Early Life
Emily Osborn was born in Essex, the eldest of nine children of the Rev. Edward Osborn and his wife Mary,who took up the curacy of West Tilbury under its rector Edward Linzee during the spring of 1834, when Emily as about 5. The family occupied the parsonage at the top of Gun Hill, which is pictured in a lithograph of 1845 by D. Walton. Osborn lived for some 8 years at the parsonage, though she afterwards recalled that her "early surroundings ... were not such as to develope artistic proclivities, there being but little natural beauty in the country around West Tilbury ...". There, her mother encouraged her "and watched with pride the clever portraits Emily drew of her brothers and sisters". The parent herself possessed a great love of painting and had, on her own account, "wished in vain to study Art professionally". The same article speaks of experimentation at this period, how the teenage girl, not always being able to obtain the paints she desired "devised a plan of making an extra supply of colours from flowers, by putting the petals into bottles with a little spirits of wine".
Read more about this topic: Emily Mary Osborn
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,—muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)