Marianne North: Childhood

"Trees Laden with Parasites and Epiphytes
in a Brazilian Garden" by Marianne North

English artist Marianne North (1830-1890) wrote: "My first recollections relate to my father. He was from first to last the one idol and friend of my life, and apart from him I had little pleasure and no secrets. He used to carry me on his shoulders over the hills and far away, down on the beach to see the fishing boats land, and the heaps of glittering, slippery fish counted and sold by Dutch auction. I well remember the old fishermen, covered with silver scales, calling out, 'Make way for Muster North and his little gal!" giving me kind pats with great salt hands as I passed perched high on my father's shoulder through the crowd. 

We had much variety in our life, spending the winter at Hastings, the spring in London, and dividing the summers between my half-sister's old hall in Lancashire and a farmhouse at Rougham. Governesses hardly interfered with me in those days. Walter Scott or Shakespeare gave me their versions of history, and Robinson Crusoe and some other old books my ideas of geography. At last someone told my mother that I was very uneducated (which was perfectly true), so I was sent to school at Norwich. 

School life was hateful to me. The teaching was such purely mechanical routine, and the girls with one exception were uninteresting. The only bright days were when my father used to ride over for business and take me with him. At last the happy time came, and I left school. My months there had not been many, but they were very long ones to me, and soon after it was decided to go abroad for three years.

We went to Heidelberg, where we settled for eight months in the two upper stories of a large ugly house outside the town gates. Before April was over we left Heidelberg and spent the next two years touring Europe, often being too close for comfort to the civil disturbances and wars rife at the time.

Returning to London during 1850 I had some lessons in flower-painting from a Dutch lady, Miss van Fowinkel, from whom I got the few ideas I possess of arrangement of colour and of grouping, and then we recommenced the happy old life at Rougham, I passing hours and hours of every day on horseback, painting, and singing with little fear of interruption. The next season I saw the opening of the first great Exhibition.

The only art master I longed for would not teach, i.e. old William Hunt, whose work will live forever, as it is absolutely true to nature. We used to see a good deal of him at Hastings, where he generally passed his winters, living in a small house almost on the beach under the East Cliff, where he made the most delicious little pencil sketches of boats and fishermen. I can see him now, looking up with his funny great smiling head and long gray hair. I remember 'That Boy,' too, whom Hunt taught to be anything he chose as model, blowing the hot pudding, fighting the wasp, or taking the physic. "

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Vision of Eden: the Life and Work of Marianne North" and "Recollections of a Happy Life" by Marianne North.)