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Title: Old English colour prints
Author: Malcolm C. Salaman
Editor: Charles Holme
Release date: October 1, 2023 [eBook #71768]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Offices of 'The Studio', 1909
Credits: Fiona Holmes and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD ENGLISH COLOUR PRINTS ***
Transcriber’s Note
Page 30 - Chilaren changed to Children
It is noted that some of the plates are only showing part
fractions - these have been left as printed.
OLD ENGLISH
COLOUR-PRINTS
TEXT BY
MALCOLM C. SALAMAN
(AUTHOR OF ‘THE OLD ENGRAVERS OF ENGLAND’)
EDITED BY
CHARLES HOLME
MCMIX
OFFICES OF ‘THE STUDIO’
LONDON, PARIS AND NEW YORK
PREFATORY NOTE.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
OLD ENGLISH COLOUR-PRINTS.
II.
III.
NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS.
PREFATORY NOTE.
The Editor desires to express his thanks to the following Collectors
who have kindly lent their prints for reproduction in this
volume:--Mrs. Julia Frankau, Mr. Frederick Behrens, Major E. F.
Coates, M.P., Mr. Basil Dighton, Mr. J. H. Edwards, and Sir Spencer
Ponsonby-Fane, P.C., G.C.B. Also to Mr. Malcolm C. Salaman, who,
in addition to contributing the letterpress, has rendered valuable
assistance in the preparation of the work.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Plate I. “Jane, Countess of Harrington, Lord Viscount
Petersham and the Hon. Lincoln Stanhope.”
Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A.,
after Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A.
” II. “Robinetta.” Stipple-Engraving by John Jones,
after Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A.
” III. “Master Henry Hoare.” Stipple-Engraving by
C. Wilkin, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A.
” IV. “The Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Georgiana
Cavendish.” Mezzotint-Engraving by Geo.
Keating, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A.
” V. “The Mask.” Stipple-Engraving by L. Schiavonetti,
after Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A.
” VI. “Bacchante” (Lady Hamilton). Stipple-Engraving
by C. Knight, after George Romney.
” VII. “Mrs. Jordan in the character of ‘The Country
Girl’” (“The Romp”). Stipple-Engraving
by John Ogborne, after George Romney.
” VIII. “Hobbinol and Ganderetta.” Stipple-Engraving
by P. W. Tomkins, after Thomas Gainsborough,
R.A.
” IX. “Countess of Oxford.” Mezzotint-Engraving by
S. W. Reynolds, after J. Hoppner, R.A.
” X. “Viscountess Andover.” Stipple-Engraving by
C. Wilkin, after J. Hoppner, R.A.
” XI. “The Squire’s Door.” Stipple-Engraving by
B. Duterreau, after George Morland.
” XII. “The Farmer’s Door.” Stipple-Engraving by
B. Duterreau, after George Morland.
” XIII. “A Visit to the Boarding School.” Mezzotint-Engraving
by W. Ward, A.R.A., after
George Morland.
” XIV. “St. James’s Park.” Stipple-Engraving by F. D.
Soiron, after George Morland.
” XV. “A Tea Garden.” Stipple-Engraving by F. D.
Soiron, after George Morland.
” XVI. “The Lass of Livingstone.” Stipple-Engraving
by T. Gaugain, after George Morland.
” XVII. “Rustic Employment.” Stipple-Engraving by
J. R. Smith, after George Morland.
” XVIII. “The Soliloquy.” Stipple-Engraving by and
after William Ward, A.R.A.
” XIX. “Harriet, Lady Cockerell as a Gipsy Woman.”
Stipple-Engraving by J. S. Agar, after
Richard Cosway, R.A.
” XX. “Lady Duncannon.” Stipple-Engraving by
F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after John Downman,
A.R.A.
” XXI. “Cupid bound by Nymphs.” Stipple-Engraving
by W. W. Ryland, after Angelica Kauffman,
R.A.
” XXII. “Rinaldo and Armida.” Stipple-Engraving by
Thos. Burke, after Angelica Kauffman, R.A.
” XXIII. “Angelica Kauffman in the character of Design
listening to the Inspiration of Poetry.”
Stipple-Engraving by Thos. Burke, after
Angelica Kauffman, R.A.
” XXIV. “Love and Beauty” (Marchioness of Townshend).
Stipple-Engraving by Thos. Cheesman, after
Angelica Kauffman, R.A.
” XXV. “Two Bunches a Penny, Primroses” (“Cries of
London”). Stipple-Engraving by L. Schiavonetti,
after F. Wheatley, R.A.
” XXVI. “Knives, Scissors and Razors to Grind” (“Cries
of London”). Stipple-Engraving by G. Vendramini,
after F. Wheatley, R.A.
” XXVII. “Mrs. Crewe.” Stipple-Engraving by Thos.
Watson, after Daniel Gardner.
” XXVIII. “The Dance.” Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi,
R.A., after H. W. Bunbury.
” XXIX. “Morning Employments.” Stipple-Engraving
by P. W. Tomkins, after H. W. Bunbury.
” XXX. “The Farm-Yard.” Stipple-Engraving by
William Nutter, after Henry Singleton.
” XXXI. “The Vicar of the Parish receiving his Tithes.”
Stipple-Engraving by Thos. Burke, after
Henry Singleton.
” XXXII. “The English Dressing-Room.” Stipple-Engraving
by P. W. Tomkins, after Chas. Ansell.
” XXXIII. “The French Dressing-Room.” Stipple-Engraving
by P. W. Tomkins, after Chas. Ansell.
” XXXIV. “January” (“The Months”). Stipple-Engraving
by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after Wm. Hamilton,
R.A.
” XXXV. “Virtuous Love” (from Thomson’s “Seasons”).
Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A.,
after Wm. Hamilton, R.A.
” XXXVI. “The Chanters.” Stipple-Engraving by J. R.
Smith, after Rev. Matthew W. Peters, R.A.
” XXXVII. “Mdlle. Parisot.” Stipple-Engraving by C.
Turner, A.R.A., after J. J. Masquerier.
” XXXVIII. “Maria.” Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins,
after J. Russell, R.A.
” XXXIX. “Commerce.” Stipple-Engraving by M. Bovi,
after J. B. Cipriani, R.A., and F. Bartolozzi,
R.A.
” XL. “The Love-Letter.” Stipple-Engraving, probably
by Thos. Cheesman.
OLD ENGLISH COLOUR-PRINTS
“Other pictures we look at--his prints we read,” said Charles Lamb,
speaking with affectionate reverence of Hogarth. Now, after “reading”
those wonderful Progresses of the Rake and the Harlot, which had for
him all the effect of books, intellectually vivid with human interest,
let us suppose our beloved essayist looking at those “other pictures,”
Morland’s “Story of Letitia” series, in John Raphael Smith’s charming
stipple-plates, colour-printed for choice, first issued while Lamb was
hardly in his teens. Though they might not be, as in Hogarth’s prints,
“intense thinking faces,” expressive of “permanent abiding ideas” in
which he would read Letitia’s world-old story, Lamb would doubtless
look at these Morland prints with a difference. He would look at them
with an interest awakened less by their not too poignant intention of
dramatic pathos than by the charm of their simple pictorial appeal,
heightened by the dainty persuasion of colour.
There is a fascination about eighteenth-century prints which
tempts me in fancy to picture the gentle Elia stopping at every
printseller’s window that lay on his daily route to the East India
House in Leadenhall Street. How many these were might “admit a wide
solution,” since he arrived invariably late at the office; but Alderman
Boydell’s in Cheapside, where the engraving art could be seen in its
dignified variety and beauty, and Mr. Carington Bowles’s in St. Paul’s
Churchyard, with the humorous mezzotints, plain and coloured, must have
stayed him long. Then, surely among the old colour-prints which charm
us to-day there were some that would make their contemporary appeal
to Elia’s fancy, as he would linger among the curious crowd outside
the windows of Mr. J. R. Smith in King Street, Covent Garden, or Mr.
Macklin’s Poet’s Gallery in Fleet Street, Mr. Tomkins in Bond Street,
or Mr. Colnaghi--Bartolozzi’s “much-beloved Signor Colnaghi”--in Pall
Mall. Not arcadian scenes, perhaps, with “flocks of silly sheep,” nor
“boys as infant Bacchuses or Jupiters,” nor even the beautiful ladies
of rank and fashion; but the _Cries of London_ at Colnaghi’s must
have arrided so true a Londoner, and may we not imagine the relish
with which Lamb would stop to look at the prints of the players? The
Downman _Mrs. Siddons_, say, or the _Miss Farren_, or that most joyous
of Romney prints, _Mrs. Jordan as “The Romp”,_ which would seem to
give pictorial justification for Lamb’s own vivid reminiscence of the
actress, as his words lend almost the breath of life to the picture.
Yet these had not then come to the dignity of “old prints,” with a
mellow lure of antique tone. Their beautiful soft paper--hand-made
as a matter of course, since there was no other--which we handle and
hold up to the light with such sensitive reverence, was not yet grown
venerable from the touch of long-vanished hands. They were as fresh
as a busy industry of engravers, printers, and paper-makers could
turn them out, and of a contemporary popularity that died early of a
plethora.
What, then, is their peculiar charm for us to-day, those colour-prints
of stipple or mezzotint engravings which pervaded the later years
of the eighteenth century, and the earliest of the nineteenth? No
serious student, perhaps, would accord them a very high or important
place in the history of art. Yet a pleasant little corner of their
own they certainly merit, representing, as they do, a characteristic
contemporary phase of popular taste, and of artistic activity,
essentially English. Whatever may be thought of their intrinsic value
as works of art, there is no denying their special appeal of pictorial
prettiness and sentiment and of dainty decorative charm. Nor, to
judge from the recent records of the sale-rooms, would this appeal
seem to be of any uncertain kind. It has lately been eloquent enough
to compete with the claims of artistic works of indisputable worth,
and those collectors who have heard it for the first time only during
the last ten years or so have had to pay highly for their belated
responsiveness. Those, on the other hand, who listened long ago to the
gentle appeal of the old English colour-prints, who listened before the
market had heard it, and, loving them for their own pretty sakes, or
their old-time illustrative interest, or their decorative accompaniment
to Sheraton and Chippendale, would pick them up in the printsellers’
shops for equitable sums that would now be regarded as “mere songs,”
can to-day look round their walls at the rare and brilliant impressions
of prints which first charmed them twenty or thirty years ago, and
smile contentedly at the inflated prices clamorous from Christie’s.
For nowadays the decorative legacy of the eighteenth century--a legacy
of dignity, elegance, beauty, charm--seems to involve ever-increasing
legacy duties, which must be paid ungrudgingly.
A collector, whose house is permeated with the charm and beauty of
eighteenth-century arts and crafts, asked recently my advice as
to what he should next begin to collect. I suggested the original
pictures of the more accomplished and promising of our younger living
painters, a comparatively inexpensive luxury. He shook his head, and,
before the evening, a choice William Ward, exceptional in colour, had
proved irresistible. Yes, it is a curious and noteworthy fact that
the collector of old English colour-prints has rarely, if ever, any
sympathy with modern art, however fine, however beautiful. He will
frankly admit this, and, while he tells you that he loves colour,
you discover that it is only colour which has acquired the mellowing
charm of time and old associations. So your colour-print collector will
gladly buy a dainty drawing by Downman, delicately tinted on the back,
or a pastel by J. R. Smith, somewhat purple, maybe, in the flesh-tints,
while the sumptuous colouring of a Brangwyn will rouse in him no desire
for possession, a Lavery’s harmonies will stir him not at all, and the
mystic beauty of tones in any _Late Moonrise_ that a Clausen may paint
will say to him little or nothing. But then, one may ask, why is he
content with the simple colour-schemes of these dainty and engaging
prints, when the old Japanese, and still older Chinese, colour-prints
offer wonderful and beautiful harmonies that no English colour-printer
ever dreamt of? And why, if we chance to meet this lover of colour at
the National Gallery, do we find him, not revelling joyously in the
marvellously rich, luminous tones of a Filippino Lippi, for example,
or the glorious hues of a Titian, but quietly happy in front of, say,
Morland’s _Inside of a Stable_, or Reynolds’s _Snake in the Grass_?
Well, we have only to pass a little while in his rooms, looking at his
prints in their appropriate environment of beautiful old furniture,
giving ourselves up to the pervading old-time atmosphere, and we shall
begin to understand him and sympathise with his consistency. And, as
the spell works, we shall find ourselves growing convinced that even
a Venice set of Whistler etchings would seem decoratively incongruous
amid those particular surroundings. For it is the spell, not of
intrinsic artistic beauty, but of the eighteenth century that is upon
us. It is the spell of a graceful period, compact of charm, elegance
and sensibility, that these pretty old colour-prints, so typically
English in subject and design, cast over us as we look at them. Thus
they present themselves to us, not as so many mere engravings printed
in varied hues, but rather as so many pictorial messages--whispered
smilingly, some of them--from those years of ever-fascinating memory,
when the newly-born Royal Academy was focussing the artistic taste
and accomplishment of the English people, and Reynolds, Gainsborough,
Romney, were translating the typical transient beauty in terms of
enduring art, while the great engravers were extending the painters’
fame, and the furniture-makers and all the craftsmen were supporting
them with a new and a classic grace; when Johnson was talking stately,
inspiring common-sense, Goldsmith was “writing like an angel,” and
Sheridan was “catching the manners living as they rose”; when Fanny
Burney was keeping her vivid diaries, and Walpole and Mrs. Delany
were--we thank Providence--writing letters; when the doings of the
players at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, or the fashionable revellers
at Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and the Pantheon, were as momentous to “the
town” as the debates at Westminster, and a lovely duchess could
immortalise a parliamentary election with a democratic kiss. These
prints, hinting of Fielding and Richardson, Goldsmith and Sterne,
tell us that sentiment, romantic, rustic and domestic, had become
as fashionable as wit and elegance, and far more popular; while a
spreading feeling for nature, awakened by the poetry of Thomson, Gray
and Collins, and nurtured later by Cowper, Crabbe and Burns, was
forming a popular taste quite out of sympathy with the cold academic
formalism and trammelled feeling of the age of Pope.
These literary influences are important to consider for any true
appreciation of these old colour-prints, which, being a reflex in every
respect of the popular spirit and character of the period in which they
were produced, no other period could have bequeathed to us exactly
as they are. And it is especially interesting to remember this, for,
from the widespread popularity of these very prints, we may trace, in
the pictures their great vogue called for, the origin of that abiding
despot of popular English art which Whistler has, in his whimsical way,
defined as the “British Subject.”
That the evolution of the colour-print, from its beginnings in
_chiaroscuro_, can boast a long and fascinating history has been proved
to admiration in the romantic and informing pages of Mrs. Frankau’s
“Eighteenth-Century Colour-Prints”--a pioneer volume; but my present
purpose is to tell the story only in so far as it concerns English art
and taste.
Now, although during the seventeenth century we had in England a number
of admirable and industrious engravers, we hear of no attempts among
them to print engravings in anything but monochrome; so that, if they
heard of the colour-experiments of Hercules Seghers, the Dutch etcher,
whom Rembrandt admired, as doubtless they did hear, considering how
constant and friendly was their intercourse with the Dutch and Flemish
painters and engravers, none apparently thought it worth while to
pursue the idea. But, after all, Seghers merely printed his etchings
in one colour on a tinted paper, which can hardly be described as
real colour-printing; and, if there had been any artistic value in
the notion, would not the enterprising Hollar have attempted some use
of it? Nor were our English line-engravers moved by any rumours they
may have heard, or specimens they may have seen, of the experiments
in colour-printing, made somewhere about 1680, by Johannes Teyler,
of Nymegen in Holland, a painter, engraver, mathematical professor
and military engineer. His were unquestionably the first true
colour-prints, being impressions taken from one plate, the engraved
lines of which were carefully painted with inks of different hues;
and these prints may be seen in the British Museum, collected in all
their numerous variety in the interesting and absolutely unique volume
which Teyler evidently, to judge from the ornately engraved title-page,
designed to publish as “Opus Typochromaticum.”
The experiment was of considerable interest, but one has only to look
at these colour-printed line-engravings, with their crude juxtaposition
of tints, to feel thankful that our English line-engravers were not
lured from their allegiance to the black and white proper to their
art. Doubtless they recognised that colour was opposed to the very
spirit of the line-engraver’s art, just as, a hundred years later,
the stipple-engravers realised that it could often enhance the charm
of their own. In the black and white of a fine engraving there is a
quality in the balancing of relative tones which in itself answers to
the need of colour, which, in fact, suggests colour to the imagination;
so the beauty and dignity of the graven line in a master’s hands must
repel any adventitious chromatic aid. A Faithorne print, for instance,
with its lines and cross-hatchings in colours is inconceivable;
although one might complacently imagine Francis Place and Gaywood
having, not inappropriately, experimented with Barlow’s birds and
beasts after the manner of those in Teyler’s book. If, however, there
were any English engravings of that period on which Teyler’s method
of colour-printing might have been tried with any possibility of, at
least, a popular success, they were surely Pierce Tempest’s curious
_Cryes of the City of London_, after “Old” Laroon’s designs, which
antedated by just over a hundred years the charming Wheatley “Cries,”
so familiar, so desirable, in coloured stipple. But this was not to
be, and not until the new and facile mezzotint method had gradually
over-shadowed in popularity the older and more laborious line-engraving
was the first essay in colour-printing made in England. In the year
1719 came Jacob Christopher Le Blon with his new invention, which he
called “Printing Paintings.”
This invention was in effect a process of taking separate impressions,
one over the other, from three plates of a desired picture, engraved
in mezzotint, strengthened with line and etching, and severally inked
each with the proportion of red, yellow, or blue, which, theorising
according to Newton, Le Blon considered would go to make, when blended,
the true colour-tones of any picture required. In fact, Le Blon
practically anticipated the three-colour process of the present day;
but in 1719 all the circumstances were against his success, bravely and
indefatigably as he fought for it, influentially as he was supported.
Jacob Christopher Le Blon was a remarkable man, whose ingenious
mind and restless, enthusiastic temperament led him through an
artistic career of much adventure and many vicissitudes. Born in
Frankfort in 1667--when Chinese artists were producing those marvels
of colour-printing lately discovered by Mr. Lawrence Binyon in the
British Museum--he studied painting and engraving for a while with
Conrad Meyer, of Zurich, and subsequently in the studio of the
famous Carlo Maratti at Rome, whither he had gone in 1696, in the
suite of Count Martinetz, the French Ambassador. His studies seem to
have been as desultory as his way of living. His friend Overbeck,
however, recognising that Le Blon had talents which might develop with
concentrated purpose, induced him in 1702 to settle down in Amsterdam
and commence miniature-painter. The pictures in little which he did
for snuff-boxes, bracelets, and rings, won him reputation and profit;
but the minute work affected his eyesight, and instead he turned to
portrait-painting in oils. Then the idea came to him of imitating
oil-paintings by the colour-printing process, based on Newton’s
theory of the three-colour composition of light, as I have described.
Experimenting with promising results on paintings of his own, he next
attempted to reproduce the pictures of the Italian masters, from
which, under Maratti’s influence, he had learnt the secrets of colour.
Without revealing his process, he showed his first “printed paintings”
to several puzzled admirers, among them Prince Eugène of Savoy and,
it is said, the famous Earl of Halifax, Newton’s friend, who invented
the National Debt and the Bank of England. But, sanguine as Le Blon
was that there was a fortune in his invention, he could obtain for it
neither a patent nor financial support, though he tried for these at
Amsterdam, the Hague, and Paris.
His opportunity came, however, when he met with Colonel Sir John Guise.
An enthusiastic connoisseur of art, a collector of pictures (he left
his collection to Christchurch College, Oxford), an heroic soldier,
with a turn for fantastic exaggeration and romancing, which moved even
Horace Walpole to protest, and call him “madder than ever,” Guise was
just the man to be interested in the personality and the inventive
schemes of Le Blon. Easily he persuaded the artist to come to London,
and, through his introduction to many influential persons, he enlisted
for Le Blon the personal interest of the King, who granted a royal
patent, and permitted his own portrait to be done by the new process,
of which this presentment of George I. is certainly one of the most
successful examples, happiest in tone-harmony. Then, in 1721, a company
was formed to work under the patent, with an establishment known as the
“Picture Office,” and Le Blon himself to direct operations. Everything
promised well, the public credit had just been restored after the South
Sea Bubble, the shares were taken up to a substantial extent, and for a
time all went well. An interesting prospectus was issued, with a list
of colour-prints after pictures, chiefly sacred and mythological, by
Maratti, Annibale Carracci, Titian, Correggio, Vandyck, some of them
being identical in size with the original paintings, at such moderate
prices as ten, twelve, and fifteen shillings. Lord Percival, Pope’s
friend, who, like Colonel Guise, had entered practically into the
scheme, was enthusiastic about the results. Sending some of the prints,
with the bill for them, to his brother, he wrote: “Our modern painters
can’t come near it with their colours, and if they attempt a copy make
us pay as many guineas as now we pay shillings.” Certainly, if we
compare Le Blon’s _Madonna_ after Baroccio--priced fifteen shillings
in the prospectus--for instance, with such an example of contemporary
painting as that by Sir James Thornhill and his assistants, taken from
a house in Leadenhall Street, and now at South Kensington, we may find
some justification for Lord Percival’s enthusiasm. For colour quality
there is, perhaps, little to choose between them, but as a specimen
of true colour-printing, and the first of its kind, that _Madonna_ is
wonderful, and I question whether, in the later years, there was any
colour-printing of mezzotint to approach it in brilliance of tone.
Then, however, accuracy of harmonies was assured by adopting Robert
Laurie’s method, approved in 1776, of printing from a single plate,
warmed and lightly wiped after application of the coloured inks.
Discouragement soon fell upon the Picture Office. In March 1722 Lord
Percival wrote:--“The picture project has suffered under a great deal
of mismanagement, but yet improves much.” In spite of that improvement,
however, a meeting of shareholders was held under the chairmanship of
Colonel Guise, and Le Blon’s management was severely questioned. The
shareholders appear to have heckled him quite in the modern manner, and
he replied excitedly to every hostile statement that it was false. But
there was no getting away from figures. At a cost of £5,000 Le Blon
had produced 4,000 copies of his prints--these were from twenty-five
plates--which, if all had been sold at the prices fixed, would have
produced a net loss of £2,000. Even Colonel Guise could hardly consider
these as satisfactory business methods, and the company had already
been reorganised, with a new manager named Guine, who had introduced
a cheaper and more profitable way of producing the prints. It was
all to no purpose. Prints to the value of only £600 were sold at
an expenditure of £9,000, while the tapestry-weaving branch of the
business--also Le Blon’s scheme--showed an even more disproportionate
result. Bankruptcy followed as a matter of course, and Le Blon narrowly
escaped imprisonment.
The colour-printing of engravings, though artistically promising,
while still experimental, had certainly proved a financial failure, but
Le Blon, nothing daunted, sought to explain and justify his principles
and his practice in a little book, called “Coloritto, or the Harmony
of Colouring in Painting, reduced to mechanical practice, under easy
precepts, and infallible rules.” This he dedicated to Sir Robert
Walpole, hoping, perhaps, that the First Lord of the Treasury, who had
just restored the nation’s credit, might do something for an inventive
artist’s. Next he was privileged to submit his inventions to the august
notice of the Royal Society. Le Blon had always his opportunities, an
well a his rebuff from fortune, but his faith in himself and his ideas
was unswerving; moreover, he had the gift of transmitting this faith to
others. At last a scheme for imitating Raphael’s cartoons in tapestry,
carried on at works in Chelsea, led to further financial disaster and
discredit, and Le Blon was obliged to fly from England.
In Paris he resumed his colour-printing, inspiring and influencing many
disciples and imitators, among them Jacques Fabian Gautier D’Agoty, who
afterwards claimed to have invented Le Blon’s process, and transmitted
it to his sons. In Paris, in 1741, Le Blon died, very, very poor, but
still working upon his copper-plates. It was doubtless during Le Blon’s
last years in Paris that Horace Walpole met him. “He was a Fleming
(_sic_), and very far from young when I knew him, but of surprising
vivacity and volubility, and with a head admirably mechanic; but an
universal projector, and with, at least, one of the qualities that
attend that vocation, either a dupe or a cheat: I think the former,
though, as most of his projects ended in the air, the sufferers
believed the latter. As he was much an enthusiast, perhaps like most
enthusiasts he was both one and t’other.” As a matter of fact, Le Blon
was neither a dupe nor a cheat; he was simply a pioneer with all the
courage of his imagination and invention; and no less an authority
than Herr Hans W. Singer, of Vienna, has considered him, with all his
failures and shortcomings, of sufficient artistic importance to be
worthy of a monograph.
If, by a more judicious selection of pictures for copying, Le Blon
had been able to create a popular demand, and to ensure general
encouragement for his venture, how different might have been the
story of colour-printing, how much fuller its annals. For Le Blon’s
ultimate failure was not owing to the comparative impossibility or
getting infallibly the required harmonics of his tones with only the
three cardinal colours, and the necessity to add a fourth plate with
a qualifying black, or to the difficulty in achieving the exactness
of register essential to the perfect fusing of the tones of several
plates. Those were serious obstacles, certainly, hindering complete
artistic success; but, judging from the surprising excellence of the
best of Le Blon’s actual achievements, they would doubtless have
been surmounted for all practical purposes. The real cause of the
failure was, I suggest, that the pictures actually reproduced made
no appeal to the people of England, consequently there was no public
demand for the prints. It was a close time for the fine arts in this
country. The day of the public picture-exhibition was nearing, but it
had not yet arrived. The aristocratic collector and the fashionable
connoisseur represented the taste of the country, for popular taste
there was none. Romance and sentiment were quite out of fashion, and
the literature of the day was entirely opposed to them. Nor were there
any living painters with even one touch of nature. The reign of George
I. was indeed a depressing time for the graphic arts. Society, heavily
bewigged and monstrously behooped, was too much concerned with its
pastimes and intrigues, its affectations, caprices and extravagances,
to cultivate any taste or care for beauty. Kent, the absurdly
fashionable architect, was ruling in place of the immortal Wren, and
Kneller was so long and so assuredly the pictorial idol of the country
that Pope, its poet-in-chief, could actually write of him that “great
Nature fear’d he might outvie her works.” Then, all else of pictorial
art meant either Thornhill’s wearisome ceilings and stair-cases, or
the stiff and tasteless portraiture, with stereotyped posture, of the
lesser Knellers, such as Jonathan Richardson, Highmore, and Jervas,
whom Pope made even more ridiculous by his praises.
With only such painters as these to interpret, what chance had even
such admirable engravers as John Smith, George White, John Simon,
Faber, Peter Pelham, whose mezzotints even were beginning to wane
in favour for lack of pictorial interest? It is no great wonder
then that, seeing Le Blon’s failure, in spite of all his influence
and achievement, the engravers in mezzotint were not eager to try
the principles of his “Coloritto” in their own practice, and so
colour-printing suffered a set-back in this country. But Le Blon’s
prints are of great value to-day. What, then, has become of those
9,000 copies printed by the Picture Office? The £600 worth sold before
the bankruptcy must have represented about a thousand, yet these
impressions from Le Blon’s fifty-plates are of extreme rarity even in
the museums of the world, and it has been suggested by Herr Singer,
and also by Mr. A. M. Hind, in his valuable “History of Engraving and
Etching,” that many copies of the large prints, varnished over, may be
hanging in old houses under the guise of oil paintings, thus fulfilling
their original purpose. It is an interesting conjecture, and how
plausible one may judge from the varnished copies in the British Museum.
Le Blon’s really important venture inspired no imitators in England,
but it was followed by a few experimental attempts to embellish
engravings with colour. These were chiefly adaptations of the old
_chiaroscuro_ method, surface-colour being obtained by using several
wood-blocks in combination with engraved copper-plates. Arthur Pond
and Charles Knapton, painters both, imitated a number of drawings in
this manner, the designs being etched; while, some years earlier,
Elisha Kirkall (“bounteous Kirkall” of the “Dunciad”) had successfully
used the coloured wood-blocks with mezzotint plates, strengthened with
etched and graven lines. His pupil, J. B. Jackson, however, engraved
only wood for his remarkable prints. But these experiments were merely
sporadic; they led to nothing important and continuous in the way of
colour-printing.
Meanwhile, the prints of Hogarth, with their marvellous pictorial
invention, mordant satire, and moral illumination, took the fancy of
the town without the lure of colour, and cultivated in the popular mind
a new sense of picture, concerned with the live human interest of the
passing hour. Other line-engravers, too,--Vivares, Woollett, Ravenet,
Major, Strange,--with more masterly handling of the graver, were,
through the new appeal of landscape, or the beauties of Rembrandt and
the Italian masters, or the homely humours of Dutch _genre_, winning
back the popular favour for their art.
Though the call for the colour-print had not yet arrived, the way was
preparing for it. With this widening public interest in pictorial art,
a dainty sense of tone was awakened by the porcelain now efflorescing
all aver the country. Then, when Reynolds was bringing all the
graces to his easel, the urbane influence for beauty spread from the
master’s painting-room at 47, Leicester Fields--as the Square was then
called--to all the print-shops in town. And the year--1764--that saw
the death of Hogarth was the year in which Francesco Bartolozzi came to
England, bringing with him into the engraving-world fresh influences of
grace and delicacy which gradually ripened for colour.
II.
The sentimental mood for the storied picture was now being fostered by
the universal reading of the novel, which in its mid-eighteenth-century
form gave its readers new experiences in the presentation of actual
contemporary life, with analysis of their feelings and cultivation
of there sensibilities. Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, Sophia Western
and Amelia, Olivia, Maria, were as living in interest as any of the
beautiful high-born ladies whose portraits in mezzotint, translated
from the canvasses of the great painters, appealed from the
printsellers’ windows in all the monochrome beauty of their medium.
The public, steeped now in sentiment, wanted to see their imaginary
heroines in picture: nor had they long to wait. The Royal Academy had
become a vital factor in forming public taste, and the printsellers’
shops were its mirrors. But not all its members and exhibitors were
Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses. There were, for instance, Angelica
Kauffman and Cipriani, with their seductive Italian graces of design;
there was Bartolozzi, with his beautiful draughtsmanship, and his
brilliant facile craft on the copper-plate, but the medium that should
bring these into familiar touch with popular taste was still to seek.
However, it was at hand, and the man who found this medium, and brought
it to the service of popular art, was William Wynne Ryland, “engraver
to the King.”
Whether the so-called crayon method of engraving, in imitation of
soft chalk drawings, was invented by Jean Charles François, or Gilles
Demarteau, or Louis Bonnet--all three claimed the credit of it--it
was, at all events, from François, whose claim had obtained official
recognition, that Ryland, the pupil of Ravenet and Le Bas, and, in a
measure, of Boucher, learned the method while he was still a student
in Paris. Only later in his career, however, long after he had left
behind him his student days in Paris and Rome, and achieved prosperity
in London as a line-engraver and printseller, with royal patronage, and
with social success as a man of fashion and pleasure, did he remember
the process that François had imparted to him. Then, in his necessity,
when his extravagances had brought him to bankruptcy, he called the
dotted crayon manner to memory, and saw in stipple-engraving, if
suitably employed, a possible asset of importance. Compared with line
and even with mezzotint it was a very easy and rapid way of engraving,
and though, of course, it could not compare with either in nobility,
richness and brilliance of effect, Ryland realised that its soft
rendering of tones by artistically balanced masses of dots might be
adapted to dainty and delicate drawings. The most fortunate opportunity
for proving this was at hand. He had some personal acquaintance with
Angelica Kauffman, whom Lady Wentworth had brought to London some
ten years before, and whose beauty, talents and personal charm had
meanwhile made her a fashionable artistic idol, with Society and its
beauties flocking to her studio to be painted or to buy her pictures.
Having first tested his stippling with his own designs, gracefully
French in manner, which he published soon afterwards as “Domestic
Employments,” Ryland suggested the idea of stipple-engraving to the
sympathetic young painter. When he had experimented with one or two of
her drawings, she gladly recognised that stipple was the very medium
for the interpretation of her work to the public. The first prints
sold “like wildfire,” and so satisfied was Ryland of the profitable
prospect, that, on the strength of it, he promptly re-established
himself in a printselling business at 159, Strand. His confidence was
amply justified, the public being quick to show their appreciation
of the new method, introduced as it was with all the persuasion of
the fair Angelica’s graceful, fanciful designs of classic story and
allegory. This was in 1775, and within a very short time Ryland found
that, rapidly as she designed and he engraved, he could scarcely keep
pace with the demand for these prints, which, the more readily to crave
the popular fancy, he printed in red ink, to imitate red chalk, later
to be known as the “Bartolozzi red.”
Ryland had called Bartolozzi into consultation, and the gifted Italian
engraver, with his greater mastery of technique, his delicate sense of
beauty, and his finer artistic perceptions, had seen all that might be
done with the new way of stipple; he saw also its limitations. With
enthusiasm Bartolozzi and Ryland had worked together till they had
evolved from the crayon manner of François a process of engraving which
proved so happily suited to the classes of fanciful and sentimental
prints now fast becoming the vogue, that it simply jumped into a
popularity which no other medium of the engraver’s art had ever
attained.
The stipple method may be thus described. The copper-plate was
covered with an etching-ground, on to which the outlined picture was
transferred from paper. Then the contours of the design were lightly
etched in a series of dots, all the dark and middle shadows being
rendered by larger or more closely etched dots, the later engravers
using even minute groups of dots. This accomplished, the acid was next
applied with very great care, and all the etched dots bitten in. The
waxen ground was then removed from the plate, and the work with the
dry-point and the curved stipple-graver was commenced. With these tools
the lighter shadows were accomplished, and the bitten portions of the
picture were deepened and strengthened wherever required, to attain
greater fulness or brilliance of effect.
Engraving in dots was, of course, no new thing; as an accessory to
line-engraving it had often been called into service by the earlier
artists. Giulio Campagnola, Albert Dürer, Agostino Veneziano, Ottavio
Leoni, for example, had used it; we frequently find it employed by our
own seventeenth-century line-men the better to suggest flesh-tones, and
Ludwig von Siegen, in describing his invention of mezzotint in 1642,
includes the “dotted manner” among the known forms of engraving. Then
there was the _opus mallei_, or method of punching dots in the plate
with a mallet and awl, which was successfully practised by Jan Lutma,
of Amsterdam, late in the seventeenth century. This may be considered
the true precursor of stipple, just as the harpsichord, with the
same keyboard, but a different manner of producing the notes, was the
precursor of the pianoforte; but it must have been a very laborious
process, and Lutma found few imitators.
Under the ægis of Ryland and Bartolozzi, however, and with the
inspiration of Angelica Kauffman’s “harmonious but shackled fancy,”
as a contemporary critic put it, for its initial impetus, stipple
was developed as a separate and distinctive branch of the engraver’s
art. Its popularity was now to be further enhanced by the gentle
and persuasive aid of colour. Ryland had seen many specimens of
colour-printing in Paris, when he was with François and with Boucher;
he now bethought him that, just as the public fancy had been captured
by red-chalk imitations, so might it be enchanted by engraved
representations of water-colour drawings actually printed in colours.
Angelica Kauffman and Bartolozzi eagerly encouraged the idea, and the
two engravers, after many experiments, determined the best process
of colouring and printing from the plates. Apparently they rejected
the multi-plate method tried six years previously by that interesting
artist Captain William Baillie; and Ryland’s earliest colour-prints
were partially tinted only with red and blue. Mrs. Frankau tells us,
on the authority of a tradition handed down in his old age from James
Minasi, one of Bartolozzi’s most trusted pupils, that an Alsatian
named Seigneuer was responsible for all the earlier colour-printed
impressions of Ryland’s and Bartolozzi’s stipples after Angelica
Kauffman and Cipriani, that then he set up on his own account as a
colour-printer, much recommended by Bartolozzi, and largely employed by
the publishers, and that his printing may be traced, though unsigned,
by a transparency of tone due to the use of a certain vitreous white
which he imported in a dry state from Paris. Minasi must, of course,
have been a perfect mine of Bartolozzi traditions, but when my father
in his boyhood knew him and his musical son, the distinguished engraver
would talk of nothing but music, for in 1829, with steel plates
superseding the copper, and lithography triumphant, there seemed no
prospect that the coloured stipples, already some time out of fashion,
would eighty years later be inspiring curiosity as to how they were
done. One sees, of course, many feeble colour-prints of the period,
which of old the undiscriminating public accepted as readily as to-day
they buy, for “old prints,” modern cheap foreign reproductions which
would disgrace a sixpenny “summer number.” On the other hand, the
really fine examples of the old-time colour-printing, combined with
brilliant engraving--and, of course, only fine things are the true
collector’s desiderata, irrespective of margins and “state” letterings,
and other foolish fads--are certainly works of art, though a very
delicate art of limited compass.
These colour-prints were done with a single printing, and the plate
had to be freshly inked for each impression. The printer would have a
water-colour drawing to work from, and having decided upon the dominant
tint, with this he would ink over the whole engraved surface of the
plate. Then he would wipe it almost entirely out of the incisions
and punctures on the copper which had retained it, leaving just a
sufficient harmonising ground-tint for the various coloured inks,
carefully selected as to tints, which were next applied in the exact
order and degree to ensure the right harmonies. All this required the
nicest care directed by a very subtle sense of colour. Most difficult
of all, and reserved for the last stage of the inking, was adding
the flesh-tints, an operation of extreme delicacy. Then, before
putting the plate in the printing-press, it had to be warmed to the
exact degree of sensitiveness which should help the colours to fuse
with tenderness and softness, without losing any brilliant quality
of tone. This was not the least anxious part of the work, needing
highly-trained artistic sensibility on the part of the printer. How
artistically important this matter of warming the plates must have
been in printing a combination of coloured inks may be judged when I
say that I have been privileged to watch Whistler warming his etched
plates ready for the printing-press, and seen him actually quivering
with excited sensibility as the plate seemed to respond sensitively to
the exigence of his own exquisite sense of tone. But, of course, no
eighteenth-century colour-prints, however charming in tone, suggest
that there were any Whistlers engaged in the printing of them. Perhaps
that is why our modern master of the copper-plate never cared for these
dainty things, as he did greatly care for Japanese colour-prints. The
old printers, however, had their own definite manner of work, and their
own tricks of experience for producing pleasing and brilliant effects.
By the dusting of a little dry colour on to the moist, here and there,
during the printing process, they could heighten tones, or by very,
very lightly dragging a piece of muslin over the surface of the plate
they could persuade the tints to a more tender and harmonious intimacy.
Of course, when the plate was printed, the colour was taken only by the
dots and lines of the engraving, the white paper peeping between. If
would-be buyers of colour-prints would only remember this simple fact,
and examine the stippling closely to see whether it really shows the
colour, they would not so constantly be deceived into buying entirely
hand-coloured prints. Whether the old printers and engravers authorised
and sponsored the touching-up of the prints with water-colour which one
almost invariably finds, at least to some slight extent, even in the
best examples, with rare exceptions, it is impossible to determine. At
all events, it is presumable that the eyes and lips were touched up
before the prints left the publishers’ shops.
It must not be supposed, however, that colour had ousted from public
favour the print in monochrome. As a matter of fact, it was usually
only after the proofs and earlier brilliant impressions in monochrome
had been worked off, and the plate was beginning to look a little worn,
that the aid of colour was called in to give the print a fresh lease
of popularity. Indeed, with mezzotint a slightly worn plate generally
took the colours most effectively. This is why one sees so very seldom
an engraver’s proof in colours, the extreme rarity of its appearance
making always a red-letter moment at Christie’s. Therefore, in spite of
the ever-widening vogue of the colour-print, it was always the artist
and engraver that counted, while the printer in colours was scarcely
ever named. And the new industry of stipple-engraving may be said to
have been, in its first days of popularity, monopolised almost by
Ryland and Bartolozzi, in association with Angelica Kauffman and John
Baptist Cipriani.
Cipriani had, by his elegant and tasteful designs, won immediate
favour on his arrival in England, and even the Lord Mayor’s coach was
decorated with panels of his painting. His style prepared the way for
Angelica Kauffman, and together they soon brought a new pictorial
element to the service of home-decoration. Their graceful rhythmic
treatment of classic fables was just what the brothers Adam wanted for
their decorative schemes, and the two Italian artists were extensively
employed to paint panels for walls and ceilings. In time the fair
Angelica outdistanced Cipriani in popularity, and, painting panels for
cabinets, commodes, pier-table tops, and other pieces of decorative
furniture, her taste was soon dominating that of the fashionable
world. No wonder then that, when Ryland and Bartolozzi, through the
medium of their facile and adaptable engravings, made her charming,
if not flawlessly drawn, compositions readily accessible, the public
eagerly bought them, and, framing them, generally without any margin,
according to their own oval and circular forms, found them the very
mural adornments that the prevailing Adam taste seemed to suggest. In
monochrome or in colours, the prints, with their refined and fluent
fancies, pictured from Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Homer, and Angelica’s
beautiful face and figure vivid in several, had an extraordinarily wide
appeal. They flattered the fashionable culture of the day, when to
quote Horace familiarly in ordinary conversation was almost a patent of
gentility. On the continent they were even copied for the decoration of
porcelain.
For Ryland this meant another spell of prosperity: it also meant
disaster. His constant thirst for pleasure, and his ambition to
shine as a fine gentleman, stimulated by such easy and seemingly
inexhaustible means of money-making, led him into fatal extravagances.
Accused of forging a bill, instead of facing the charge, of which
he protested his innocence, he stupidly hid himself and tried
ineffectually to cut his own throat. After that, some flimsy evidence
procured his condemnation, and, as William Blake, looking in Ryland’s
face, had predicted years before, he was hanged at Tyburn in 1783.
They could have done no worse to a highwayman; and, after all, by the
introduction of stipple-engraving Ryland had certainly increased the
people’s stock of harmless pleasure. In his own stippling there was a
delicacy of touch, a smoothness of effect, equal to Bartolozzi’s, but
with less tenderness and suppleness of tone. Evidently he formed his
style to suit the designs of Angelica Kauffman, which it rendered with
appreciation of their refinement. This will be seen in the charming
_Cupid bound to a Tree by Nymphs_, among our illustrations, and many
other pleasing plates, such as _Venus presenting Helen to Paris_,
_Beauty crowned by Love_, _The Judgment of Paris_, _Ludit Amabiliter_,
_O Venus Regina_, _Olim Truncus_, _Dormio Innocuus_, _Juno Cestum_,
_Maria_, from Sterne’s “Sentimental Journey,” for which Miss Benwell,
the painter, is said to have sat; _Patience and Perseverance_;
_Morning Amusement_, a fanciful portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
embroidering at a tambour-frame, and wearing the Turkish costume which
she so graphically describes in one of her letters, and in which
Kneller had painted her at the instigation of Pope; fancy portraits,
too, of the adventurous Lady Hester Stanhope, and Mary, Duchess of
Richmond.
Although Angelica Kauffman had Bartolozzi and his numerous
disciple--which meant, of course, most of the best stipple-engravers of
the day--at the service of her prolific pencil, her favourite of all
was Thomas Burke. In this she proved her sound judgment, for certainly
no other stipple-engraver, not Bartolozzi himself, could equal Burke’s
poetic feeling upon the copper, or surpass him in his artistic mastery
of the medium. After studying, it is believed, at the art school of the
Royal Dublin Society, he came to London to learn mezzotint-engraving
under his talented countryman, John Dixon, who was winning reputation
as one of Reynolds’s ablest “immortalisers,” to borrow the master’s own
word. Burke soon showed that he could scrape a mezzotint with the best
of them, but the pupil’s manner developed on his own lines, differing
from the master’s in a more tender and luminous touch, a greater
suavity of tone. These qualities are patent in his beautiful rendering
of Angelica Kauffman’s _Telemachus at the Court of Sparta_, and it
was only natural that they should suggest his adopting the stipple
method. The technique he learnt from Ryland, and unquestionably he
“bettered the instruction.” The painter’s sense of effect, which Dixon
had taught him to translate into mezzotint, was of incalculable value
to him in his use of the new medium, for, by an individual manner of
infinitely close stippling suggestive of the rich broad tone-surfaces
of mezzotint, he achieved, perhaps, the most brilliant and beautiful
effects that stipple-engraving has ever produced. Burke, in fact, was
an artist, who, seeing a picture, realised how to interpret it on the
copper-plate with the just expression of all its tone-beauties. There
is a glow about his engraving which shows the art of stipple at the
very summit of its possibilities, and, happily, brilliant impressions
of several of his plates were printed in colours. Thus, in such
beautiful prints as _Lady Rushout and Daughter_, _Rinaldo and Armida_,
_A Flower painted by Varelst_, _Angelica Kauffman as Design listening
to the Inspiration of Poetry_, _Cupid and Ganymede_, _Jupiter and
Calisto_, _Cupid binding Aglaia_, _Una_ and _Abra_, to name, perhaps,
the gems among Burke’s Kauffman prints, is shown what artistic results
could be compassed when stipple-engraving and colour-printing met at
their best. If, however, Angelica’s engaging fantasies inspired Burke
to his masterpieces, not less exquisite was his rendering of Plimer’s
miniatures of the Rushout daughters, while his art could interpret with
equal charm the homely idyllic picture, as may be seen in the pretty
_Favourite Chickens--Saturday Morning--Going to Market_, after the
popular W. R. Bigg, and _The Vicar of the Parish receiving his Tithes_,
after Singleton. But there are pictures by the masters one would like
Burke to have engraved. The strange thing is that he did not do them.
Most of the engravers were now wooing the facile and profitable
popularity of the stipple method and the colour-print and all the
favourite painters of the day, from the President of the Royal
Academy to the lady amateur, were taking advantage of the fashion.
The constancy and infinitude of the demand were so alluring, and the
popular taste, never artistically very exacting, had been flattered and
coaxed into a mood which seemed very easy to please. It asked only for
the pretty thing.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, seeing, doubtless, what delicious and popular
things Bartolozzi had made of Cipriani’s Cupids and Graces, was
readily induced to lend himself, in the lighter phases of his art, to
the copper-plates of the stipple-engravers, pleasantly assisted by
the colour-printer. Still leaving the more dignified and pictorially
elaborate examples of his brush, the beautiful, elegant, full-length
portraits of lovely and distinguished women and notable men, to
the gracious interpretation of mezzotint, which had served him so
nobly and faithfully, he found that, in the hands of such artists on
copper as Bartolozzi, John Jones, Caroline Watson, Wilkin, Cheesman,
Dickinson, Nutter, Schiavonetti, Marcuard, Thomas Watson, John Peter
Simon, Grozer, Collyer, J. R. Smith, the delicate art of stipple could
express all the sweetness, tenderness, and grace he intended in the
pictures he enjoyed to paint of children and of girlish beauty. So
we have such delightful prints, both in monochrome and in colour, as
the _Hon. Anne Bingham_ and _Lavinia, Countess Spencer_, _Lady Betty
Foster_, _The Countess of Harrington and Children_, _Lady Smyth and her
Children_, _Lord Burghersh_, _Hon. Leicester Stanhope_, _Simplicity_
(Miss Gwatkin), _The Peniston Lamb Children_, all of Bartolozzi’s
best; _Lady Cockburn and her Children_, and _Master Henry Hoare_,
the _Hon. Mrs. Stanhope_ as _“Contemplation,”_ _Lady Beauchamp_
(afterwards Countess of Hertford), _A Bacchante_ (Mrs. Hartley, the
actress, and her child), the Spencer children in _The Mask_, and _The
Fortune Tellers_, Miss Elizabeth Beauclerc (Lady Diana’s daughter and
Topham Beauclerc’s) as “_Una_,” _Muscipula_, _Robinetta_, _Felina_,
_Collina_, _The Sleeping Girl_, _Infancy_, _Lady Catherine Manners_,
_The Reverie_, _Lord Grantham and his Brothers_, _Mrs. Sheridan as “St.
Cecilia,”_ _Maternal Affection_ (Lady Melbourne and child), _Perdita_
(Mrs. Robinson), _Mrs. Abington as “Roxalana,”_ _The Age of Innocence_,
_The Infant Academy_, _The Snake in the Grass_--but the list is
endless. All collectors of colour-prints know how desirable these
Reynolds’ stipples are to charm their walls withal, but almost unique
must be the collector who can also hang among them Keating’s joyous
mezzotint of Reynolds’s famous portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire
and her baby daughter, printed in colours. This is one of those rare
examples which, with J. R. Smith’s _Bacchante_ and _Nature_ (Lady
Hamilton), Henry Meyer’s _Nature_ too, some of the Morland prints by
the Wards, Smith, and Keating; S. W. Reynolds’s _Countess of Oxford_,
J. R. Smith’s _Mrs. Bouverie_, and a few other important Hoppner
prints, C. Turner’s _Penn Family_, after Reynolds, Smith’s _Synnot
Children_, after Wright of Derby, and _Mrs. Robinson_, after Romney,
prove that, in the hands of an engraver with a painter’s eye, mezzotint
could respond to the coloured inks as harmoniously and charmingly as
stipple.
Gainsborough--at least, the Gainsborough of unapproachable mastery
and inimitable beauty, the greatest glory of our eighteenth century
art--seems to have been beyond the colour-printer’s ambition. With
the exception of the _Hobbinol and Ganderetta_ (Tomkins), reproduced
here, and the _Lavinia_ (Bartolozzi), both of which were painted
for Macklin’s “British Poets,” I doubt if anything important of
Gainsborough’s was reproduced in coloured stipple, and, of course,
these things cannot be said adequately to represent the master;
while, as to mezzotint, W. Whiston Barney’s version of Gainsborough’s
_Duchess of Devonshire_ was, I understand, printed in colours, though
impressions are extremely rare. Romney’s exquisite art, on the other
hand, with its gracious simplicity of beauty, lent itself more readily
to the colour-printed copper-plate. Among the numberless tinted
engravings with which the small-paned windows of the eighteenth-century
print-shops were crowded, none ingratiated themselves more with the
connoisseurs than the Romneys. So, in any representative collections of
colour-prints to-day, among the finest and most greatly prized examples
must be the lovely _Emma_ and _Serena_ (Miss Sneyd) of John Jones,
Mrs. Jordan as “_The Romp_” of Ogborne, Miss Lucy Vernon as “_The
Seamstress_,” and Lady Hamilton as “_The Spinster_” of Cheesman, the
beautiful Emma also as a “_Bacchante_” by Knight, as “_Sensibility_”
by Earlom, and as “_Nature_” in the two mezzotint versions, just
mentioned, by J. R. Smith and Henry Meyer.
Of course the pictorial miniatures of the fashionable Richard Cosway,
with their light, bright scheme of draughtsmanship, their dainty
tints, their soft and sinuous graces, their delicate decision of
character, were exceedingly happy in the stipple-engraver’s hands.
In colour the prints had a charm of reticence which was peculiarly
persuasive. Several of the most engaging were done by the artistic
Condé, such at _Mrs. Bouverie_, _Mrs. Tickell_, _Mrs. Jackson_, _Mrs.
Fitzherbert_, _Mrs. Robinson as “Melania”,_ and the beautiful youth
_Horace Beckford_; J. S. Agar did delicately _Harriet, Lady Cockerell,
as a Gipsy Woman_, _Lady Heathcote_, and _Mrs. Duff_; Cardon, with
his distinguished touch, engraved the charming _Madame Récamier_,
Schiavonetti the _Mrs. Maria Cosway_ and _Michel and Isabella Oginesy_,
Bartolozzi the _Mrs. Harding_, Mariano Bovi the _Lady Diana Sinclair_,
and Charles White the pretty _Infancy_ (Lord Radnor’s children). Only
less fashionable than Cosway’s were the miniatures of Samuel Shelley.
In portrait-manner, and in fanciful composition, Reynolds was his model
and inspiration, but the result, in spite of high finish and a certain
charm of elegance, was a very little Reynolds, for Shelley’s drawing
generally left something for criticism. Naturally, miniature-painting
found happy interpretation in coloured stipple, and Shelley was
fortunate in his engravers, especially Caroline Watson, with her
exquisite delicacy and brilliantly minute finish, and William Nutter,
who was equally at home with the styles of many painters.
An artist whose dainty and original manner of portraiture, enjoying
a great vogue in its day, was also particularly well suited to the
tinted stipple was John Downman. A man of interesting personality and
individual talent, he began, as a pupil and favourite of Benjamin
West, to take himself seriously and ambitiously as an “historical
painter,” to borrow a definition of the period. Indeed, after he had
won a fashionable reputation for the singular charm and style of his
portraits, and become an A.R.A., we find a contemporary critic of
the Royal Academy exhibition of 1796 confessing surprise at seeing a
scriptural subject painted with such exceptional care and simplicity
of expression by “a hand accustomed to delineate the polished and
artificial beauties of a great metropolis.” But it was to these
portrait-drawings that the artist owed his popularity, and these and
the engravings of them, neglected for three-quarters of a century,
are the things that to-day make Downman a name to conjure with among
collectors. His portraits, exceptionally happy in their suggestion of
spontaneous impression and genial intuition of character, were drawn
with pencil, or with finely-pointed black chalk or charcoal. The
light tinting of hair, cheeks, lips and eyes, with the more definite
colouring, in the case of the female portraits, of an invariable
sash and ribbon on a white dress, was effected in a manner peculiar
to himself. Instead of the usual way, the colour was put on the back
of the drawing, and showed through the specially thin paper he used
with softened effect. How he happened upon this method of tinting his
drawings is rather a romantic story. Seized by the press-gang and taken
to sea, about the beginning of the American War of Independence, he
was kept abroad for nearly two years, and when, at last, he managed
to return to England he found his wife and children in a state of
destitution at Cambridge. There his happy gift of portraiture brought
him a livelihood. One day he left by chance a drawing face downward
upon the table, and one of his children began daubing some pink paint
on what was seemingly a blank piece of paper. Downman, finding his
drawing with daubs upon the back, perceived delicate tints upon the
face, and so he looked with a discoverer’s eye, and thought the thing
out; and the novel way he had accidentally found of transparently
tinting his drawings proved his way to prosperity. It introduced him
into the houses of the socially great to the royal palace even, and the
fashionable beauties of the day, as well as those who would have liked
to be fashionable beauties, and the favourite actresses, all readily
offered their countenances to Downman’s charming pencil, knowing it
would lend them the air of happy young girls. Of course there was a
willing market for prints from these gladsome and novel presentations
of faces which the people seemed never to tire of; so among the
collector’s prizes to-day are the _Mrs. Siddons_ by Tomkins, the
_Duchess of Devonshire_ and the _Viscountess Duncannon_ by Bartolozzi,
_Lady Elizabeth Foster_ by Caroline Watson, _Miss Farren_ (Countess of
Derby) by Collyer, and _Frances Kemble_ by John Jones.
The social reign of the Court beauties lasted over a long period, and
survived many changes of fashion, from the macaroni absurdities and
monstrous headdresses to the simple muslin gown and the straw “picture”
hat. The days of “those goddesses the Gunnings” seemed to have come
again when the three rival Duchesses, Devonshire, Rutland, and Gordon,
were the autocrats of “the _ton_,” ruling the modish world not only
with the sovereignty of their beauty, elegance, wit and charm, but with
the fascinating audacity of their innovations and the outvieing heights
of their feathers.
“Come, Paris, leave your hills and dells,
You’ll scorn your dowdy goddesses,
If you once see our English belles,
For all their gowns and boddices.
Here’s Juno Devon all sublime;
Minerva Gordon’s wit and eyes;
Sweet Rutland, Venus in her prime;
You’ll die before you give the prize.”
So sang the enthusiastic poet; though the “satirical rogues” who wrote
squibs and drew caricatures were not quite so kind, and a writer in
the “Morning Post,” with a whimsical turn for statistics, actually
drew up a “Scale of Bon Ton,” showing, in a round dozen of the leading
beauties of the day the relative proportions in which they possessed
beauty, figure, elegance, wit, sense, grace, expression, sensibility,
and principles. It is an amusing list, in which we find the lovely
Mrs. Crewe, for instance, credited with almost the maximum for beauty,
but no grace at all; the Countess of Jersey with plenty of beauty,
grace and expression, but neither sense nor principles; the Duchess
of Devonshire with more principles than beauty, and more figure than
either; her Grace of Gordon with her elegance at zero, and the Countess
of Barrymore supreme in all the feminine attractions.
When personal gossip about these fashionable beauties was rampant
upon every tongue; when the first appearance of one of them in a new
mode was enough to ensure her being enviously or admiringly mobbed
in the Mall, naturally the portrait-prints in colour responded to
the general curiosity. But there was a public which, having other
pictorial fancies than portraiture, even pretty faces could not satisfy
without the association of sentiment and story. So there were painters
who, recognising this, furnished the engravers with the popular
subject-picture. It was well for their link with posterity that they
did so, for how many of them would be remembered to-day were it not
for these prints? One of the most prominent was William Redmore Bigg,
who won a great popularity by painting, with the imagination of a
country parson, simple incidents of rustic and domestic life, charged
with the most obvious sentiment. The people took these pictures to
their hearts, and they were a gold-mine to the engravers. As to their
artistic qualities we have little opportunity of judging to-day except
through the familiar prints. These are innumerable, and they all have
a conventional prettiness. In colours the most pleasing, perhaps, are
the _Saturday Morning_ of Burke, the _Saturday Evening_ and _Sunday
Morning_ of Nutter; _Dulce Domum_ and _Black Monday_ of John Jones;
_Romps_ and _Truants_ of William Ward; _Shelling Peas_ and _The Hop
Picker_ of Tomkins; _College Breakfast_, _College Supper_, and _Rural
Misfortunes_ of Ogborne, _The Sailor Boy’s Return_ and _The Shipwrecked
Sailor Boy_ of Gaugain.
Then there was William Hamilton, a prolific and prevalent artist. Sent
to Italy in his youth by Robert Adam, the architect, he returned with
a sort of Italianate style of storied design, classical, historical,
allegorical, conventional; but, happily, he developed a light, pretty
and decorative manner of treating simple familiar subjects, which
was pleasing alike to engravers and public. The charming plates from
Thomson’s _Seasons_, engraved by Tomkins and Bartolozzi; the graceful
set of _The Months_ by Bartolozzi and Gardiner; the idyllic _Morning_
and _Evening_ by Tomkins, with _Noon_ and _Night_ by Delattre, the
numerous designs of children at play, such as _Summer’s Amusement_,
_Winter’s Amusement_, _How Smooth, Brother! feel again_, _The Castle
in Danger_, by Gaugain; _Breaking-up_ and _The Masquerade_ by Nutter;
_Blind Man’s Buff_ and _Sea-Saw_, _Children feeding Fowls_, _Children
playing with a Bird_, by Knight; _Playing at Hot Cockles_, and others
by Bartolozzi: these are among the prettiest colour-prints of the
period and the most valued to-day--especially _The Months_. Hamilton’s
work just synchronised with the popular vogue for the coloured stipple,
and without these prints how much should we know of an artist so
esteemed in his day, and so industrious? One might almost ask the same
of Francis Wheatley, whose popularity also survives but through the
engraver’s medium. It was only after his return from Dublin, where he
might have continued to the end as a prosperous portrait-painter had
not Dublin society discovered that the lady it had welcomed as Mrs.
Wheatley was somebody else’s wife, that Wheatley began painting those
idealised urban, rustic, and domestic subjects, which gave him such
contemporary vogue and led to his prompt admission among the Royal
Academicians. Had he never painted anything else he would always be
remembered by his thirteen _Cries of London_, published by Colnaghi
at intervals between 1793 and 1797, and so familiar to us through the
accomplished copper-plates of the Schiavonetti brothers, Vendramini,
Gaugain and Cardon, though, alas! so wretchedly hackneyed through the
innumerable paltry reproductions. But what a fascinating, interesting
set of prints it is! How redolent of old lavender! How clean, serene,
and country-town-like the London streets appear; how sweet and fragrant
they seem to smell; how idyllic the life in them! As one looks at
these prints one can almost fancy one hears the old cries echoing
through those quiet Georgian streets. Perhaps the London streets of
1795 were not quite so dainty as Wheatley’s sympathetic pencil makes
them look to have been. But, remember, that in those days lovely ladies
in muslin frocks and printed calicoes of the new fashion, who had sat
to Reynolds, and whose portraits were in the print-shop windows, were
still being carried in the leisurely sedan-chair, and there were many
pretty airs and graces to be seen; while in those streets, too, the
youthful Turner was seeing atmosphere and feeling his graphic way to
immortality, and young Charles Lamb was walking about, “lending his
heart with usury” to all the humanity he saw in those very streets
which these Wheatley prints keep so fragrant. Of the numberless other
colour-prints after Wheatley perhaps the most valued to-day are, in
mezzotint, _The Disaster_, _The Soldier’s Return_ and _The Sailor’s
Return_, by William Ward, _The Smitten Clown_, by S. W. Reynolds; in
stipple, the _Summer_ and _Winter_ of the Bartolozzi “Season” set,
of which Westall did the _Spring_ and _Autumn_; _The Cottage Door_
and _The School Door_, by Keating; _Setting out to the Fair_ and
_The Fairings_, by J. Eginton, and the pretty _Little Turkey Cock_
by Delattre, all admirable examples of the kind of art that made
Wheatley’s reputation.
The pleasant uninspired rusticities and sentimentalities of Henry
Singleton were to popular as to engage the abilities of some of the
leading engravers, who must certainly have made the best of them for
the colour-printer, since Singleton’s colouring was accounted poor
even in his own day. Among the most taking examples we have Nutter’s
pretty pair _The Farmyard_ and _The Ale-house Door_, Burke’s _Vicar of
the Parish_, Eginton’s _Ballad-Singer_, Knight’s _British Plenty_ and
_Scarcity in India_, some children subjects by Meadows and Benedetti,
and E. Scott’s _Lingo and Cowslip_, which shows that genuinely comic
actor, John Edwin, and that audaciously eccentric and adventurous
actress, Mrs. Wells, in O’Keefe’s notorious Haymarket farce, “The
Agreeable Surprise,” a group which Downman also pictured, though with
infinitely more spirit and character.
Subjects dealing with childhood were still greatly in demand, but the
public now wanted the children to be more grown-up, and more mundane
than the cupids and cherubim of Cipriani, or the Baby Loves and
Bacchanals of Lady Diana Beauclerc, so admired by Horace Walpole, and
so much flattered by the engravings of Bartolozzi, Tomkins and Bovi.
The prolific Richard Westall was not behind his brother Academicians
in adapting his inspiration to the market, so, combining rural fancy,
as required, with the sentiment of child-life, he made many a parlour
look homelier with his pleasant, plausible picturings. When the charm
of the engraving glossed over the weaknesses, and colour-printing added
its enticing advocacy under Westall’s personal direction, we can find
some justification for their popularity in such prints as Nutter’s _The
Rosebud_, _The Sensitive Plant_, and _Cupid Sleeping_; Josi’s _Innocent
Mischief_, _Innocent Revenge_, and Schiavonetti’s _The Ghost_, a pretty
but unequal companion to _The Mask_ of Reynolds.
Although at this productive period of the colour-print William Blake’s
“Songs of Innocence” were issued, with their sweetly pictured pages
of uniquely printed colour, and their magic simplicity of poetry,
every page having “the smell of April” as Swinburne said, it does not
appear that they exercised any imaginative influence on the artists
who were producing children subjects for the popular prints. Yet
certainly poetic sentiment informed the grace and charm which were the
characteristics of Thomas Stothard, whose prodigiously industrious and
productive pencil dominated in a great measure the book-illustration
of the day. Five thousand designs are credited to him, and Blake
himself engraved some of these in stipple; but our present concern
with Stothard is in such engaging colour-prints as Knight’s _Fifth of
November_, _Feeding Chickens_, _The Dunce Disgraced_, _The Scholar
Rewarded_, _Coming from School_, and _Buffet the Bear_, _Runaway
Love_, _Rosina_, _Flora_, and the popular _Sweet Poll of Plymouth_,
Nutter’s _First Bite_, and _Just Breeched_; Strutt’s _Nurs’d at Home_
and _Nurs’d Abroad_, and others of more adult interest too numerous to
mention.
Another popular favourite with the buyers of colour-prints was the
Rev. Matthew. William Peters, the only clergyman who ever wore the
dignities of the Royal Academy, though, as a matter of fact, it was
only after he had attained full academic honours that he took holy
orders. Eventually, after some successful years with portraiture and
fancy subjects, he resigned his R.A.’ship; but it must be said that
while he was painting for popularity there was a good deal of the
“world and the flesh” about his pictures, albeit his was a very winsome
view of both, to wit, the seductively pretty _Sylvia_ and _Lydia_,
by Dickinson; White’s _Love_ and _The Enraptured Youth_; John Peter
Simon’s _Much Ado about Nothing_; Hogg’s _Sophia_, and J. R, Smith’s
_The Chanters_. _The Three Holy Children_ in Simon’s print, however,
shows Peters more as we may imagine him in the light of a “converted”
Royal Academician--converted to be chaplain to George “Florizel,”
Prince of Wales.
John Russell, whose gracious portraits in pastel appealed to fashion
with the special charm of their uncommon medium, also found happy
interpretation on the copper-plate, especially from the delicate
graver of P. W. Tomkins. The most attractive examples in colours are
the charming _Maria_, _Maternal Love_ (Mrs. Morgan and child), and
_Children Feeding Chickens_. Collyer’s _Mrs. Fitzherbert_ is also
one of the most desirable among the numerous Russell colour-prints.
When the engravings of Charles Ansell’s _Death of a Racehorse_ in
1784 had an immense sale, none presumably would have believed that,
a hundred and twenty-five years later, collectors would hold him
in high regard, not for the horses that made him famous, but for
four dainty little drawings of domestic “interiors,” thoroughly
representative of their period, preserved in P. W. Tomkins’s stipple
prints, especially charming and rare in colours. Tomkins engraved
other things of Ansell’s, Knight also; but the set of _The English
Fireside_ and _The French Fireside_, _The English Dressing-Room_ and
_The French Dressing-Room_ (the two latter reproduced here), if really
fine in colour, must be a prize in the choicest collection. As these
prints give us intimate glimpses into the home-life of the “smart set”
of the period, so, thanks to the pictorial sense of that vivacious
artist Edward Dayes, we are able to see just how the fashionable world
comported itself in the parks. _An Airing in Hyde Park_ and _The
Promenade in St. James’s Park_, the one engraved by Gaugain, the other
by Soiron, are alive with contemporary social and pictorial interest,
and in colours they are rare to seek. Social interest, too, flavours
chiefly the name of Henry William Bunbury. Classed generally with
the caricaturists, among whom, even in that period of forcible and
unrestricted caricature, he was certainly one of the most spontaneously
humorous as he was the most refined, he had, like his brother
caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson, his days of grace. In those days he
did, not with flawless drawing perhaps, but with a vivid feeling for
beauty, some charming things, which the engravers turned to good
account in colour. Among these are _Morning Employments_ by Tomkins,
_The Song_ and _The Dance_ by Bartolozzi, _The Modern Graces_ by Scott,
and _Black-eyed Susan_ by Dickinson.
From his popular task of whipping with genial graphic satire the
social follies and foibles of the day. Bunbury’s pencil would on
occasion “lightly turn to thoughts of love,” as in _A Tale of Love_, so
artistically engraved by J. K. Sherwin; and it was in this mood that
his discourse on love and romance would somewhat shock Fanny Burney.
She did not think it quite nice in a Court equerry, who was also a
husband and a father, to dilate so rhapsodically on such topics; but he
adored “The Sorrows of Werther,” which she told him she could not read;
and, after all, was he not the devoted husband of Catherine Horneck,
Goldsmiths “Little Comedy”? Rowlandson had not, of course, Bunbury’s
culture and refinement, but with all his rollicking Rabelaisian humour,
he had faultless draughtsmanship with, when he chose, a daintiness
of touch and a magic grace of curve. Among his countless coloured
plates, however, those that can be accepted as true colour-prints can
be numbered almost on one hand. _Opera Boxes_ and the interesting
and vivid _Vauxhall_, spiritedly engraved by Pollard, and capitally
aquatinted by Francis Jukes, were not, as generally supposed, actually
printed in colours; but _The Syrens_ and _Narcissa_, both things of
voluptuous charm, are etched and stippled and veritably colour-printed
in part. With very few exceptions, Rowlandson’s prints were only etched
by him, then aquatinted and coloured by other hands, he supplying a
tinted drawing.
When the mantle of the fashionable portrait-painter had slipped
naturally from the shoulders of Reynolds to those of John Hoppner,
and the older beauties were not as young as they used to be, and a
new set of beautiful young women had meanwhile grown up, the curious
public called for the new faces. So Hoppner, already finely interpreted
by the best mezzotint men, now readily allied himself with Charles
Wilkin, a portrait-painter in oil and miniature of some repute, who,
as a very talented and individual stipple-engraver, had won his spurs
with Sir Joshua, notably in his rich engraving of the famous _Lady
Cockburn and her Children_. The new venture was _A Select Series of
Portraits of Ladies of Rank and Fashion_. These, charming and desirable
in monochrome, are delightful, but very rare, in colour. Seven of the
portraits were done by Hoppner, and show him in most gracious vein:
these are Viscountesses St. Asaph and Andover, Countess of Euston, the
new Duchess of Rutland, Lady Charlotte Campbell, Lady Langham, and
Lady Charlotte Duncombe. The other three are from the spirited pencil
of the engraver himself--Ladies Gertrude Villiers, Catherine Howard
and Gertrude Fitzpatrick, who as a child had sat to Reynolds for his
_Collina_. Hoppner’s Hon. Mrs. Paget as _Psyche_ is also a charming
coloured stipple, engraved by Henry Meyer. The colour-printed mezzotint
seems to have found exceptional favour with Hoppner, for in that
medium we have the lovely _Countess of Oxford_--a choice example--and
_Mrs. Whitbread_, by S. W. Reynolds; J. R. Smith’s _Sophia Western_
and _Mrs. Bouverie_, with an engaging suggestion of pastel; Charles
Turner’s _Lady Cholmondeley and Child_; John Jones’s _Mrs. Jordan as
“Hippolyta”_; John Young’s _Lady Charlotte Greville_, _Mrs. Hoppner
as “Eliza,”_ _Mrs. Orby Hunter_, the Godsall children (_The Setting
Sun_), and _Lady Lambton and Children_ (one of them Lawrence’s _Master
Lambton_); William Ward’s pretty _Salad Girl_, _Mrs. Benwell_, and _The
Daughters of Sir Thomas Franklana_, so well known in monochrome, but
so exceedingly rare in colour; James Ward’s _Juvenile Retirement_ (the
Douglas children); _Children Bathing_ (Hoppner’s own); _Mrs. Hibbert_,
and the graceful _Miranda_ (Mrs. Michael Angelo Taylor), of which only
one impression is known in colours, exquisite in quality, that in the
very choice collection of Mr. Frederick Behrens.
Although Hoppner’s pre-eminence among the portrait-painters was so
long established, it was seriously challenged in the Royal Academy
exhibition of 1790 by the portrait of _An Actress_ from the brush of
a painter only twenty-one years of age, who was destined to preside
over the Academy and become the most fashionable painter of his day.
This was Thomas Lawrence, and the portrait was that of the popular
and beautiful Miss Elizabeth Farren--Countess of Derby seven years
later--in her fur-lined white cloak and muff, which was engraved by
Charles Knight, with finishing touches by Bartolozzi, who signed it,
and is now one of the most desired of colour-prints, as it is one of
the most constantly reproduced.
The acknowledged beauties, however, did not monopolise the “placidness
of content or consciousness of superiority,” which Dr. Johnson, so
Johnsonianly, held was necessary to “expand the human face to its full
expression.” Happily there were artists to see everywhere dainty and
charming women who could be attractively pictured with the artistic
sense of nature and actuality, perhaps even more picturesquely for not
being able always to keep their temperaments out of their faces and
attitudes. One of these artists was also an eminent engraver, and at
the same time an extensive printseller and publisher, with always one
eye to his art and the other to the main chance. John Raphael Smith
loomed very large in the London print-world of the later eighteenth
century, because he had not only the artistic ability to do the thing
popularly wanted, but also the commercial intuition as to what would
be likely to please the public in its varying fancies. A master of
mezzotint, and monarch among the translators of Gainsborough, Reynolds
and Romney, he used with lighter touch the same medium for engraving
many of his own vivacious picturings of contemporary social scenes,
with their manners and fashions very much alive. A generous, convivial,
cheerful liver himself, filling every hour with the activities of art,
commerce and pleasure, J. R. Smith had the vivid pictorial eye for
what was gay and pleasing in the life around him. Also he possessed an
instinctive sense of fashion. Therefore, in the numerous attractive
drawings of petty women in varied attitudes of busy idleness, we get a
more real impression of the fashions of the passing hour than even the
stately canvasses of Sir Joshua could give us with all their artistic
defiance of the modistes. Smith would engrave these himself in stipple
suggesting crayon effects, with the original artist’s freedom, and
the mezzotinter’s broad handling of tones; or he would entrust them
to other engravers. Being a painter, he used colour on his plates
judiciously, and among the most highly-prized colour-prints of the
period J. R. Smith’s spirited engravings hold quite an individual
place. To name, perhaps, the most characteristic: _À Loisir_; _Black,
Brown and Fair_; _Maid_; _Wife_; _Widow_; and _What you Will_; _A
Christmas Holiday_; _Flirtilla_ and _Narcissa_; _The Fortune Tellers_;
_The Mirror, Serena and Flirtilla_; _Thoughts on a Single Life_,
with its companion, _Thoughts on Matrimony_, engraved quite as well
by William Ward, at whose hands _The Widow’s Tale_ makes a charming
appearance in coloured mezzotint. In this medium also _The Promenade
at Carlisle House_ enjoys an elusive existence. Then there are Smith’s
_Lecture on Gadding_ and _The Moralist_, stippled by Nutter, and his
_Credulous Lady and the Astrologer_, by Simon. But not even his own
designs inspired his mezzotint-scraper to finer results than the
splendid _Almeria_ (Mrs. Meynott), after Opie, or his stipple-graver to
surer beauty than in his _Mrs. Mills_ after Engelheart, or his _Snake
in the Grass_, after Reynolds, or those charming and familiar Morland
prints _Delia in Town_ and _Delia in the Country_, _Rustic Employment_
and _Rural Amusement_, and the _Letitia_ set, of course in their
original form.
J. R. Smith’s was a dominating personality, and his influence on
his talented pupil, William Ward, was very strong. He taught him
by example, paying him the compliment of engraving in mezzotint
and charmingly colour-printing his pupil’s felicitous, Morlandish
picture, _The Visit to the Grandfather_. He certainly made him work,
and the results show not only in the innumerable fine plates which
Ward produced in mezzotint and stipple after various painters, but
in his own dainty drawings of charming femininity. These, such as
the well-known _Louise_, _Alinda_, _Lucy of Leinster_, _Almeida_,
_The Soliloquy_, _Hesitation_, _Louisa Mildmay_, and _The Cyprian
Votary_, were all translated to the copper with a verve and charm,
produced by an exact understanding of the artistic economies of the
stippled crayon manner, unsurpassed, perhaps not equalled, by any other
engraver. When finely tinted, they show the colour-printer’s craft at
its daintiest, and their collector’s taste at its highest. In the same
_genre_ are _Private Amusement_ (“Reflection”) and _Public Amusement_
(“Temptation”), engraved by Ward after Ramberg--a favourite pair. But
very different, of course, in character are his fine mezzotints of the
rural pictures of his talented, irascible younger brother James. Of
these, perhaps, the best print in colours are _The Citizen’s Retreat_,
_Selling Rabbits_, _Compassionate Children_, _The Haymakers_, _Outside
of a Country Ale-house_, _Summer_ and _Winter_, and the well-known
_Vegetable Market_, the companion to which, _A Poultry Market_, was
finely engraved by James Ward himself, whose own attractive plates of
_The Rocking Horse_ and _Rustic Felicity_ and _A Cottager going to
Market_ and _A Cottager returning from Market_, have also been printed
in colours. William Ward’s popular fame as an engraver, however, will
doubtless rest mainly on his innumerable transcripts in stipple and
mezzotint of the pictures of his brother-in-law, that natural artist,
that dissolute, happy-go-lucky vagabond, that homely, facile painter of
genius, George Morland.
In exploiting Morland as he did, John Raphael Smith proved his unerring
instinct for the right popular thing. He was answering an unconscious
call for artistic virility and freshness of vision. The prints of the
widest public appeal, however simple their intentions in rusticity or
domesticity of subject, were merely repeating pictorial conventions,
illustrating stereotyped sentiments. Bigg, Hamilton, Wheatley,
Singleton, Westall, they were all doing pleasing, pretty things
enough, and the public were buying the prints, and hanging them on the
walls of their homes, without even suspecting that Nature as the true
inspiration of art had but little to do with all this picture-making.
Then came Morland, with his natural instinct for the true, the simple
picture, his free and facile art, his charming wizardry of the
palette, his happy, unaffected realism. The others had been idealising
the commonplace; Morland knew that nothing is commonplace if seen
and treated with relative truth. J. R. Smith saw, both as artist
and prosperous publisher of prints, that here at last was a virile
genius that could charm the people’s love of pictures to a clearer
understanding of beauty through a true pictorial vision of nature.
It was a curious coincidence that just about the same time an obscure
publisher in Kilmarnock had given the Scotch lovers of song the means
of recognising in the natural lyric note of Burns a reviving impulse
for English poetry. Here in Morland was a Burns on canvas, a Burns who
sang with his paint-brush, who could put the moods of _Green Grow the
Rashes, O_, of _My Nannie, O_, or _The Jolly Beggars_, into enduring
pigments as the poet had put them into immortal song. And Morland’s
simple pictures are classic to-day, because in them, irrespective of
subject, is the painter’s true poetry of form and colour.
Always susceptible to the ready comradeship, in the first consciousness
of his brilliant easy powers, with his artistic ambitions bound up
in his joy of living, Morland came quickly under the influence of
Smith’s convivial yet energising personality. The publisher, urged
by the public’s clamorous response, stimulated him to a prolific
activity, and, with such engravers as Smith himself and the Wards to
interpret him with masterly understanding and sympathy, and all the
other engravers of note eager to do the same, Morland soon commanded
the market--or, at least, his exploiters did. It seemed that Morland
could do everything the public appeared to want, so, before he
developed into the Morland exclusively of the stable and the farmyard
and picturesque vagabondage, he challenged the popular _genre_
painters on their own ground, and beat them with the magic simplicity
of nature. Could the domestic Bigg do anything in his own line as
charmingly life-like as _A Visit to the Child at Nurse_ and _A Visit
to the Boarding School_? Look at William Ward’s mezzotints of these
pictures in colour, and then compare with their sweet actuality of
scene and sentiment the same engraver’s version of Bigg’s _The Birth
of an Heir_, with its scenic posturing and sentimentality. Then, what
colour-prints of children could Hamilton or Stothard ever have designed
to compare, for true suggestion of the bright buoyancy of childhood,
with such gems as Ward’s mezzotints _Children Birds-nesting_, _Juvenile
Navigators_, _Blind Man’s Buff_, _The Kite Entangled_; Keating’s
_Playing at Soldiers_, and _Nurse and Children in a Field_; Dayes’
_Children Nutting_, and Tomkins’s stipple _Children Feeding Goats_.
Morland enjoyed to let the children of the neighbourhood play and romp
about his studio, and thus he could paint them naturally, with no
self-consciousness on their parts and happy sympathy on his.
No wonder all the engravers were agog to make copper-plates from his
quickly finished paintings. That charming spontaneity of picturesque
impression, with luminous harmony of tones, which distinguishes all
Morland’s pictures, even those painted in his least reputable days
of hand-to-mouth living, is reflected in the best engravings of his
multitudinous works. Of those printed in colours one may attempt a
selection from the point of view of especially fine quality and rarity.
Among the stipples, therefore, must be named again J. R. Smith’s
_Rustic Employment_ and _Rural Amusement_, _Delia in Town_ and _Delia
in the Country_, and the famous _Story of Letitia_ series--_Domestic
Happiness_, _The Elopement_, _The Virtuous Parent_, _Dressing for the
Masquerade_, _The Tavern Door_, and _The Fair Penitent_ (re-issued
in 1811 with the ample costumes of 1786 incongruously altered to the
current slim Empire fashion, upsetting, of course, the pictorial
balance of design). Then there are _Constancy_ (Mrs. Ward), _Variety_
(Mrs. Morland), and _Morning_; _Thoughts on Amusement for the
Evening_--a very rare oval--by William Ward; _Louisa_, a pair of
large ovals, _The Lass of Livingstone_, and _How Sweet to meet with
Love’s Return_, the famous _Dancing Dogs_, and _Guinea Pigs_, all by
T. Gaugain (the last pair re-issued by Phillipe); _The Tea Garden_
and _St. James’s Park_, by F. D. Soiron; _The Squire’s Door_ and
_The Farmer’s Door_, by Duterreau; _The Farmer’s Visit to his Married
Daughter in Town_, by W. Bond, and _The Visit Returned in the Country_,
by Nutter; _Industry_ and _Idleness_ (Mrs. Morland), by Knight, and
_The Fair Seducer_, and _The Discovery_, by E. J. Dumée.
Many of Morland’s pictures on the mezzotint plates seem to have
justified the colour-printer, but innumerable Morland prints were
coloured by hand entirely or in part, and it is said that J. R.
Smith employed his young pupil Joseph Mallord William Turner upon
this work. I doubt, however, if even Mr. Rawlinson could detect
Turner’s hand upon a Morland print, therefore we must be content to
distinguish the finest and rarest of the mezzotints actually printed
in colours. To those already named we may add _The Angling Party_
by Keating, and _The Angler’s Repast_ by William Ward, to whom we
are also indebted for _The Coquette at her Toilet_, _The Pledge of
Love_ (“Contemplating the Miniature”); _Contemplation_ (“Caroline of
Lichfield”), very rare, and exquisitely suggestive of the original
in Mr. Thomas Barratt’s wonderful Morland collection; _Cottagers_,
_Travellers_, _The Thatcher_, _First of September--Morning_, _First of
September--Evening_, _Inside of a Country Ale-house_, _The Public-House
Door_, _The Effects of Extravagance and Idleness_, _The Turnpike Gate_,
_The Sportsman’s Return_, and _The Farmer’s Stable_, Morland’s National
Gallery masterpiece; _The Return from Market_, a beautiful thing, and
_Feeding the Pigs_, by J. R. Smith; _Sunset: a View in Leicestershire_,
by James Ward; _Summer_ and _Winter_ by W. Barnard; _Morning, or the
Benevolent Sportsman_; _Evening, or the Sportsman’s Return_, by J.
Grozer, and _Selling Cherries_ and _Shelling Peas_, a very rare pair,
etched and mezzotinted by E. Bell. Then there is “The Deserter” set,
by Keating, _Enlisting a Recruit_, _Recruit deserted and detected
hiding in his wife’s room_, _The Deserter handcuffed and conveyed to a
court martial_, _The Deserter pardoned and restored to his family_; a
set of pictures studied with realism resulting from one of Morland’s
characteristic adventures, possible, perhaps, only in the eighteenth
century. _Snipe Shooting_, one of a set of four, by G. Catton, Jun.,
must not be forgotten; it is of particular interest as showing aquatint
in effective combination with stipple and etching. How important a
place Morland fills in the history of eighteenth-century prints,
one realises only when, looking over a collection like Mr. Thomas
Barratt’s at Hampstead, where the colour-prints are to be seen in their
multitude, one attempts to note down a few gems, and finds a long list
has quickly accumulated.
III.
Bartolozzi had come to England as an acknowledged master of
line-engraving, rival even of the splendid Sir Robert Strange, and
the spontaneous charm and fluent beauty of his incomparable etchings
after Guercino, and the lovely lines of his _Clytie_ and his _Silence_
after Annibale Carracci, had simply astonished the connoisseurs.
His accomplished and prolific etching-point and graver carried an
unaccustomed grace and delicacy into many a channel of the engraving
industry. The benefit concert-ticket of the humblest musician was
engraved as finely and brilliantly as the diploma of the Royal Academy,
while the book-illustration of the day was largely enriched by the
easy charm of his touch. Then, as we have seen, the little art of
stipple came almost like a fairy-gift to his ready hand, so opportune
was the moment. Bartolozzi’s sweet caressing sense of beauty found
inevitable expression through the gentle possibilities of the medium,
and the public became eagerly responsive. With the encouragement of a
popularity daily on the increase, and the appreciation of his brother
artiste, he produced those charming stipple prints which are among the
masterpieces of the method, and make, for many people, the name of
Bartolozzi synonymous with “beautiful old colour-prints.”
He was still the true artist, doing worthy things, interpreting beauty
with an elusive magic of charm all his own. Pupils flocked to his
studio; among them engravers of repute, who realised that the new and
easy stipple was going to prove more remunerative than the laborious
line-method, or even mezzotint. Pupils, too, there were who learnt
from Bartolozzi so well, that they equalled their master while yet
in their pupilage, as he admitted, either with generous praise, or
by the ambiguous method of signing their plates with his own name.
Unfortunately for his reputation this was a practice that grew upon
him, for, since the name of Bartolozzi had a distinct market value,
he appended it sometimes to prints quite unworthy of its bearer. For
the modern collector this, of course, involves frequent snares and
delusions.
Bartolozzi has been called the Achilles of eighteenth-century
engraving, and certainly his productiveness and his influence were on
quite an heroic scale; nor was the vulnerable heel wanting to complete
the simile. This was his spendthrift love of epicurean living, which
gradually dulled his artistic conscience until it made no attempt to
distinguish between the demands of art and a commercial popularity.
Luxurious in his habits, free with his hospitality, generous to a fault
with his purse, he looked with a satisfied eye on the ever-expanding
market for the coloured stipple-print, which practically he had
created, or, at least, auspicated with beautiful offerings. And as he
saw that the public would now accept almost anything tendered to it in
the name of a colour-print, however meretricious the design or poor
the engraving, he seems to have sacrificed artistic scruples to the
constant need of money-making. If his purse was a sieve, the popular
craze for colour prints must keep on filling it. So Bartolozzi, the
great and famous engraver, whose sure draughtsmanship had long been
as a leaning-staff to the printsellers and many an artist, actually
encouraged vain but incompetent amateurs, several of them quite
pleasant ladies with pretty ideas, to make feeble, mawkish designs,
which perhaps he would correct in drawing, before giving them to often
half-fledged engravers, and turning them upon the market in poorly,
hurriedly stippled plates, specious in coloured inks.
As his best pupils, Tomkins, Cheesman, Schiavonetti, Ogborne, Marcuard,
left him, and set up as independent engravers, Bartolozzi’s studio,
with its innumerable workers, gradually developed into little more
than a factory for turning out popular prints as rapidly as possible.
This hurry for the market seems, however, to have affected not only
Bartolozzi and his engravers, but the printselling world generally.
The art critic of the “Monthly Mirror” for 1796, while blaming the
printsellers as the cause, protested against the “slovenly and
imperfect manner” in which so many prints were being turned out,
declaring, moreover, that this was influencing the painters to an
indifference about the execution of such works as were intended for
prints, making them “contented to satisfy the print or bookseller with
the mere effect of light and shade.”
Earlier than this, however, Sir Robert Strange, who hated Bartolozzi,
and for whom line-engraving alone represented the dignity of the
engraver’s art, had predicted a sort of artistic _débâcle_ through the
popularity of stipple-engraving. “From the nature of the operation,”
he wrote, “and the extreme facility with which it is executed, it has
got into the hands of every boy, of every printseller in town, of every
manufacturer of prints, however ignorant and unskilful. I call them
manufacturers, because the general run of such productions does not
in reality merit the appellation of works of art and must ultimately
tend to depreciate the fine arts in general, to glut the public, and
to vitiate the growing taste of the nation. This art, if to it may be
called, is in itself extremely limited, admits of little variety, and
is susceptible of no improvement.” Naturally, the great line-engraver,
who had worked for his fame through long arduous years, was vexed
to see the very effects of soft flesh tones, which he produced to
admiration with laborious mastery of point and graver, rendered so
easily by stipple, and even more popularly appreciated. Yet there was a
good deal of truth in his protest. The public was in time glutted, not
with finely engraved colour-prints, but with inferior stippling of weak
designs, much of it crudely coloured by hand, or printed with no sense
of art; but the fine arts in general were not in the least depreciated
through such things.
And now the charming little art has, at its old-time best, found
enthusiastic lovers again, while the noble beauty of line-engraving
is to-day appreciated by only the limited few. “If Strange could but
re-visit the glimpses of Christie’s, it would more than astonish
him to see there none of his own superb line-engravings after the
great Italian masters, but to hear the keen bidding for his old
rival Bartolozzi’s best colour-prints after Reynolds, or the Downman
_Duchess of Devonshire_ and _Lady Duncannon_, the Cipriani infants,
_Contentment_, _Friendship_, the Hamilton _Months_, or Miss Benwell’s
_St. James’s_ and _St. Giles’s Beauties_, or the _Orange Girl_.
Not a little surprised would Strange be if also he could hear how the
modern collector values the work of Bartolozzi’s most distinguished
pupils in that same art which he in his day regarded so contemptuously.
Of these, Peltro William Tomkins was Bartolozzi’s own favourite. “He
is my son in the art,” said the master, always generous with praise
of good work; “he can do all I can in this way, and I hope he will do
more.” Tomkins inherited the graphic tendency from his father, William
Tomkins, A.R.A., a landscape painter; but, of course, it was from
Bartolozzi he learnt the sweetness and grace of draughtsmanship which
distinguish his copper-plates, whether in the engraving of his own
pretty fanciful designs of children, such as _He Sleeps_, _Innocent
Play_, _The Wanton Trick_, or the pictures of other artists. His
close-grained stippling, too, had that same soft and tender rotundity
of tone we find in the authentic works of the master, and of course it
was peculiarly adaptable to the simple tints of the eighteenth-century
colour-printer. A few of Tomkins’s most attractive prints will be
found among the illustrations to this volume, others I have named in
speaking of the painters. The extent of his work was enormous, and it
always had charm; so the collector can choose many appealing things
without exhausting the list of Tomkins’s capital prints. Engraver to
the Queen and drawing-master to the Princesses, he seems to have been a
favourite with the lady artists and amateurs, whose drawings frequently
employed his graver, such as Julia Conyers, Princess Elizabeth, Lady
Templetown, Lady Edward Bentinck, Miss Drax, and, of course, they
all demanded colour as a sort of prescriptive right. Among his more
serious work were some good plates after the old masters, as those in
Tresham’s “British Gallery of Pictures,” rather brilliant in colour.
_On a Virgin and Child and St. John_, after Raphael, engraved and
published by Tomkins at Fulham in 1789, I find “Printed in colour by C.
Floquet,” which suggests an amicable understanding between engraver and
printer; for the colourist was rarely credited with his share in the
old colour-prints.
Thomas Cheesman’s engravings have at their best the free and easy
charm of the artist accustomed to express his own conceptions. In his
youth he lodged with Hogarth’s widow, through whose influence he was
entrusted with the engraving of _The Last Stake_. The work must have
been a liberal education. Stippling, strengthened with etching, he
learnt from Bartolozzi, and how he excelled in it may be seen in such
charming prints as Romney’s _Spinster_ and _Seamstress_, Angelica
Kauffman’s _Marchioness of Townshend and Chila (Love and Beauty)_,
Reynolds’s _Reverie_, his own _Maternal Affection_, and others of
his graceful designs. Robert S. Marcuard was another of Bartolozzi’s
best pupils, and his fine engraving of his master’s portrait, after
Reynolds, has a richness of tone and distinction of character rarely
seen in stipple-plates, but found also in Marcuard’s transcripts of
others among Reynolds’s male portraits. He appears to have strengthened
his stippling of shadows with etching to a more than usual extent, a
practice suggested, perhaps, by his work in mezzotint.
Several noteworthy prints by Charles Knight have already been named.
He was quite a valuable engraver of remarkable industry, and so
studiously did he assimilate the Bartolozzi methods, while lacking only
the master’s inimitable delicacy, that he could be trusted to execute
important plates which needed but Bartolozzi’s own finishing touches
to make them worthy of his name. These the master would unhesitatingly
sign for publication, as in the case of the famous _Miss Farren_ after
Lawrence. The brilliant etching, with all the preliminary work, was
Knight’s; yet it is known as Bartolozzi’s print. But to the various
acknowledged prints of Knight’s already mentioned one may add, as good
examples in colours, _Cupid Disarmed_, and _Cupid’s Revenge_ after Miss
Benwell, and _The Valentine_ and _The Wedding Ring_ after Ansell.
John Ogborne and William Nutter learnt line-engraving from that
interesting engraver and valuable antiquarian, Joseph Strutt, a pupil
himself of Ryland; then they went to Bartolozzi to acquire the stipple
method, through which they both achieved distinction, Nutter adding
to Bartolozzi’s teaching the broader influence of J. R. Smith’s.
John Keyse Sherwin’s natural gifts were influenced to an easy grace
in Bartolozzi’s studio, and we owe to him a few charming stipples in
colour; but his brief and brilliant career, ruined by vanity, dandyism,
and fashionable favour, belongs to the story of line-engraving,
in which it fills a lively and interesting page. Another talented
individuality among the group of Bartolozzi’s disciples was Edmund
Scott, who did some very engaging stipples in colour, of which a few
have been named. His work was much favoured by the popular painters.
Naturally Bartolozzi’s European reputation, and rumours of the rapidity
with which money could be made by the stipple method, attracted to
his studio a number of pupils from the Continent, where, till the war
began in 1793, there was a very large and constant trade in English
prints. Several fine collections, by the way, were made at the time,
and some of these are still intact, notably one in Weimar. Among the
foreign pupils were, of course, several Italians, of whom the most
important were Luigi Schiavonetti and Giovanni Vendramini, whose names
are familiar chiefly through their charming plates in the _Cries of
London_ series. Schiavonetti, however, was brilliant also in etching
and line-work, and not less artistic than his stipples were his
engravings of Blake’s beautiful illustrations to Blair’s poem, _The
Grave_. Vendramini was personally so popular that he was induced to
take over Bartolozzi’s business and his house at North End, Fulham,
when the old man in 1802, seeing the waning of the public taste for his
prints, accepted a royal invitation to Portugal, where they gave him a
knighthood and a pension, and where he went on engraving and teaching
till, close on ninety years of age and in straitened circumstances,
he died in 1815. James Minasi, an engraver of taste, I have already
mentioned as one of Bartolozzi’s favourite pupils, devoted to the end.
His cousin, Mariano Bovi was another, and a very artistic touch he
had, as may be seen in his many engravings of Lady Diana Beauclerc’s
fantastic infantile groups, and the charming decorative frieze after
Cipriani, reproduced here. Other notable Italian disciples were
Pietro Bettelini and Michel Benedetti. Russia, which was always ready
at that time to encourage the prolonged visits of English artists,
sent Bartolozzi an assimilative pupil in Gabriel Scorodoomoff, who
did several pretty colour-prints. Of the French pupils, John Peter
Simon had perhaps the most artistic sense of the medium, and he will
always be esteemed for his brilliant engraving of Reynolds’s _Heads of
Angels_--a beautiful print in colours. Jean Marie Delattre, when once
he had learnt stipple, became the master’s right-hand man, “forwarding”
many of his plates to a considerable extent, touching up and correcting
the work of less competent pupils, and turning out a number of
good prints of his own. Other Frenchmen there were, too, among the
stipple-engravers who, though not actually pupils of Bartolozzi, could
not help reflecting his influence. Chief among these were Thomas
Gaugain, F. D. Soiron, and B. Duterreau, all of whom are represented
among our illustrations by charming prints after Morland. Gaugain began
his artistic life as a student of painting with Richard Houston, the
eminent mezzotint-engraver, and this training seems to have lent a
valuable quality of tone to his engraving. The last and rarest plate of
the _Cries of London--Turnips and Carrots_--was his.
John Condé was an ideal engraver of Cosway’s miniatures, which he
rendered with a touch of the utmost refinement and taste, and an
exquisite sense of their adaptabilities to the copper. Scarcely less
successful in this field was Schiavonetti’s gifted Flemish pupil,
Anthony Cardon, and it was doubtless through his master’s influence
that he, too, was engaged upon the _Cries of London_.
But the Bartolozzi influence was not quite supreme. No engraver, for
instance, used the stipple method with more originality or more truly
pictorial effect than John Jones, who was, of course, one of the
glories of the great English school of mezzotint. At his best only to
be compared for beauty with Burke, his was a broader conception of the
delicate medium; and, gauging its artistic capacity to a nicety, he
understood exactly how to balance breadth and depth of tone with the
fine shades, while avoiding that tendency to monotony of smoothness
which characterised even the best of the Bartolozzi school. His manner
was quite his own, strong in its refined simplicity, artistic in its
reticence, and among the most beautiful and individual colour-prints
in stipple, few are comparable with those that Jones did after Romney,
Reynolds and Downman. His exquisite _Serena_ was one of the prints
we had hoped to have included among our illustrations. Scarcely less
distinctive in stipple than Jones, J. R. Smith and William Ward, was
that other great artist in mezzotint, Thomas Watson, whose stippling
had the large pictorial feeling. Naturally he was happy with Reynolds,
as in the lovely _Una_, while in the _Mrs. Crewe_ and _Mrs. Wilbraham_,
he made the very best of Daniel Gardner, who appears to have learnt all
he could from Sir Joshua.
Of the stipple-engravers who made pretty and attractive colour-prints
their name is legion, while these pages are necessarily limited. So
I must regretfully leave but barely named such notable stipplers as
Joseph Collyer, with his vigorous touch; Francis Hayward, whose _Mrs.
Siddons as the “Tragic Muse”_ is so well known; William Bond; the
versatile Robert Pollard; R. M. Meadows; the dainty John S. Agar; those
three fine mezzotinters, Charles Turner, Richard Earlom, and William
Dickinson, whose _Duchess of Devonshire and Viscountess Duncannon_ has
often the high distinction of pairing with Burke’s _Lady Rushout and
Daughter_; the brothers Facius; Caroline Watson, with her exquisite
finish whether in pure stipple or in “mixed” methods; Joseph Grozer;
Christian Josi, to whom we are indebted for more than his engraving,
in his valuable publication of Ploos Van Amstel’s interesting second
pioneering series of aquatints printed in colour, _Collection
d’Imitations des Dessins_, twenty-three years after Van Amstel’s
death; John Eginton; Charles White, a favourite engraver of the lady
artists; James Hogg, whose _Handmaid_ after Walton is as charming as
its companion, _The Tobacco Box_; Robert Thew; R. M. Paye; and William
Blake, whose sure immortality is quite independent of such artistic
stippling as his _Mrs. Q._ after Huet Villiers, and his two Morland
prints.
The war with France, closing important markets for English engravings,
had a depressing influence on the production of prints, and the early
years of the nineteenth century saw fresh vagaries in the popular
taste. Even the Morlands were neglected. The coarse political and
social caricatures of James Gillray--once Bartolozzi’s pupil--and
of Thomas Rowlandson were intriguing and titillating the town with
their robustious humours and audacious licence. Yet Adam Buck was
strangely in favour; his inadequate drawings of babies and slender
women in Empire gowns, which a contemporary writer describes as
“happily combining the taste of the antique with that of the modern,”
suited the spurious classic fashion of the time. These were engraved,
some partly stippled, partly aquatinted, by Freeman, J. C. Stadler,
Roberts and even Cheesman. Artistically negligible, the excellence
of their colour-printing alone can excuse any demand at the present
day for such pretty-pretty trifles as _The Darling Asleep_, _The
Darling Awake_, _The Darling Dancing_, and so on. In their own day,
notwithstanding their passing vogue, they sounded the knell of the
stippled colour-print.
Coloured aquatints were now becoming the rage. That this charming and
delicate process, producing various gradations of tone by successive
“bitings” with acid through a porous, resinous ground, might long
before have competed with stipple, may be judged by the delightful
pair of colour-printed aquatints, _Courtship_ and _Matrimony_, by
Francis Jukes after W. Williams, published in 1787 by J. R. Smith.
But, invented in France about 1750 by Jean Baptiste Prince, practised
a little later with colour by Ploos Van Amstel, and introduced to
England in 1775 by Paul Sandby for the treatment of landscape, it was a
long while before the pictorial capacities of aquatint were adequately
understood and extended. In the artistic hands of the Daniells, the
Havells, J. C. Stadler, J. Bluck, J. Sutherland and F. C. Lewis, it
became, particularly under the ægis of Ackermann, a most popular
medium for colour, especially in the sporting and coaching prints
which the Regency spirit brought so extensively into demand. Then in
turn came lithography, with its ease of method and its sweet, soft
graces, bringing colour too; and R. J. Lane was the new hero of the
printsellers, while for long years Bartolozzi and his brother stipplers
on the copper-plate were shelved, neglected, forgotten, and Morland
prints were scarcely saleable. To-day they have come into their own
again--their own, and perhaps a little bit over.
NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS.
COUNTESS OF HARRINGTON AND HER CHILDREN (Plate I.). Sir Joshua painted
her twice also as Miss Fleming.--ROBINETTA (Plate II.). The Hon. Anna
Tollemache was the original of this picture, of which Reynolds painted
three versions: that in the National Gallery, Lord Lonsdale’s, and Lord
Tollemache’s, from which Jones made his engraving, dedicating it to the
picture’s then owner the Hon. William Tollemache.--MASTER HENRY HOARE
(Plate III.). The only son of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bart., F.R.S.,
the well-known antiquarian and historian of Wiltshire.--DUCHESS OF
DEVONSHIRE AND CHILD (Plate IV.). One of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s thirteen
exhibits in the Royal Academy of 1786, when Walpole depreciated
it. Here is the famous duchess in that tender mother-mood in which
Coleridge apostrophised her so exquisitely. The chubby baby, when
she grew up, very properly married the son and heir of that Earl of
Carlisle who in graceful verse had championed her mother’s introduction
of the fashion of feathers.--THE MASK (Plate V.). Part of the “Duke
of Marlborough and family,” which Sir Joshua painted in 1777. The
little Ladies Charlotte and Anne Spencer, being taken into the room at
Blenheim where Sir Joshua sat at his easel, the youngest drew back,
clutching at her nurse’s gown, crying “I won’t be painted!” a natural
action which appealed irresistibly to Reynolds. And little Lady Anne,
as Countess of Shaftesbury, lived until 1865, the last survivor of all
Sir Joshua Reynolds’s countless sitters.
BACCHANTE (Emma, Lady Hamilton) (Plate VI.). Painted in 1784 for
Sir William Hamilton, when, of course, there was no thought of the
marriage. The price was 50 guineas, just about a fifth of what a
brilliant impression of the print in colours would fetch to-day.
The Hon. Charles Greville, Sir William’s nephew and Emma’s lover at
the time, seems to have negotiated the business, for he wrote, in
October 1784 to his uncle, who was then in Naples: “Let me know how
the _Bacchante_ is to be paid. The dog was ugly, and I made him paint
it again.” Later Greville wrote: “Emma’s picture shall be sent by the
first ship. I wish Romney yet to mend the dog.” The picture is said to
have been lost at sea, on its way back from Naples, but at Greville’s
sale in 1810, the _Bacchante_--in that case a replica of the lost
canvas--was catalogued as “Diana, original of the well-known engraved
picture,” and bought by Mr. Chamberlayne for 130 guineas.--MRS. JORDAN
IN THE CHARACTER OF “THE COUNTRY GIRL” (Plate VII.). It was as Peggy in
Garrick’s comedy “The Country Girl,” adapted from Wycherly’s “Country
Wife,” that Dorothy Jordan first appeared at Drury Lane in 1785,
and immediately bewitched the public with the natural, irresistible
joyousness of her acting and the lovable charm of her personality. In
the following year she gave Romney thirteen sittings for this picture.
At the first he could not satisfy himself as to the best pose for
her. After many tries she pretended to be tired of the business, and,
jumping up from her chair, in the hoydenish manner and tone of Peggy,
she said, “Well, I’m a-going.” “Stay!” cried Romney; “that’s just what
I want.” And at once he began to sketch her for this picture. It was
bought in 1791 for 70 guineas by the Duke of Clarence, afterwards King
William IV., and thereby, of course, hangs the well-known tale of a
twenty years’ love, ten children, and unhappy separation. The print,
first published as _The Romp_ at 5s., may now fetch, if fine in colour,
like Major Coates’s copy, as much as £200.--HOBBINOL AND GANDERETTA
(Plate VIII.). William Somerville’s “Hobbinol” was a mock-heroic poem
on rural games, which Mr. Gosse describes as “ridiculous.”--COUNTESS
OF OXFORD (Plate IX.). This is in the National Gallery; but Hoppner
exhibited an earlier portrait in 1797. Jane Scott, daughter of a
Hampshire vicar, married, in her twentieth year, the fifth Earl of
Oxford, whom Byron described as “equally contemptible in mind and
body”; but then, she and the poet were lovers when she was forty and
he about twenty-five. “The autumn of a beauty like hers is preferable
to the spring in others,” he said in after years. “I never felt a
stronger passion, which,” he did not forget to add, “she returned
with equal ardour.” It was on Lady Oxford’s notepaper that Byron
wrote his final letter to Lady Caroline Lamb, and this in the very
year in which, it now appears, he revived his boyish passion for Mary
Chaworth.--VISCOUNTESS ANDOVER (Plate X.). Eldest daughter of William
Coke, of Holkham, the famous agriculturist, so long M.P. for Norfolk,
and later Earl of Leicester.
ST. JAMES’S PARK (Plate XIV.). M. Grosley, a Frenchman, describes
this scene in his “Tour of London,” 1772: “Agreeably to this rural
simplicity, most of these cows are driven about noon and evening to
the gate which leads from the park to the quarter of Whitehall. Tied
to posts at the extremity of the grass plots, they swill passengers
with their milk, which, being drawn from their udders upon the spot,
is served, with all the cleanliness peculiar to the English, in
little mugs at the rate of a penny a mug.”--A TEA GARDEN (Plate XV.).
Bagnigge House had been the country residence of Nell Gwyn, and in
1757 the then tenant accidentally discovered a chalybeate spring in
his grounds, which two years later he turned to profit. Bagnigge
Wells then developed a tea garden, with arbours, ponds with fountains
and gold-fish, a bun-house, music, and a reputation for the amorous
rendezvous. The place was very popular, and much favoured, especially
on Sundays, by the would-be fashionable wives of well-to-do city-folk.
In the character of “Madam Fussock” Colman took this off in his
prologue to Garrick’s Drury Lane farce, “Bon Ton; or High Life above
Stairs,” 1776.--THE LASS OF LIVINGSTONE (Plate XVI.). A popular old
Scotch song, words by Allan Ramsay. There is also an older version,
“The Bonnie Lass o’ Liviston,” associated with an actual person who
kept a public-house in the parish of Livingstone.
LADY COCKERELL AS A GIPSY WOMAN (Plate XIX.). One of the beautiful
daughters of Sir John and Lady Rushout, whose miniatures are, perhaps,
Plimer’s masterpieces.--LADY DUNCANNON (Plate XX.). One of the
“Portraits of Four Ladies of Quality,” exhibited by Downman at the
Royal Academy in 1788. There are also colour-prints of Viscountess
Duncannon after Lavinia, Countess Spencer and Cosway, and, with her
more famous sister, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, after Angelica
Kauffman; while they both figure, with other fashionable beauties, in
J. K. Sherwin’s picture “The Finding of Moses,” also in Rowlandson’s
“Vauxhall,” and two prints in which the same artist celebrated their
triumphant share in the Westminster election of 1784, when it was
said that “two such lovely portraits had never before appeared on
a canvass.” The Countess of Bessborough, as she became, was the
mother of Lady Caroline Lamb. Her distinguished grandson, Sir Spencer
Ponsonby-Fane, kindly lent the print reproduced here.
RINALDO AND ARMIDA (Plate XXII.). The enchantment of Rinaldo, the
Christian Knight, by Armida, the beautiful Oriental sorceress, in
Tasso’s “Gerusalemme Liberata.” LOVE AND BEAUTY: MARCHIONESS OF
TOWNSHEND (Plate XXIV.). One of the three beautiful daughters of Sir
William Montgomery immortalised by Reynolds on the large canvas now in
the National Gallery, called “The Graces decorating a terminal figure
of Hymen.” She married the distinguished general who finished the
battle of Quebec when Wolfe had fallen.
TWO BUNCHES A PENNY, PRIMROSES (Plate XXV.). KNIVES, SCISSORS AND
RAZORS TO GRIND (Plate XXVI.). Numbers 1 and 6 of the CRIES OF
LONDON. The other plates are: 2, _Milk below, Maids_. 3, _Sweet China
Oranges_. 4, _Do you want any Matches?_ 5, _New Mackerel_. 7, _Fresh
Gathered Peas_. 8, _Duke Cherries_. 9, _Strawberries_. 10, _Old Chairs
to Mend_. 11, _A new Love-song_. 12, _Hotspice Gingerbread_, two
plates. 13, _Turnips and Carrots_. There are still in existence two
or three paintings of similar character by Wheatley--one depicting a
man selling copper kettles--which would suggest, besides the belated
publication of the thirteenth plate, that it was originally intended
to issue a larger number of the “Cries” than those we know, had
the public encouragement warranted it. The colour-printing of the
earliest impressions was superlatively fine, and in the original pink
board-wrappers these are, of course, extremely rare, and would realize
to-day as much as a thousand pounds.
MRS. CREWE (Plate XXVII.). The famous beauty, Fulke Greville’s
daughter. It was to her house in Lower Grosvenor Street that the
triumphant “true blues”--the Prince of Wales among them--crowded
in the evening to toast Fox’s victory at Westminster. Reynolds has
perpetuated Mrs. Crewe’s rare beauty on three canvasses, and Sheridan
in dedicating to her “The School for Scandal” did reverence to her
mind as well as her features. Fox poetised in her praise, and Fanny
Burney said “She is certainly the most completely a beauty of any
woman I ever saw! She uglifies everything near her.”--THE DANCE (Plate
XXVIII.). The tradition, lately repeated in book and periodical, which
gives the figures in this print as those of the Gunning sisters, is
obviously absurd. When Bunbury was an infant in arms the beauty of
the Gunnings first took the town by storm; next year Maria became
a countess, Elizabeth a duchess, and, when this print was done the
one had been dead twenty-two years, the other already widowed and
“double duchessed,” as Horace Walpole put it.--MORNING EMPLOYMENTS
(Plate XXIX.). The name on the harpsichord should obviously be Jacobus
Kirkman; there was no Thomas. The instrument with the double keyboard
is exactly like that in my own possession, which Dr. Burney selected
from Jacob Kirkman’s shop in 1768. When a fashionable craze for the
guitar was sending the makers of harpsichords and spinets very near to
bankruptcy, Kirkman bought up all his own fine instruments, which the
ladies were practically “giving away” for guitars; then he purchased
a lot of cheap guitars and presented them to milliner’s girls and
street-singers, so that they were twanged everywhere and became vulgar,
the ladies bought harpsichords again, and he made a large fortune.
MADEMOISELLE PARISOT (Plate XXXVII.). A noted dancer in the opera
ballets at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. There is a beautiful
mezzotint of her, dated 1797, by J. R. Smith after A. W. Devis. This
is very rare, and in colours extremely so. Mdlle. Parisot also figures
as one of the three dancers in Gillray’s caricature “Operatical
Reform, or La Danse à l’Evêque,” published in 1798 to ridicule
the Bishop of Durham’s protest against the scanty attire of the
ballet-dancers.--MARIA (Plate XXXVIII.). Maria of Moulines, in Sterne’s
“Sentimental Journey.”
MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.
[Illustration:
PLATE I.
“_Jane, Countess of Harrington,_
_Lord Viscount Petersham and the_
_Hon. Lincoln Stanhope._”
_Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after_
_Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A._
(_Published 1789. Size 8¾″ × 11⅛″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE II.
“_Robinetta._”
_Stipple-Engraving by John Jones, after Sir Joshua_
_Reynolds, P.R.A._
(_Published 1787. Size 8⅞″ × 10½″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE III.
“_Master Henry Hoare._”
_Stipple-Engraving by C. Wilkin, after Sir Joshua_
_Reynolds, P.R.A._
(_Published 1789. Size 7⅝″ × 9⅝″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE IV.
“_The Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Georgiana Cavendish._”
_Mezzotint-Engraving by Geo. Keating, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A._
(_Published 1787. Size 15⅞″ × 12¼″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE V.
“_The Mask._”
_Stipple-Engraving by L. Schiavonetti, after Sir Joshua Reynolds,
P.R.A._
(_Published 1790. Size 9¼″ × 7⅜″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE VI.
_“Bacchante” (Lady Hamilton)._
_Stipple-Engraving by C. Knight, after George Romney._
(_Published 1797. Size 10½″ × 12⅝″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE VII.
“_Mrs. Jordan in the character of_
_‘The Country Girl’_” (“_The Romp_”).
_Stipple-Engraving by John Ogborne, after George Romney._
(_Published 1788. Size 9⅝″ × 12⅛″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE VIII.
“_Hobbinol and Ganderetta._”
_Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after_
_Thos. Gainsborough, R.A._
(_Published 1790. Size 14⅛″ × 18¼″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE IX.
“_Countess of Oxford._”
_Mezzotint-Engraving by S. W. Reynolds, after_
_J. Hoppner, R.A._
(_Published 1799. Size 8-1/″ × 10⅛″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE X.
“_Viscountess Andover._”
_Stipple-Engraving by C. Wilkin, after J. Hoppner, R.A._
(_Published 1797. Size 6⅝″ × 8⅛″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XI.
“_The Squire’s Door._”
_Stipple-Engraving by B. Duterreau, after George Morland._
(_Published 1790. Size 12-/4″ × 15⅛″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XII.
“_The Farmer’s Door._”
_Stipple-Engraving by B. Duterreau, after George Morland._
(_Published 1790. Size 12¾″ × 15⅛″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XIII.
“_A Visit to the Boarding School._”
_Mezzotint-Engraving by W. Ward, A.R.A., after George Morland._
(_Published 1789. Size 21¾″ × 17⅜″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XIV.
“_St. James’s Park._”
_Stipple-Engraving by F. D. Soiron, after George Morland._
(_Published 1790. Size 19¾″ × 16″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XV.
“_A Tea Garden._”
_Stipple-Engraving by F. D. Soiron, after George Morland._
(_Published 1790. Size 19¾″ × 16″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XVI.
“_The Lass of Livingstone._”
_Stipple-Engraving by T. Gaugain, after George Morland._
(_Published 1785. Size 11¾″ × 9¾″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XVII.
“_Rustic Employment._”
_Stipple-Engraving by J. R. Smith, after George Morland._
(_Published 1788. Size 9¾″ × 12¼″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XVIII.
“_The Soliloquy._”
_Stipple-Engraving by and after William Ward, A.R.A._
(_Published 1787. Size 7½″ × 11″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XIX.
“_Harriet, Lady Cockerell as a Gipsy Woman._”
_Stipple-Engraving by J. S. Agar, after Richard Cosway, R.A._
(_Published 1810. Size 8⅛″ × 11⅜″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XX.
“_Lady Duncannon._”
_Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after John_
_Downman, A.R.A._
(_Published 1797. Size 6⅜″ × 7¾″._)
_From the collection of Rt. Hon. Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, G.C.B._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXI.
“_Cupid bound by Nymphs._”
_Stipple-Engraving by W. W. Ryland, after_
_Angelica Kauffman, R.A._
(_Published 1777. Size 11½″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXII.
“_Rinaldo and Armida._”
_Stipple-Engraving by Thomas Burke, after_
_Angelica Kauffman, R.A._
(_Published 1795. Size 10¼″ × 13″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXIII.
“_Angelica Kauffman in the_
_character of Design listening to the_
_Inspiration of Poetry._”
_Stipple-Engraving by Thomas Burke, after_
_Angelica Kauffman, R.A._
(_Published 1787. Size 12⅜″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXIV.
_“Love and Beauty”_
_(Marchioness of Townshend)._
_Stipple-Engraving by Thomas Cheesman,_
_after Angelica Kauffman, R.A._
(_Published 1792 and 1795. Size 10⅜″ × 12⅝″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXV.
_“Two Bunches a Penny, Primroses”_
_(“Cries of London”)._
_Stipple-Engraving by L. Schiavonetti,_
_after F. Wheatley, R.A._
(_Published 1793. Size 10¾″ × 14″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXVI.
_“Knives, Scissors and Razors to Grind”_
_(“Cries of London”)._
_Stipple-Engraving by G. Vendramini,_
_after F. Wheatley, R.A._
(_Published 1795. Size 11″ × 14″._)
_From the collection of Mrs. Julia Frankau._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXVII.
“_Mrs. Crewe._”
_Stipple-Engraving by Thos. Watson, after Daniel Gardner._
(_Published 1780. Size 6⅜″ × 8-1/″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXVIII.
“_The Dance._”
_Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after_
_H. W. Bunbury._
(_Published 1782. Size 11⅞″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXIX.
“_Morning Employments._”
_Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after H. W. Bunbury._
(_Published 1789. Size 14¼″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXX.
“_The Farm-Yard._”
_Stipple-Engraving by William Nutter, after_
_Henry Singleton._
(_Published 1790. Size 9¾″ × 11⅞″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXXI.
“_The Vicar of the Parish receiving his Tithes._”
_Stipple-Engraving by Thomas Burke, after Henry Singleton._
(_Published 1793. Size 12″ × 14⅛″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXXII.
“_The English Dressing-Room._”
_Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after Chas. Ansell._
(_Published 1789. Size 7½″ × 9½″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXXIII.
“_The French Dressing-Room._”
_Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after Chas. Ansell._
(_Published 1789. Size 7½″ × 9½″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXXIV.
_“January” (“The Months”)._
_Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after_
_Wm. Hamilton, R.A._
(_Published 1788. Size 10″ × 12″._)
_From the collection of J. H. Edwards, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXXV.
_“Virtuous Love” (from Thomson’s “Seasons”)._
_Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after_
_Wm. Hamilton, R.A._
(_Published 1793. Size 6¼″ × 5″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXXVI.
“_The Chanters._”
_Stipple-Engraving by J. R. Smith, after_
_Rev. Matthew W. Peters, R.A._
(_Published 1787. Size 7⅝″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXXVII.
“_Mdlle. Parisot._”
_Stipple-Engraving by C. Turner, A.R.A.,_
_after J. J. Masquerier._
(_Published 1799. Size 6⅝″ × 8⅜″._)
_From the collection of Mrs. Julia Frankau,_
_to whom it was presented by
the late Sir Henry Irving._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXXVIII.
“_Maria._”
_Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after J. Russell, R.A._
(_Published 1791. Size 4¾″ × 6¼″._)
_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XXXIX.
“_Commerce._”
_Stipple-Engraving by M. Bovi, after J. B. Cipriani, R.A._
_and F. Bartolozzi, R.A._
(_Published 1795. Size 18⅜″ × 7⅝″._)
_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]
[Illustration:
PLATE XL.
“_The Love-Letter._”
_A very rare Stipple-Engraving, probably by Thos. Cheesman._
_and F. Bartolozzi, R.A._
(_Size 8¾″ × 6¾″._)
_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]
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