t 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.

This is Butler's own account of himself, taken from a letter to Sir
Julius von Haast; although written in 1865 it is true of his mode of
life for many years:

I have been taking lessons in painting ever since I arrived, I
was always very fond of it and mean to stick to it; it suits me
and I am not without hopes that I shall do well at it. I live
almost the life of a recluse, seeing very few people and going
nowhere that I can help--I mean in the way of parties and so
forth; if my friends had their way they would fritter away my
time without any remorse; but I made a regular stand against it
from the beginning and so, having my time pretty much in my own
hands, work hard; I find, as I am sure you