T.C. Gotch: An Introduction

"The Child Enthroned" by T.C. Gotch

"Newlyn, that country of corybantic longshoremen and peaceable painters, is the home of Mr. T.C. Gotch from autumn to spring. His house is perched on high, like an eagle's eyrie, half way up the cliff that climbs from Penzance to the crest of the hills. You will find him any day between ten and six in his quiet studio, down below in the meadows, or, after working hours, in that drawing room of his with the wonderful view. Oh what a view! How it haunts one afterwards in shortening days, when early autumn fogs steal down the streets, and there is no sky but the poor parallel of gray that stretches motionless above the housetops. Oh that view! Mount's Bay below, St. Michael's sentinel upon the further shore, and away yonder beyond these waters, so tranquil, so polite that they might serve as ocean to a doll's fishing village, thunders the Atlantic.

But it is not everybody who can spare the time for a jaunt to the end of Cornwall, and although it has been my good fortune to spend long days at Newlyn, and many an hour in that eyrie hanging upon the cliff, it is not in this happy background I am thinking at this moment of Mr. Gotch. A more distracting and, shall I say, a less agreeable environment envelops him.

First I see him in London in the early summer of 1891, and then in Paris, last spring in the Champ de Mars Salon, before Dagnan-Bouveret's great picture of 'The Last Supper.' Those are dramatically before me. They range themselves into his Disconsolate Year and his Notable Year, and their story may give heart to those who, like him, know nights of heaviness, but whom morning has not yet brought any particular joy. 

It was said of John Whitgift, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, that his motto was 'vincit qui patitur' [he who suffers conquers], and he made it good. In 1891 Mr. Gotch was still enduring."

To be continued

(Excerpt from "T.C. Gotch and His Pictures" by Lewis Hind in "The Windsor Magazine" 

*corybantic: wild; frenzied.
"rock and roll's corybantic gyrations"