The early life of John Philip, whose glorious pictures of Spanish life won him such wide-spread fame, presents an instance of greatness won despite extreme poverty, with its attendant drawbacks, and the friendlessness of utter obscurity. He began his career as a painter when a mere boy; though not upon canvas, millboard nor panel, but upon watering-cans. When seventeen years of age he worked his passage from Scotland to London on board a coasting-vessel, for the purpose of seeing the exhibition of the Royal Academy, and on his return, with a mind richly stored by close investigation of the pictures he saw there and in the National Galleries--of which those by Wilkie were the most fascinating and instructive--he painted a picture which attracted the attention of Lord Panmure, who generously sent him to study in London, and supplied him with the means of support while so engaged. Philip died, as so many sadly remember, on Feb. 27th, 1867. One of his earliest attempts was long visible outside an old tavern, in the village of Dyce, near his native town Aberdeen, where he was born in 1817. At Dyce he was employed as herd-boy, and a story is told of his having at that time but two shirts, and when one of these was stolen, Johnny said cheerfully to his relative, Mrs. Allardyce, "Never min, ye can mak a shift, wash the ane I hae on, and I'll gang to my bed till it's dry. My puir mither hae often to do that." Inconvenient as such circumstances must have been, John Philip in the days of his prosperity often spoke of the happy days he knew when he was a poor little herd-laddie in the pretty little village of Dyce.
Somewhat similar in its start was the life of Henry Dawson, who died in 1878. Born at Hull in 1811, he commenced the world as a factory-lad at Nottingham, in which position he began to paint pictures, which he sold at prices ranging from two to twenty shillings; but it was long before he achieved the grand success the latter price implied, not indeed before 1835, and the munificent patron to whose liberality he owed the advance was a hairdresser, who for many years remained his best customer. So slowly came the fame and prosperity he sought so laboriously and patiently, and at last so honourably won, that when he was in his fortieth year he actually contemplated opening a small-ware shop to aid him in bringing up and educating his family. Indeed had it not been for John Ruskin, to whom he applied for advice as to whether he should reluctantly abandon his beloved art or persevere in its practice, the profession would have lost one of the most powerful of our modern masters in landscape.