Past Lives: Artist who abandoned life amid the London literati

The words are not mine but caught my fancy partly because they indicate the milieu enjoyed by today's subject, a County Durham tradesman's son who became a distinguished portrait-painter, when he was learning his business in early 19th century London. And partly because they chime with something read in a review of a new biography of Wordsworth; the critic suggested that a factor in renewed popular interest in the poet is a response to the "goodness he and his family are seen to embody".

William Bewick is the painter and is not to be confused with his northern contemporary, the engraver Thomas Bewick. Our man was born in 1795, one of 12 children, in Blackwellgate, Darlington, at the time Wordsworth was in his honourable and cautious way wooing Mary Hutchinson at nearby Sockburn.

Bewick's father wanted the boy to follow him sensibly in the upholstery trade. Although his mother, a beautiful Quaker who had been Jane Roantree from Hurworth, descendant of linen manufacturers, was more indulgent, even she might have taken fright had she known of the tempestuous character of the teacher William was to attach himself to when he went to London.

For the 20-year-old was taken under the wing of Benjamin Haydon, the talented but controversial artist who feuded ceaselessly with the Royal Academy; he it was who, above, so eloquently preferred Byron to Wordsworth. Haydon, after imprisonment for debt and then his latest rebuff by the art establishment, eventually penned an equally striking suicide note: "Stretch me no more on this rough world," he wrote, quoting Lear.

In the event, Bewick was not led astray by Haydon, and he himself, comfortably off and respectable long after his few years of great promise amid famous artistic names of the period, was to die in his bed at Haughton-le-Skerne, then a village two miles east of Darlington. He is buried in the churchyard there; so, too, incidentally, is Byron's uncle, the Hon Rev Richard Byron, rector of Haughton for the first 16 years of Bewick's life.

Amid the famous? Well, he met Wordsworth, Ugo Foscolo, Hazlitt, Shelley, Keats and others at Haydon's studio. He found himself making drawings of London's newly acquired Elgin marbles for Goethe. He spent years copying Michelangelo's masterpieces in the Sistine Chapel for a rich and wealthy patron.

After his London years, he got to know Sir Walter Scott, visiting and drawing him at Abbotsford. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is proud of its Bewick collection of early 19th-century Scotland's great and good. The National Portrait Gallery has his Hazlitt and the British Museum has three of his drawings.

But merely "great promise"? He never achieved the national fame that at one time seemed his destiny. One reason was that his association with the wayward Haydon may have been held against him, be it ever so subtly, by the conformists. No such slight seems to have been suffered by Sir Edwin Landseer, who with his two brothers was also a Haydon pupil.

It is interesting that the Landseer brother who was apparently closest to Bewick, born the same year and who in 1871 wrote his biography, was very late in receiving recognition by the Royal Academy; that was Thomas Landseer, a skilled engraver.

Another explanation of Bewick's comparative lack of recognition was his great misfortune in finding a patron who, though of great wealth and of the highest artistic pedigree, was not long for this world. Sir Thomas Lawrence gave Bewick the Sistine Chapel copying task, with the intention that the result should be a gift to the Royal Academy to mark his 1826 presidency.

Sir Lawrence was principal portrait painter to George IV and Bewick wrote home to say that "considering the situation in which my connection with Haydon has placed me with the body of the Royal Academy", the commission augured well. "It is a good thing to have a friend at court."

Four years later, with Bewick having just completed his marathon at the Vatican and other commissions during all that time in Italy, Sir Lawrence died; the Royal Academy did not consider itself bound by his wishes. The Sistine Chapel copies in oil were sold by Lawrence's executors and Bewick received only compensation rather than the expected acclaim.

Although the artist did have subsequent successes, including a London exhibition of his cartoons for the Vatican portfolio (an appeal was launched to buy them for the nation, but in vain), disappointment weighed heavily with him. As well it might, because Lawrence had told Bewick he regarded him as an eventual candidate for the presidency of the Royal Academy and that he would use his influence to that end.

Who is to say that the setback did not contribute to the failing health which in the early 1840s decided Bewick to semi-retire to Darlington? He had anyway suffered from serious rheumatism, not least because - the story goes - the chilly dampness of a Rome winter had got into his bones while he was perched on scaffolding to copy Michelangelo's prophets and sybils: the Pope was affected by the smell of paint and insisted on the Sistine Chapel windows remaining open.

Bewick returned to a Darlington which was rather more prosperous than when he left it. During the last 15 of those 24 intervening years the place had become renowned in the brave new world of railways.

He remembered it as containing "little or nothing of art nor any taste for art among its inhabitants, it being a Quaker town. The love of making money was their ruling passion."

Well, yes, they were still hard at work doing that but some, at least, of the leading citizens were now not averse to spending some of their brass on pictures - and the returning prodigal would oblige them when it suited him.

Most of them were wealthy Quakers, country gentlemen and businessmen. He certainly painted Francis Steavenson, who was to become the first town clerk of Darlington; Francis Mewburn, who became wealthy as "the first railway solicitor", was another lawyer friend. At the Laing art gallery in Newcastle there is an 1825 Bewick sketch of Joseph Pease, "father of the railways", at a picnic with friends at Rokeby, the great house near Greta Bridge.

We do not know whether the two local people who had most encouraged him to chance a career in art were still alive on his return. His Aunt Sarah, who had noted how well the boy did during the half-day each week that his Quaker school allowed for drawing, interested him in the paintings at her own home near Barnard Castle; and, with practical tips, there was a country artist and jack of all trades called George Marks. Bewick's mother died in 1843 and his father the following year.

One thing is certain, he came back as one of the "gentleman" class. He had not lost contact with Darlington and over the years had invested in property in Haughton, including Jasmine House in the south-east corner of the green. The village was reckoned an exceptionally healthy place to live. Some would have us believe it was once dubbed "the Montpellier of the North", but it is certainly likely that, because it is built on sand and gravel, moisture does not linger there.

In 1844 he moved into another of his houses after his tenants, the owners of the village mill, went into bankruptcy. By 1850 he and his wife moved into their newly-built home on adjacent land he owned in the same corner of the green. He named it Haughton House and it was there he died, childless, in 1866. Today it is called Haughton Mews and is divided in two - one half is the former home of Michael Wood, to whom I am indebted for much of the information in this piece.

Mr Wood now lives abroad but in the 1990s helped write a thoroughly researched booklet about Bewick; his co-author, Jean Kirkland, has also moved away. Among the most fascinating of their findings is the fate of the Sistine Chapel cartoons and the careless dispersal of much of the rest of Bewick's life's work. More of that, I hope, anon.

Conscience note: The Teesside telephone number of a reader who had a query about engraver Bewick has gone astray. My apologies, sir, and I hope you will get in touch.