Artist's equipment
Samuel Butler’s sketching portfolio, paint brushes and tin paint box containing used watercolours.
Butler took pleasure in sketching outside, and often completed whole works at the scene, in one sitting. At home in London, however, he would spend hours in his studio, continually trying to improve.
‘Sometimes I find myself painting almost very well, and then I make horrid failures… I work without interruption and very hard: my average is fully 7 hours a day at painting independently of music – and writing.’
– Samuel Butler, in a letter of 28 February 1867