Many Beautiful Things

Lilias Trotter had the opportunity to become one

of England's greatest painters.

I think Lilias is an iconoclast.

She defied all the categories.

If she's as good as I think she is,

why has nobody else heard of her?

Ruskin was one of the most important men

of the 19th century.

I don't think that he believed

that he couldn't win her.

Did she make the right decision?

Or did she make the worst decision of her life?

December 31, 1895,

sunset is coming on with wonderful

effects of light and color.

As the sun sinks, they deepen and glorify,

beyond any possibility of putting

on paper, how the angels must watch when that light reaches

a new spot on this earth that God so loves.

Lilias Trotter was an artist.

She was a British writer.

She was contemplative, and she was visionary.

Lilias was born in 1853 into the home

of a distinguished West End family in London.

We do know that her mother identified, in her early,

an artistic talent.

There were a lot of artists in the family.

She had this amazing ability to capture, quickly, images.

But she was already developing an eye to record things,

but she clearly had this great spirit

of just receiving beauty and perceiving it in a way that

was extraordinary.

It's recorded that when she first sighted the Alps,

she burst into tears.

The beauty so overcame her.

But life changed enormously for her when, at the age of 12,

her father died.

There seemed to be a distinct turning to faith

after her father's death,

that she was seeking a comfort of her Heavenly Father

in the absence of her earthly father.

In 1876, Lilias and her mother went to Venice.

Soon after checking in, her mother

heard that John Ruskin was also residing at the hotel.

Ruskin was the leading arbiter of art for the Victorian age.

Lilias' mother worked up her courage and wrote a note.

Her mother was probably hoping that she would get some

instruction in drawing and some general commendation

from Ruskin.

I doubt that she was expecting much more

than that, although there would obviously

have been the excitement of personal contact

with one of the most famous people

in the English-speaking world, which is what he was.

John Ruskin is enormously important to the history

of culture in the 19th century.

His writing and prose is some of the greatest

in the English language.

He was a writer about art, literature, architecture,

and the natural world.

Ruskin was one of the most important men

of the 19th century

and went onto influence almost everybody's

life in the 20th century.

Ruskin made a famous statement,

"There is no wealth but life."

What is wealth if we don't have quality of life,

if we don't think about the fresh air around us,

if we don't think about the landscape.

Ruskin became an authority

whose opinion was always to be

taken seriously.

He managed to create, if you like,

a vision of life, which inspired just generations of people.

He was a true celebrity of the 19th century.

In his lectures in Oxford in 1883,

which were published under the title of The Art of England,

rather remarkably, he tells the anecdote

of meeting Lilias Trotter,

whom of course nobody in Oxford had heard of.

One minute Ruskin is talking

about famous contemporary painters, and the next minute

he's mentioning this young girl

that he met in Venice.

Certainly as the story is told, I mean, Ruskin

is a bit surly about this and thinks, oh gosh,

what's this going to be?

But actually, clearly, he responded to something

in these watercolors.

And he said that they lacked knowledge, but in the sense

that he could sense the spirit behind them.

And he asked her mother whether he could take her

out sketching with him.

I think he could see, in Lilias,

the possibility of adding another woman to the relatively

small list of serious women artists of the period.

And he would have wanted to encourage her.

He's challenging the conventional understanding

of what great art actually is, if you like.

Come and look.

These colored pages are with one and the same intent,

to make you see.

Many things begin with seeing in this world of ours.

Looking at her work, it's an example of someone finding

a distinctive voice as an artist.

Having taken her up as a protege,

he's really very effusive about her.

He says that she seemed to learn everything

the instant she was shown it, and ever so much more

than she was taught.

One could see from her journals that she had a knack

for combining image and text, but also of developing

a way of drawing landscape, flower studies, and even

drawings of people.

One soon comes to realize, if you see something

like this over a period of time, that this can only

be by Lilias Trotter.

And establishing that kind of distinctive voice

is really quite a considerable achievement

for a relatively little known artist.

And he actually said, "For more than five

and 20 years of my life, I would not

believe that women could paint pictures,

and all history seemed to be on the side of this conviction.

But I was wrong in this established conviction of mine.

Women can paint."

What began as a modest interest became a passion,

pushing me forward in the search for Lilias.

Now this is the day before search engines.

It was through post and through phone that eventually led me

across the ocean to England,

to search out museums, archives,

a search that led me many, many different paths,

really over almost a three-decade span of time.

And I will agree that there

was an obsessive quality about it

that concerned some of the people closest to me.

I can't imagine anyone else knowing more

about Lilias Trotter than Miriam.

We would be getting ready for bed, and I'd say,

now am I with Miriam or Lilias?

I wanted to think being a minister's wife didn't make

me different than anyone else.

But the fact is, my life was greatly impacted

by the vocation my husband had.

And so there was a sense of which, in my early years,

because I was very isolated with little children,

and I discovered that I could travel outside my confines

through books and through art.

And I can remember just saving that little space when

a child was taking a nap or at the end of the day,

and get a cup of coffee, and this would be my Lilias time.

Looking at this little white book

with gold lettering, Lilias Trotter of Algiers,

and just the opening sentence.

Take the very hardest thing in your life,

the place of difficulty, outward or inward,

and expect God to triumph gloriously in that very spot.

Just there, he can bring your soul into blossom.

I just had chill bumps go through me

when I looked at this.

The art came straight through my mind into my heart.

This was the beginning, for me, of the discovery of Lilias.

I was determined to pursue, to the very end of my ability,

to find out who this woman was.

If she's as good as I think she is,

why has nobody else heard of her?

There lies before us

the beautiful, possible life,

one with a passion for giving

that shall be put forth to God,

not spent out for man.

It's well known that Ruskin had an eye for young women

of intelligence, dedication, a good Christian,

with quite a talent for art,

but also in a way biddable to his

will in being able to push them in the directions he thought

might be useful.

Lilias fitted all the requirements.

She was clearly a very quick pupil.

From that point on, he draws her into his circle.

It's hard to appreciate what that could have meant for her

to be being coached by the master.

I don't know how we could even parallel

that in our own lives.

But it was not only a significant moment for her,

but it was the beginning of a very deep and rich friendship.

Ruskin has said, and I believe it true,

the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is

to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.

Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think,

but thousands can think for one who can see.

There's a practice of looking and trying to understand

your surroundings on a daily basis that was simply natural

to both Lilias and Ruskin.

And it may have been encouraged and developed by Ruskin,

but it was probably there in Lilias' work to begin with.

Like Ruskin, she appreciated that a flower, an insect,

a landscape, is all, again, part of divine creation,

and by looking at it, and especially by drawing it,