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 and/or life:
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)