The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

As a child I used to sleep in a room hung round with prints after English landscape painters--those steel engravings so common half a century ago, which bore the legend, "From the picture in the Vernon Gallery." Far more than I knew at the time, these pictures impressed me; I gazed and gazed at them, with that fixed attention of a child which is half curiosity, half reverie, till every line of them was fixed in my mind; at this moment I see the black-and-white landscapes as if they were hanging on the wall before me, and I have often thought that this early training of the imagination--for such it was--has much to do with the passionate love of rural scenery which lurked within me even when I did not recognize it, and which now for many a year has been one of the emotions directing my life. Perhaps, too, that early memory explains why I love a good black-and-white print even more than a good painting. And--to draw yet another inference--here may be a reason for the fact that, through my youth and early manhood, I found more pleasure in Nature as represented by art than in Nature herself. Even during that strange time when hardships and passions held me captive far from any glimpse of the flowering earth, I could be moved, and moved deeply, by a picture of the simplest rustic scene. At rare moments, when a happy chance led me into the National Gallery, I used to stand long before such pictures as "The Valley Farm," "The Cornfield," "Mousehold Heath." In the murk confusion of my heart these visions of the world of peace and beauty from which I was excluded--to which, indeed, I hardly ever gave a thought--touched me to deep emotion. But it did not need--nor does it now--the magic of a master to awake that mood in me. Let me but come upon the poorest little woodcut, the cheapest "process" illustration, representing a thatched cottage, a lane, a field, and I hear that music begin to murmur. It is a passion--Heaven be thanked--that grows with my advancing years. The last thought of my brain as I lie dying will be that of sunshine upon an English meadow.