Alison: About two or three weeks ago this rather dreary looking orange album turned up in the living room and I was very astonished at its contents which first of all seemed to me very mysterious and anonymous and then I looked more closely at it and realised that this is a kind of artists diary of scraps and drawings done and drawn by my great grandfather William Sproston Caine, possibly when he was at an art school, or during his travels, and I only know it is William Sproston Caine because I googled him after looking at this book, and I found some letters in his handwriting which are identical to the writing found in this book.
And it is a very delightful object – very old, very frail, of rather brutally cut out squared sketches and pen and ink drawings and watercolours of I think a high quality of artistry, which have been put together possibly not by the artist himself but by his daughter Hannah, my grandmother, possibly. And it reflects the jottings of a very busy travelling man, who actually took my grandmother round the world when she was a girl of 18.
[nb Alison says later that she had no idea that he was an artist, so this is possibly all speculation – also he died in 1903 just after some of this art work was made so perhaps not him, although they may date back over many years – one dates 1881, and Mil notices that 1890 has been written in 2 different hands]
[Mil asks about Alison’s great grandfather] He was a big, burly, genial ruffian. He had a kind of ruffian beard, and he was a very very devoted liberal MP, he was a politician and hard worker, and he has got a very respectable innings on Wikipedia. And he was a very good lay preacher, and he set up in Liverpool a wheatsheaf mission, and he was also very keen on temperance, and I think he killed himself quite early through overwork, because he was only in his late 50s or early 60s when he died. But my grandmother adored him, he had 5 children and a loving wife and they were supposed to be very happily married. As a say he’s a genial ruffian. My father’s side, my father’s mother’s father.
[on Hannah, Alison’s grandmother] Well sadly she died when I was eight years old, and for various reasons she was largely confined to her bedroom in the great big house in North Wales, but she was quite a mystic woman, and read a lot of religious books, and was in the early stream of people interested, like Arthur Conan Doyle, in spiritualism, in the early years of the century. So although she was trapped in that aristocratic political shell up there, she wrote plenty, and got plenty of books through the post, and had quite a correspondence about spiritualism. So I find that rather intriguing, because of the nature of her husband who was a very very straight, straight Calvinistic methodist man, and whose father had build two chapels so they were terribly holy people. But Hannah broke out and she did her own thing – she was an independent minded woman. She was very frail – she may have been escaping of course ……. Hannah was a very beautiful woman – there is a famous portrait of her in the Walker Art Gallery. Hannah also went to art school.
That’s my crazy great uncle, William Caine, who was his son, his n’er do well son, who had this crazy crazy art style. That’s a person portrait – he wrote a book, and poems.
The Royal Collection 