A brief biography of R W BUSS

Robert William Buss (1804-1875), painter and etcher, the eldest son of William Church Buss (d. 1832) and his wife, Mary, was born in Bull and Mouth Street, Aldersgate, London, on 4 August 1804. He was named after his grandfather, an excise officer who turned schoolmaster in Tunbridge. Buss served an apprenticeship with his father, a master engraver and enameller, and then studied painting under George Clint, a miniaturist, watercolour and portrait painter, and mezzotint engraver.

In 1826 Buss married Frances Fleetwood (d. c.1861), a handsome, dignified woman whose practical resourcefulness and strong character complemented Buss's gentle, humorous temperament, love of colour and form, and exacting attention to painting realistic details. The couple settled in Camden Town, London, where of their ten children five survived infancy. The only girl, Frances Mary Buss (1827-1894), became a distinguished educationalist. She was assisted for many years by her father, and her clergyman brothers Alfred and Septimus.

Painting and the stage

At the start of his career Buss, like Clint, specialized in painting theatrical portraits. Many of the leading actors of the day sat for him, including William Charles Macready, John Pritt Harley, and J. B. Buckstone. Fifteen of these portraits, prepared for Cumberland's British Theatre, were exhibited at the Colosseum in Regent's Park, London. Later Buss essayed historical and humorous subjects.

He exhibited a total of 112 pictures between 1826 and 1859: twenty-five at the Royal Academy, twenty at the British Institution, forty-five at the Suffolk Street gallery of the Society of British Artists, seven at the New Watercolour Society, and fifteen in other locales. Of these, twenty-five were engraved, evidence of considerable popularity. Among them were Soliciting a Vote, engraved by T. Lupton in 1834; The Bitter Morning, lithographed by T. Fairland, also in 1834; and The Stingy Traveller, engraved by J. Brown in 1845. Buss also entered a cartoon, Prince Henry and Judge Gascoigne, into the Westminster Hall competition.

London actress Mrs. Nisbett. From this working sketch (right) an engraving was prepared for Cumberland's British Theatre. For the music salon of Charles Philip Yorke, fourth earl of Hardwicke at Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, he executed vast representations (9 ft x 20 ft) of the Origin and Triumph of Music.

Book illustration

Buss began his career as an illustrator on an inauspicious note. Based on having carved into the block Buss's design illustrating Dickens's 'A Little Talk about Spring, and the Sweeps' for the Library of Fiction (published June 1836), the wood-engraver John Jackson recommended Buss in late April 1836 to the publishers Edward Chapman and William Hall. They needed someone to replace Robert Seymour—who had committed suicide—as illustrator to Charles Dickens's serial fiction Pickwick Papers. Buss set aside his painting and worked up a dozen or so preliminary sketches (five are in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) for the fledgeling novel, then in its second of twenty instalments. His drawings were adequate, but the process of biting in a steel plate was unfamiliar to him so he hired an expert etcher. Buss saw that the ‘free touch of an original work was entirely wanting,’ and that the printed images seemed lifeless and uninspired. But, he concluded, ‘Time was up’ and the unsatisfactory illustrations for part 3 had to be issued (R. W. Buss, 124). The publishers summarily dismissed him—something that vexed Buss throughout the rest of his life, as he revealed in a statement written on 2 March 1872. But he never held his dismissal against Dickens; indeed, for his own pleasure Buss subsequently painted three oils and two small watercolours and made several other drawings from subjects in Dickens’s fiction.

Shortly after the Pickwick fiasco Buss mastered the art of etching. Saunders and Otley hired him to illustrate a new edition of Frederick Marryat's Peter Simple (1837) and Henry Colburn hired him to illustrate Frances Trollope's The Widow Married (1840). These were very successful, and thereafter he obtained several commissions for illustrating fiction. For some years Buss worked for Charles Knight, designing wood-engravings for Knight's editions of London (1841-4), William Shakespeare (1842-3), and Old England (1842-6).

Schoolmaster

In 1845, burdened by ‘money anxieties’ Buss's wife started a school for young boys and girls, and his daughter established on the same premises, 14 Clarence Road, Kentish Town, a morning school offering young ladies a liberal education.When four years later the two schools moved into larger quarters near by in Holmes Terrace, Buss assisted—first teaching drawing and later expanding his repertory to include science, literature, and elocution. In 1850 Buss's wife retired, and on 4 April in that year his daughter launched a more ambitious venture, in the family house at 46 Camden Street, Camden Town: the North London Collegiate School for Ladies.

A former pupil recalled that Buss’s ‘Chemistry series was marvellous, especially for smells and explosions, while his Elocution lessons and the little plays he arranged for us with costumes made us his devoted pupils.’ He also researched earlier British printmakers, lecturing on the subject in his daughter's schools and, from 1853, he delivered a series four talks, accompanied by 300 examples reproduced on sixty scrolling cartoons, at literary and scientific institutions in London and the provinces. These he published privately in 1874 as English Graphic Satire, a book for which he supplied in various mediums examples of his predecessors’ work. Buss also gave lectures on fresco painting and on the picturesque and the beautiful, though these were never published, and from 1850 to 1852 he edited The Fine Art Almanack.

Dickens' Dream

After his wife's death in 1861 Buss did little further teaching. When Dickens died in June 1870, the ageing artist was moved to attempt a large watercolour, Dickens's Dream (Dickens House Museum, London), depicting the dozing author seated in his Gad’s Hill study and enveloped by his creations. It was Buss’s last bid to illustrate Dickens’s characters, and with typical modesty he replicated the images of the artists who succeeded him. But before he could finish the painting, he died peacefully at his home, 14 Camden Street, on 26 February 1875 and was buried at Highgate cemetery, Middlesex.

Michael Buss: February 3, 2007 (Based on an article by Robert Patten in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.)