Education
The boy was sent to school at Bodmin, and his taste for drawing came under the notice of Colonel Walter Raleigh Gilbert of the Priory, Bodmin, and his wife, ‘a lady of great accomplishments,’ with whom he was soon established as a great favourite. Mrs. Gilbert had been a schoolfellow of Miss Home, and kept up a correspondence with her friend after her marriage to John Hunter, the celebrated physician. She recommended Clift as an apprentice to Hunter, stating that he was qualified by his quickness and by his natural taste for drawing, which was shown in his eagerness ‘to come into her kitchen in Cornwall and make drawings with chalk on the floor.’
Clift arrived in London on 14 February 1792, his own and Hunter's birthday, and as he at once gave satisfaction to Hunter, was apprenticed without the payment of a fee, on the understanding that he was ‘to write and make drawings, to dissect and take part in the charge of the museum’ which his master had formed at the back of his house in Leicester Square. While Hunter lived this system of labour proved satisfactory to both of them. The pupil waited on his master at his dissections or wrote from his dictation from early morning until late at night. Hunter died on 16 October 1793, but his death made no difference in Clift's attachment to his master's memory. So long as life lasted Clift used to call him a truly honest man, and to ridicule the slanders that envy endeavoured to fasten on his character.
Read more about this topic: William Clift
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“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
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