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We have no art. We have only the Royal Academy, which is remarkable merely for the badness of its cuisine, and the coiffure of its well-meaning President. Our artists, as they call themselves, are like Mr. Grant Allen: they say that all their failures are 'pot-boilers. They love that word. It covers so many sins of commission.
He began at last another ambitious picture "Finding of Christ in the Temple" but while he was engaged upon this, he had to paint mere pot-boilers also in order to get on at all, and he says that half the time the great picture "stood with its face to the wall" while he was trying merely to earn bread and butter.
Riding once with Starr to dine at the Café Royal, Whistler leaned forward in the hansom and looked at the green park in the dusk, fresh and sweet after the rain; at the long line of light reflected, shimmering, in the wet Piccadilly pavement, and said: "Starr, I have not dined, as you know, so you need not think I say this in anything but a cold and careful spirit: it is better to live on bread and cheese and paint beautiful things than to live like Dives and paint pot-boilers.
His so-called superiors did not quite see it in this light, as they have abundantly testified, but the modesty of Watt was ever conspicuous all through his life. Watt led a busy life, the time not spent upon the indispensable "pot-boilers" being fully occupied in severe studies; chemistry, mathematics and mechanics all received attention.
Of quadrants he could make three per week with the help of a lad, at a profit of forty shillings, but as sea-going ships could not then reach Glasgow, few could be sold. A supply was sent to Greenock, then the port of Glasgow, and sold by his father. He was reduced, as the greatest artists have often been, to the necessity of making what are known as "pot-boilers."
At the suggestion of an editor more kindly than the general run, and urged by need, he had written some short pieces of a less ambitious nature. It was in bitter disappointment he commenced them, regarding them as mere pot-boilers. He would not give them his name. He signed them "Aston Rowant." It was the name of the village in Oxfordshire where he had been born. It occurred to him by chance.
Some of the reprinted articles would be fairly ranked in the present day under the derogatory title of "Pot-boilers"; but others are among the most effective and entertaining pieces which the author ever penned. Some of these must be specified.
Kite shrugged his shoulders, and looked uneasy. "Oh, pot-boilers! Poor stuff. Happened to catch people's eyes. Who told you about them?" "Some man I forget. And what are you doing now?" "Oh, nothing. A little black-and-white for that thing," he pointed contemptuously to the paper. "Keeps me from idleness." "Where are you going to live?" "I don't know. I shall find a garret somewhere.
He avowedly wrote many pot-boilers merely for money; he began to write simply to make the world talk about him, and he hardly cared what the world might say; and he not seldom wrote rank bombast in open contempt for his reader, apparently as if he had made a bet to ascertain how much stuff the British public would swallow.
You would have had no occasion to waste your time in painting pot-boilers, but could have devoted yourself to good, honest, serious work, which is more than most of us can do. We are obliged to consider what will sell and to please the public by turning out what they call pretty pictures children playing with dogs, and trumpery things of that sort.
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