Edward Dutton Cook

“ At nineteen he renounced further tutelage, and started on his own account as a landscape painter. He commenced to exhibit his works. Every one praised, but unfortunately no one purchased. The market seemed to be only for the show, not the sale of goods. The notion of the many seemed to be that Art was an absurd luxury, which only the very few could indulge in. A middle-class man would have been considered very eccentric and extravagant who in those days bought a picture, unless it happened to be his own portrait. ”

“ One only of the “Marriage a la Mode” pictures, for all that is really valuable in art, might be safely backed against all that was ever done by both Fuseli and Runciman put together. Yet they looked upon him as rather a bygone sort of creature—a barbarian blind to poetic art. Well, even a greater William, the playwriter, born at Stratford-on-Avon, was considerably underrated a century ago. Could William Hogarth have seen Fuseli’s works, I warrant he would have had something to say about them! ”

“ Is there not a living ballet master, not very young now, who owes his baptismal name to parental success in the grand ballet of “Oscar and Malvina, or the Cave of Fingal?” But this must have been years after Runciman. The poems had merit, and that floated them for a long time, but the leak of falsehood made its way—they sunk at last. And Macpherson? Well, if a poet will be a forger, he must prepare to be remembered by posterity rather for his fraud than his poetry. ”

“ Poor Widow Hogarth! Yet she would not sell her William’s pictures left in his house!
Much of the untamed, unmanageable, heterodox nature of Runciman’s art pertained to his life generally. Gay, free-thinking, prankish—with a tendency to late-houred habits that must have often scandalised his landlady—and a talent for conversation rare amongst artists, who, as a rule, express their thoughts better by their brushes than their speech ”

“ William dead and buried, the window shutters reopened, and heaven’s glad light once more permitted to stream into the house, the red eyes of the household a little cooled and staunched, came the widow’s dreadful task of examining the property of the deceased, of picking up the fragment’s that remained. How to live? Survivors have often to make that painful inquiry. There was little money in the house. The painter’s life had been hard-working enough ”

“ His servants all had been years and years in his service, he had painted their portraits and hung them up in his house; there is homage to both master and servants in the fact. After all, a man may, if he chooses, be a hero even to his valet de chambre. ”

“ Sir James Clerk consented to the embellishment of his hall at Pennyciuck with a series of pictures from Ossian, by the hand of Runciman.
Ossian was the rage—quotations from the blind bard of Morven were in every one’s mouth. True, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who loved to thrust his brave fist through a sham (though he was tricked in the Cock Lane business) , had denounced the whole thing as an imposition “as gross as ever the world was troubled with.” Dr. Blair wrote in defence, “Could any man, of modern age, have written such poems?” ”

“ The eight prints of the “Rake’s Progress” could be purchased at Mrs. Hogarth’s house, in Leicester Fields, for one guinea; “Lord Lovat,” “Beer Street,” and “Gin Lane” for a shilling each only, and all the others could be obtained upon like easy terms. It cannot be told when the bill first appeared in Widow Hogarth’s window—“Lodgings to Let.” But eight years after William’s death there was certainly a lodger in the house in Leicester Fields—a lodger who could exclaim, “I also am a painter!”
Alexander Runciman was born in Edinburgh, in 1736. ”