Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 18

His formal education was completed at Dr. Charles Burney’s newly-opened academy at Hammersmith, and probably at his other, more famous Academy at Greenwich. Dr. Burney was a distant relative, a contributor to the Monthly Review, an antiquarian and one of the great classical scholars of his time. It was here that Wainewright added to his Latin, Greek and the considerable body of knowledge which he delighted to display with such panache in his later essays.

Here, too, another talent burgeoned. He became proficient as a draughtsman. W. Carew Hazlitt, his first proper biographer, who collected and edited his essays in 1880, was able to see the book in which he drew at Dr. Burney’s. “It displays great talent and natural feeling” he recorded. The book is now lost. Wainewright himself declared: “The little attention I gave to anything was directed to painting, or rather to an admiration of it.” It was more than admiration; he decided to become an artist himself.

He was 19, articulate, well-schooled, well-connected and, most importantly, had a comfortable independent income.

But – and this was one of the roots of his tragedy – not enough to keep up the wardrobe and the inclinations of a dandy, for such he had become. His dandyism was to become more than a passing phase of youthful extravagance; it was the start of the profligacy which led to his downfall.

He had already studied painting under John Linnell, friend of Blake and an accomplished landscape and portrait artist, but to become anything of an artist himself it was necessary to

THE FATAL CUP

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