Marriage is sometimes described in prayer books as an “excellent mystery”; something that cannot help but stimulate the imagination. Every marriage, union, is slightly mysterious , whether the partnership succeeds or fails. There is usually something that escapes analysis. There have been few marriages as long, devoted, and inharmonious as the alliance of Jane and Thomas Carlyle…
Solemnized in 1826, it lasted until 1866, and before they plighted their troth, both husband and wife had expressed the deepest hesitations. “Without great sacrifices on both sides,” Carlyle had written, “the possibility of our union is an empty dream”; while Jane had declared in 1823, “Your Friend I will be… but your Wife! Never, never!”
—Walter Greaves is well known for his landscapes and river scenes. He was the son of a Chelsea boat-builder who used to ferry JMW Turner across the River Thames. Walter and his brother Harry Greaves also performed this service for James Abbott MacNeil Whistler, and in about 1863 became his unpaid studio assistants and pupils. They adored Whistler, and accompanied him wherever he went, imitated his dress and manner, made the frames for his canvases, bought his materials and prepared his pigments. Their close friendship lasted well into the 1890’s.
Whistler favoured Walter, for he was a gifted draughtsman. He had painted and drawn memorable views of the Thames at Chelsea long before they had met and these works are now considered by many to be the greatest primitive painting produced in England. Under the spell of Whistler, Greaves’s work changed significantly. His drawings reveal an enforced sophistication, much like Whistler’s own. When Greaves fell into poverty in his old age, he tore the canvases from their frames to use them as firewood. Some of these abandoned canvases were so alike Whistler’s they were mistaken for his own. —Read More:http://www.sarahcolegrave.co.uk/artists/d/walter-greaves/1343
To some extent the obstacle they confronted was social and economic. Jane was “an ex-spoilt child,” brought up by an adoring mother in Scottish middle-class society, well educated, attractive, equally proud, we are told, of her Latin and her eyelashes; whereas Carlyle’s father was a rustic stonemason who had later taken up farming. Thomas had made himself an historian and a writer by dint of his own laborious efforts, but in the process he had ruined his health and suffered perpetually from dyspepsia, insomnia, and a host of nervous ills. Jane admired him, but felt that she could not love him.
Yet, the rough peasant-scholar and the volatile middle-class girl had somehow drifted into marriage, and as a middle-aged woman, Jane would write to a favorite cousin, explaining what she thought had happened: “In virtue of this being the least unlikable man in the place, I let him dance attendance on my young person, till I came to need him- all the same s my slippers to go to a ball in, or my bonnet to go out to walk. When I finally agreed to marry him, I cried excessively and felt excessively shocked- but if I had then said no he would have left me.”
—As is evident in prints from the Thames Set, Whistler was especially interested in harbor scenes. While living in London, the artist gravitated toward the less fashionable neighborhood of Chelsea, crowded with barges, factories and decaying buildings. In addition to scenes along the Thames, the collection includes a number of intimate portraits of family, friends and acquaintances of Whistler as well as other images that will give viewers a glimpse into the world of one of the greatest and most influential printmakers of the 19th century. —Read More:http://www.artknowledgenews.com/2009-05-19-03-12-12.html
For the first few years of their marriage, she accepted the consequences of her decision bravely. In 1828 they moved from Edinburgh to the lonely farm of Craigenputtock, where the silence was so profound that they could often hear sheep cropping in the field outside. During the winter months, a deeper hush descended, and the snow piled up against the door: when they opened it, a mountainous drift would sweep like an avalanche across the flagstones of the kitchen.
Finally, in 1834, Carlyle having at last published Sartor Resartus, they felt rich enough to move south. The London house they chose was Number 5 Great Cheyne Row, a largish Queen Anne house close to the river Thames which at that period still retained the muddy foreshore that Whistler and Walter Greaves painted, where barges and sailing boats lay breached on its verge, amid decrepit wharves and ramshackle wooden jetties.
They were to spend the rest of their lives in that ouse. There Jane Carlyle’s body was brought after her sudden death in 1866; and there, an embittered, disconsolate sage, Carlyle died in 1881. ( to be continued)…
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