Liverseege (Henry).
HENRY LIVERSEEGE was born at Manchester, in September, 1803. Of humble parentage, he was indebted to the benevolent care of an uncle for a liberal education. His career as an artist began with copying fine paintings of old masters. With the exception of a few visits to London, he passed the whole of his life in his native town of Manchester. When in London he received considerable attention from those to whom his genius was known; among others, from Etty, the R.A. Heath, appreciating his genius, gave him a commission to paint twelve subjects for the “Book of Beauty,” which, however, he did not live to commence. His paintings, which appeared at the Society of British Artists in London, attracted general approval and admiration; but in January 1832, before the completion of his twenty-ninth year, this promising artist breathed his last.
A DEAR MODEL.
“Henry Liverseege had the soul and sense to take nature for his everlasting model; when he originated, he originated out of the heart of life; when he illustrated, he made life sit for his illustrations. In his paintings from Shakspeare, Scott, Gay, and Butler, and more especially in the more difficult of them, he always procured living models. Take, for instance, the two subjects of ‘Christopher Sly and the Hostess,’ and ‘The Black Dwarf,’ two of his most admirable paintings: we have it on record that even for these he found life representatives, and the anecdotes that attach to each picture are sufficiently amusing. As regards Christopher Sly, it was long before he could find such a cobbler as he desired. At length he met with a man he thought would suit; and, having placed him in his studio, set down a bottle of gin beside him, saying, ‘Drink whenever you please.’ The spirit of the cobbler, being one of those that must lie in sleep some time, and become half corrupted before it rises, refused to stir; he sat sober as a worshipful judge upon the bench. Another bottle of gin disappeared in the same way as the former, but the son of Crispin sat steady as ever. ‘Begone!’ exclaimed the painter in a passion; ‘it will cost me more to make you drunk than the picture will procure me!’
“‘The Black Dwarf,’ it will readily be believed, was a sort of poser in the way of tumbling upon an original; but notwithstanding the difficulty of procuring a sitter sufficiently hideous or misshapen, he at last discovered a miserable dwarf who afterwards sat to him, and displayed on the completion of his likeness, great wrath and indignation at what he considered the malicious mode in which his person was delineated: he would not believe that it was anything like him, and left the room unpaid, in high dudgeon, grumbling hoarsely as far as he could be heard,—for this fragment of humanity had the voice of a giant.”