He was now his own master and able at last to turn to painting.  He studied at the art school in Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, which had formerly been managed by Henry Sass, but, in Butler’s time, was being carried on by Francis Stephen Gary, son of the Rev. Henry Francis Gary, who had been a school-fellow of Dr. Butler at Rugby and is well known as the translator of Dante and the friend of Charles Lamb.  Among his fellow-students was Mr. H. R. Robertson, who told me that the young artists got hold of the legend, which is in some of the books about Lamb, that when Francis Stephen Gary was a boy and there was a talk at his father’s house as to what profession he should take up, Lamb, who was present, said: 

“I should make him an apo-po-pothe-Cary.”

They used to repeat this story freely among themselves, being, no doubt, amused by the Lamb-like pun, but also enjoying the malicious pleasure of hinting that it might have been as well for their art education if the advice of the gentle humorist had been followed.  Anyone who wants to know what kind of an artist F. S. Cary was can see his picture of Charles and Mary Lamb in the National Portrait Gallery.  In 1865 Butler sent from London to New Zealand an article entitled “Lucubratio Ebria,” which was published in the Press of 29th July, 1865.  It treated machines from a point of view different from that adopted in “Darwin among the Machines,” and was one of the steps that led to Erewhon and ultimately to Life and Habit.  The article is reproduced in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912).

Butler also studied art at South Kensington, but by 1867 he had begun to go to Heatherley’s School of Art in Newman Street, where he continued going for many years.  He made a number of friends at Heatherley’s, and among them Miss Eliza Mary Anne Savage.  There also he first met Charles Gogin, who, in 1896, painted the portrait of Butler which is now in the National Portrait Gallery.  He described himself as an artist in the Post Office Directory, and between 1868 and 1876 exhibited at the Royal Academy about a dozen pictures, of which the most important was “Mr. Heatherley’s Holiday,” hung on the line in 1874.  He left it by his will to his college friend Jason Smith, whose representatives, after his death, in 1910, gave it to the nation and it is now in the National Gallery of British Art.  Mr. Heatherley never went away for a holiday; he once had to go out of town on business and did not return till the next day; one of the students asked him how he had got on, saying no doubt he had enjoyed the change and that he must have found it refreshing to sleep for once out of London.

“No,” said Heatherley, “I did not like it.  Country air has no body.”

The consequence was that, whenever there was a holiday and the school was shut, Heatherley employed the time in mending the skeleton; Butler’s picture represents him so engaged in a corner of the studio.  In this way he got his model for nothing.  Sometimes he hung up a looking-glass near one of his windows and painted his own portrait.  Many of these he painted out, but after his death we found a little store of them in his rooms, some of the early ones very curious.  Of the best of them one is now at Canterbury, New Zealand, one at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and one at the Schools, Shrewsbury.