Mr Heatherley’s Holiday: An Incident in Studio Life (1874)
Having achieved financial independence through his farming activities in New Zealand, Butler settled in London and pursued his ambition of becoming a painter. He studied first at the South Kensington Museum and Cary’s Art School in Bloomsbury, then (from 1867 onwards) exclusively at Heatherley’s in Newman Street. His study of Thomas Heatherley mending the school skeleton is his largest and most impressive painting. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874 and the original is now in the Tate.
Even this ‘important’ picture, as Butler referred to it, was founded on a joke: the skeleton at Heatherley’s was always getting knocked about, because the students would dress it up in costumes and dance with it, and Mr Heatherley famously never went on holiday, preferring to stay in London to maintain his studio.