T.C. Gotch: Pothooks and Hangers of Painting

"The Sandbar" by T.C. Gotch

"Here it may be well to say something about Mr. Gotch's life anterior to 1891. Strange as it may seem, he began with literary leanings and longings. As a youth in business with his father at Kettering, letters was his aim. But he never doubted his power to draw and paint, and in those long, long thoughts that fill the mind at twenty-one, he promised himself that he would live by art until he had amassed enough money to devote his time without reproach to literature. Fond delusion! 

He wrote at night in his bedroom by candlelight. He also drew, but it was his pictures, not his scribblings, that touched the fancy and won the approbation of his family. They were of good Nonomformist stock, his grandfather having been one of the founders of the Baptist Missionary Society. When they discovered that he honestly cared more for art and letters than for business, the family wisely gave the boy his head, and put their's together with the view of helping him all they could. 

A portfolio of early drawings were collected and dispatched to Mr. E.M. Wimperis, who since those days has blossomed into a delightful and popular painter, and who now sits in the vice-presidential chair of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours. Well, the drawings pleased Mr. Wimperis, and the youth from Kettering was advised to begin his studies at Heatherleys, the art school off Oxford Street, where so many have learnt the pothooks and hangers of painting. 

There Mr. Gotch remained eighteen months learning and assimilating after which he took the boat train to Antwerp and entered the Beaux Arts of that city. In Antwerp he remained six months. Verlat was painting professor, but the young Englishman sighed for brighter colours, and directly he had made up his mind that he was out of sympathy with the 'black school' of painting taught at Antwerp. He returned to London."

To be continued

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