BOY'S GENIUS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 234, 24 May 1932, Page 8

BOY'S GENIUS

artist at twenty * POST OFFICE MESSENGER IN ORPEN'S PLACE OF HONOUR. TRAGIC LIFE STORY. A dead boy was hailed as a genius in London last month. His pietures were hung in a London art gallery in the place of honour reserved for years for the masterpieces of the late Sir William Orpen. He has become famous. The boy knew nothing of the fame .that awaited him. He was just a messenger boy, 20 years old, when he died last October. His name was Victor Charles Riches. One would not have distinguished him, save for his steel-rimmed spectacles, from the scores of other messenger boys who daily rushed out of the Western District Office of the General Post Office with telegrams in their pouches and perky caps on their heads. The Eyie of an Artist. But Victor Charles Riches was different. He had the eye of an artist for everything. He used to watch, in those days when he delivered telegrams, the slant of sunshine through the clouds playing like limelight on the great stage of London. He used to see how the autumn rain transformed the city so that the buildings j looked like mighty ships driving through the ocean. When Victor went home at night to his father and mother in a side street in North Paddington he transformed the beauty he had seen into line and colour. It was made permanent. The lad earned 28s a week. He could not afford expert tuition. He had little leisure, but he worked furiously at his paintings. Now some of his water-colours have been hung in the galleries of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours. The genius of Victor Charles Riches was first recognised by Mr. Martin Hardie, lceeper of the department of paintings and engravings at the Victoria and Albert Museum and member of the council of the Royal Institute. "Had Riches lived he would have taken a high place in British painting," said Mr. Hardie recently. "It is something that we have been able to give him the recognition he deserved. His imaginative power was extraordinary. Many of his subjects were romantic dreations of his own, the results of visual memory of unusual keeness." So the expert spoke. But the father of Victor Charles Riches can tell of the brave chapters in the obscure tragedy, of a fight for life — and of the horror that would have followed if his boy had not died. Lived for Art. This is the father's story: "My boy lived for art. Every spare moment he had he used to spend practising at home or studying the work of the masters at the National Gallery or the Tate. He had no lessons except what he obtained at the elementary school. After he had been painting for some time he took up etching. He had no press, but he used the kitchen mangle to make his impressions. "Victor was nearly as fond of poetry as he was of painting. He read the . finest authors, and often wrote verse. Then some time ago his health began to fail. A growth formed behind one eye, and began to attack the brain. To save his life an operation had to be performed. It was done — and it involved the other eye. "Victor underwent another operation, but it was too late, and he died. He did not know, poor boy, that had the operation been successful and he had lived he would have been blind. . . . . Painting was his only love. And I do not think he could have borne to have lived on in the dark."