William Rimmer: Artistic Tendencies

"Despair" by William Rimmer

"An artistic tendency showed itself in the child William before he was out of pinafores; his first expression of this being to cut up an entire chintz bedquilt into butterflies without telling anyone of his performance. His parents were rather pleased, than otherwise, with this unusual transformation and encouraged the boy's creative fancies.  Shoemaker's wax was twisted into dragons and other frightful beasts, while it only needed the aid of a penknife to transform bits of chalk into equally strange and fanciful forms. 

In 1826, when William was ten years of age, the Rimmer family came to Boston and lived for a few years in a little unnamed street opposite what is now Wales' Wharf. On the wharf was a granite yard and a storehouse for gypsum. One who was a playmate of William at this time and comrade for many years after, relates that his friend used to cut from the gypsum and alabaster, figures as large as himself.

As soon as the boys were old enough, they assisted their father at his trade, and although shoemaking was not productive of a luxurious or certain income, yet by hard and steady work the Rimmers were not only able to obtain a living, but to save something wherewith to purchase books, colors, and other necessities of art and educational progress. The rare half-holidays were devoted to drawing, painting, or to long tramps into the woods to gather flowers and to study plants, botany and ornithology being included in their list of studies. 

By the age of fifteen William launched out as a painter of portraits, signs, or other pictures, and as a draughtsman. By the aid of some influential friend whose notice had been attracted by his unusual talents, he secured a place in a studio on Bylston Street, but this arrangement was of no great duration. For portraits he received from five to twenty dollars each. 

No trace of any of the work done at this time can be found, with the single exception of a little sitting figure carved in gypsum, when he was fifteen. It was studied from life, and represents his father's physical and mental characteristics. It is 'Despair.' Of all the works left by Dr. Rimmer, this is one of the most interesting and significant, possibly the most so. It shows the frankest loyalty to the model, a wonderful concentration in the composition of the figure and a natural genius for expression. These two qualities characterize all of Dr. Rimmer's work. As he grew older, nature, as felt in this figure, became subordinate to the imagination, to knowledge, to construction"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art Life of William Rimmer: Sculptor, Painter, and Physician" by Truman Howe Bartlett.)