own Wessex Poems.[1] George Moore was a painter in his youth, and it was while he was studying art in Paris that he imbibed much of the atmosphere that is so essential a part of his books. To this phase of his life we owe such works as The Confessions of a Young Man and Memoirs of My Dead Life, but could such a passage as the description of the trees in A Story-Teller's Holiday have been written by any one but a painter? I hardly think so. Holbrook Jackson tells us that Bernard Shaw as a boy never wanted to write. He wished to draw, and Michelangelo was his boyish ideal. Gautier had the intention of becoming a painter when he
- ↑ Lucian was apprenticed to a sculptor. Ouida was a painter, withal a bad one. However, she once wrote to her friend, Mrs. Huntington, that she was a better painter than writer. William and Henry James studied painting with Lafarge. Arnold Bennett dabbled in art for five years in Paris. On inspecting his work, Pierre Laprade, the French water-colourist, remarked, "Monsieur, you have three times too much cleverness, and your work is utterly without interest." Nevertheless one of Bennett's paintings was used to illuminate the cover of one of his novels, Booth Tarkington said once to an interviewer, "First I intended to be an artist and not a writer," and O. Henry made a similar remark. Stacy Aumonier was once a painter. W. B. Yeats, originally intending to follow his father's example and become a painter, went to art school in Dublin. Rudyard Kipling illustrated his own Just So Stories. Robert W. Chambers and Roland Pertwee were once painters. Samuel Butler was not only a painter but a composer as well!
