Fresh Air Fiend (66 page)

He arrived in London when he was in his late twenties, but travel took up so much of his time that he did not buy a house and settle down until he was in his sixties. This was in Willesden—no trace of him there. A little detail would have been welcome. We know from the chance remark of an editor that Simpson married late in life, but we don't know when or where that was. We know nothing of the courtship, and we don't know the woman's name. The marriage is not even mentioned in Simpson's entry in the
Dictionary of National Biography.
There is a single allusion to the wife in Simpson's autobiography, but that book is dedicated to his only child, Anne Penelope. The tenderness of the dedication suggests he was devoted to his daughter.

His books are out of print, his pictures hardly known. Poor Simpson! Yet one suspects that he would be philosophical about this, for he had plenty of pride, but he was a man who had no vanity at all.

 

As the first war artist, Simpson was the first painter to follow soldiers into battle, with the intention of recording it for the press—in this case, the
Illustrated London News
(for many people a window on the world). In a sense, we know more of the Crimean War from Simpson's lithographs than from Alexander Kinglake's many volumes of official history. But Simpson was also a prolific writer, a journalist, an amateur archaeologist, and a watercolorist of distinction. Above all, he was an eyewitness in an age of great events.

His career spanned the triumphant and turbulent years of Victoria's reign, from the war in which he earned the name "Crimean" Simpson, to the queen's jubilee, just a few years before he died. He went everywhere, he saw everything, he met everyone; and he was not a snob, so "everyone" meant just that—dervishes, kings, princesses, pioneers, camel drivers, mad Irishmen, predatory Kurds, the shah of Persia, and the king of Abyssinia. Simpson was particularly skillful at talking to, and sketching, rebels and outlaws. He had courage, a strong stomach, and a nose for what the public wanted. When he was touring San Francisco in 1873, he got wind of the war between the Modoc Indians and American troops—this was near the Oregon state line. One of the pictures he supplied to the
Illustrated London News
was of a tangled, up-rooted-looking thing like an oversized divot whacked out of the ground by a very strong, very bad golfer. The description reads, "Scalp of Scaur-faced Charlie, Modoc Chief..."

He was also interested in religion. He wrote a book about symbolism in the story of Jonah and the whale—and other stories in which men are swallowed by sea creatures. He wrote a learned book about the Buddhist praying wheel, and about wheel symbolism and "circular movements in custom and religious ritual." While covering the First Afghan War and sending back sketches of battles and marches, Simpson also managed to carry out pioneering excavations. He was fascinated by mounds, tombs, and caves. He went to Jerusalem to look at digs, unearthed part of ancient India, reported on Schliemann's Troy—indeed, he was practically alone in disputing Schliemann's claim that the mud dwelling in Troy could be King Priam's palace. He was one of the first to suggest what many people said later—and he was right—about Schliemann's being rather bogus and impatient.

Simpson's father was a poor workingman, but it was a stroke of luck that he toiled in a printing shop, because it meant that his son would do something similar, which led the boy into lithography. Young William had a glimpse of better things, and wanted them. He was apprenticed to a lithographer, and that highly specialized skill inspired his drawing and painting. From the age of fifteen or so he saved his dinner penny, and instead of buying bread rolls he bought tubes of watercolor paint. He sketched from nature and later drew pictures of all the old houses of Glasgow—that was the beginning of his lifelong interest in history and archaeology. After the houses were pulled down, only Simpson's pictures remained as a record, published in Stuart's
Views of Glasgow
(1848) and posthumously reprinted as
Glasgow in the Forties.
He read poetry and literary criticism, attended night classes somewhat fitfully, and became a devotee of Ruskin.

Simpson spent his days working as a lithographer and his time off hiking and sketching. In
Meeting the Sun
(1874), he wrote:

 

My first love in art was a Highland mountain, and I have been a mountain worshipper ever since. Fate has privileged me to visit many shrines of this faith,—the Alps, the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the mountains of Abyssinia; now I can add to this list Fujiyama in Japan, and the Sierra Nevadas of California, where I have seen Mount Shasta and the Yosemite Valley. I think that a valley, however beautiful it may be, never could have become a sacred object, such as mountains seem to have been all over the world. A great high peak, soaring up into Heaven, with its garment of snow, white and pure, often lost in the clouds, as if communing with those above, its icy barriers setting it apart like consecrated ground where the profane must not tread,—these are the features of the higher mountains, which may have impressed men and produced that religious veneration of which we have evidences from the most remote antiquity.

 

He sold his first watercolor,
The Braes of Lochaber,
in 1850.

Naturally ambitious and seeking a challenge, he set off for London in 1851, and in the metropolis found work in a large firm of lithographers. He was at pains to point out in his autobiography the importance of his craft, which was exclusively pictorial, concerned with people and events ("Now it is all done by photography," he said in 1893). Of lithography he wrote, "The startling thing is that it was a class of work which came into existence, lasted only a quarter of a century, and has entirely vanished." And he remarked on how lithographers frequently became artists, while engravers seldom did.

The Crimean War gave him his first big break. In London he had been sketching pictures of battles for readers, basing them on newspaper accounts. He read the papers, studied up on the topography, and tried to depict the action. He kept wishing he was there at the front. He said to his employers, "Here they are making gabions, fascines, and traverses. What are these? No one knows. If I were there I could send sketches of them, so that everyone would understand."

He was sent, and two days before his thirty-first birthday he was under fire at Balaklava. He sketched while being shelled. But he was not foolish, just rational and downright. "If a shell is coming towards you," he said, "it becomes instantly visible, as a black speck against the white smoke of the gun which fired it, and before it reaches you there is plenty of time to go under cover."

He earned the respect of Lord Raglan, who allowed Simpson to use the official letter bag for sending his pictures back to London. And he learned the paradoxes of war, discovering it was essential that he see battles for himself, because often two officers in a skirmish would disagree on the details and conduct of the action. At the battle of Tchernaya he noted that in spite of heavy shelling and numerous casualties there was no blood visible on the battleground—the uniforms and dust absorbed it. During the war, he was able to spend three weeks at Kertch, visiting and sketching mound tombs, one of his passions. He did not see Miss Nightingale, he said (she was at Scutari), but he did see the elderly mulatto Mrs. Seacole, and a crazed Irishman, one of the casualties of the Crimea. It is characteristic of Simpson's interest in the unusual and the out-of-the-way that he gives a brisk description of the British commanders yet offers a compelling portrait of this madman:

 

He had wrought himself into a state of madness. In the village he had picked up a long stick—a wooden hay-fork formed by the natural branch of the tree. With this clenched in both hands and his eyes staring wildly out of his head, he was rushing about, exclaiming, "I smashes whatever I sees;" and whatever could be smashed with the hay-fork was destroyed by this maniac. Glass windows were special attractions to him. I saw him chase a very small fowl, and each time he failed to catch it he became more excited. At last the miserable chicken, exhausted with the chase, fell into his hands, and when this took place the wild fool did not know what to do with it. In an incoherent way he expressed himself as wishing to know what could be done, and at last, grasping the bird by the neck and squeezing it with all his strength, he said, "Die! Die! Die!"

 

Another memorable portrait (and of course Simpson sketched these people as well as wrote about them) was that of the Kurd he met near Batoum (now the Soviet city of Batumi), on the Black Sea. This Kurd had a face that was "vile, wicked and cruel," and when asked what he was doing there, he said simply, "killing people."

 

"Who do you kill?"

"Travelers."

"How do you kill them?"

"I watch the road, and when I see travelers coming I hide behind a rock and shoot them as they pass."

"How many have you killed?"

"Thirteen, and five Russians."

He did not explain the reason why he made a distinction in the case of Russians. It may have been perhaps some patriotic sentiment. He was then asked what he was doing in Batoum. To which he replied, "Some business."

"Where are you going when you leave this place?"

"Back to the mountains, where, please God, I hope to shoot some more travelers."

 

Simpson had amassed an enormous number of pictures, including rarities, for he had recorded the fall of Sebastopol and had traveled in unknown Circassia. He was able to publish a pictorial history of the war (two folio volumes, eighty plates), and his reputation as a war artist was made.

He was something of a novelty, too, though in a different respect: he had grown a beard. When people saw him, they bleated like goats or called out "Doormats!" because "anyone with a beard was looked on as a Jew or a foreigner."

After the Crimea, whenever there was a great event to be depicted in a lithograph for the London weekly papers, Simpson was sent. He made pictures of everything that came his way: the opening of a canal, a tunnel, or a bridge; wars and uprisings; weddings, coronations, funerals, state visits, or following a royal progress. Simpson faithfully recorded them all, but he did much else besides—sketching ruins and back streets or simply picturesque views. In Japan, later in his life, he tramped around drawing views of Fuji.

When Simpson was sent to India to record the aftermath of the Mutiny, he had in mind a large-scale project, so that he might do for India what his fellow countryman David Roberts had done for the Holy Land. He had a grand scheme and envisioned four large volumes with something like 250 plates.

He was at it seven years—nearly three years in India and four years working his sketches into finished pieces. He had traveled all over India—to Lahore and Peshawar and up the Khyber Pass; to Simla and sixteen marches beyond it, to Sutlej. He sketched thugs in Jubblepore and then set off in a dooley (a sort of light palanquin) for the wild in-between places ("It is in these spaces that the real India exists"). He traveled to Bhilsa, to find Buddhist architecture, and to the source of the Ganges in the Himalayas, and to faraway Chittore, before the railway. All the while he was sketching. He estimated that in his Indian journey he covered 22,570 miles.

The project was an almost total disaster, and its failure is probably one of the reasons that Simpson is so obscure a figure today. It was Simpson's awful fate that his Indian pictures remained unpublished. His putative publisher, Day's, had gone bust, but the firm regarded Simpson's pictures as their property, and they were simply sold off, flogged as bankrupt stock. In spite of this reversal, Simpson kept on.

If the Crimea had made him a war artist, the India trip of 1857–59 made him an artist-traveler, in the manner of the Daniells, George Chinnery, Edward Lear, Zoffany, William Purser, Henry Salt, and so many others who made their name bringing pictures of India and the Far East back to England. Some of these were greater artists than Simpson, but no other traveler had more stamina, and none were so fastidiously truthful. Simpson's counterpart today is the inspired photographer who roams widely and reports on places that are little known and dangerous.

Travel also vindicated Simpson's fair-mindedness. He believed he held "exceptional" views on the subject of national character—in a word, he was not a racist, and he felt strongly that it was politicians who whipped up feelings of nationalism and xenophobia. He said that as a child he had always been told of the "superiority of the Scotch." But it was all prejudice and political humbug. He was not taken in: "I saw that each country remembered only its own virtues, and saw mainly the voices of its neighbors and, by contrasting the good features of its own character with the bad of the others, reached what was to it a satisfactory conclusion." His humanity made him clear-sighted, and this shows in his pictures. His 1876 album
Picturesque People
depicts individuals, not stereotypes. It was one of his great virtues that he traveled around the world without any preconceived notions of who or what he would find, and this absence of cant and bigotry in his nature made him a brilliant observer.

 

I long ago came to the conclusion that there is more resemblance than difference among the various people of the world, and here is what I take to be a characteristic example. In passing through the palace [of the Maharajah Runbir Singh]... I had to cross an open court. On the first day I saw a boy mending a defect in the pavement with a chunam or kunkur of some kind. The hole was only about six inches or a foot in size, and the boy sat there pounding the chunam slowly into it. I think I spoke to him in passing. Next day I again found him slowly beating away at the same hole.