My Neighbour that lay strewn about in his memory. It would take a lot of work to put them all back into their places and reconstruct the original. (_Memoir_, II. 292.)

72. Water-colour: Siena. 1900.

73. Water-colour: Pisa, inside the top of the Leaning Tower. 1900.

74. Water-colour: Wassen. 1901.

75. Water-colour: Wassen. 1901.

76. Water-colour: Trapani, S. Liberale and Lo Scoglio di Mal Consiglio. 1901.

See _The Authoress of the Odyssey_. The Scoglio is the ship of Ulysses which Neptune turned into a rock as she was on her way home to Scheria.

77. Rough sketch by Butler of the islands Marettimo, Levanzo, and Favignana.

Two views showing how Marettimo is hidden by Levanzo when you are below and comes out over Levanzo when you are up Mount Eryx.

HENRY FESTING JONES

78. My first attempt in colour to draw the islands from Mount Eryx.

I saw I should not have time to finish it, and, instead, did no. 80.

79. A volume of thirty-four leaves of drawings in pencil and ink.

I did all these under Butler's auspices, and often he was sitting near doing another sketch of much the same view. It may be said that they are the work of his pupil.

80. Drawing in pencil and ink: Trapani and the Islands from Mount Eryx. 1913.

Reproduced in the _Memoir_, ch. xxxii.

SAMUEL BUTLER AND OTHERS

81. A portfolio of miscellaneous drawings, prints, etchings, photographs, etc., by Butler, Gogin, and Sadler.

This is the portfolio containing the small water-colour of Dieppe, 1866. I have given that the prominence of a place (no. 11) because it is interesting to compare it with the more finished Dieppe, no. 10. Possibly the portfolio contains others (_e.g._ Dinant), which it will be thought proper to take out and have mounted and framed.