|ABOVE the chimney-piece in the Study at Abbotsford, and therefore on
Sir Walter's right-hand as he wrote, hung--nay, hangs, if we may
trust the evidence of a photograph before us--a copy of the
Schiavonetti-cum-Heath engraving of Thomas Stothard's once-popular
'Canterbury Pilgrims.' With its dark oblong frame and gold
corner-ornaments, it must still look much as it did on that rainy August
morning described in Lockhart, when one of Scott's guests, occupied
ostensibly with the last issues of the Bannatyne Club, sat listening in
turn to the patter of the drops on the pane, and the 'dashing trot'
of his host's pen across the paper to which he was then committing the
first series of the 'Tales of a Grandfather.' The visitor (it was
that acute and ingenious John Leycester Adolphus whose close-reasoned
'Letters to Richard Heber' had practically penetreated the mystery
of the 'Waverley Novels') specially noticed the picture; and he also
afterwards recalled and repeated a characteristic comment made upon it
by Scott, with whom it was evidently a favourite, in one of those brief
dialogues which generally took place when it became necessary to consult
a book upon the shelves. Were the procession to move, remarked Sir
Walter, the prancing young 'Squire in the foreground would be over his
horse's head in a minute. The criticism was more of the riding-school
than the studio; and too much might easily be inferred from it as to
the speaker's equipments as an Art-critic. For Art itself, we are told,
notwithstanding his genuine love of landscape and natural objects, Scott
cared nothing; and Abbotsford was rich rather in works suggestive and
commemorative, than in masterpieces of composition and colour.
'He talked of scenery as he wrote of it,' says Leslie in his
'Recollections,' 'like a painter; and yet for pictures, as works of art,
he had little or no taste, nor did he pretend to any. To him they were
interesting merely as representing some particular scene, person,
or event, and very moderate merit in their execution contented him.'
Stothard's cavalcade, progressing along the pleasantly undulated
background of the Surrey Hills, with its drunken Miller droning on his
bagpipes at the head, with its bibulous Cook at the tail, and between
these, all that moving, many-coloured pageant of Middle-Age society upon
which Geoffrey Chaucer looked five hundred years ago, must have been
thoroughly to his liking, besides reaching to a higher artistic standard
than he required. To one whose feeling for the past has never yet been
rivalled, such a picture would serve as a perpetual fount of memory and
association. He must besides have thoroughly appreciated its admitted
accuracy of costume, and it would not have materially affected his
enjoyment if the Dick Tintos or Dick Minims of his day had assured
him that, as a composition, it was deficient in 'heroic grasp,' or had
reiterated the stereotyped objection that the Wife of Bath was far too
young-looking to have buried five lawful husbands.
The original oil-sketch from which the 'Canterbury Pilgrims' was
engraved, is now in the National Gallery, having been bought some years
ago, with Hogarth's 'Polly Peachum,' at the dispersal of the Leigh
Court Collection. It is not, however, by his more ambitious efforts
that Stothard is most regarded in our day. Now and then, it may be, the
Abbotsford engraving, or 'The Flitch of Bacon,' or 'John Gilpin,' makes
fitful apparition in the print-shop windows; now and then again, in some
_culbute générale of the bric-à-brac_ merchant, there comes forlornly to
the front a card-cable contrived adroitly from the once famous Waterloo
Shield. But it is not by these, or by the huge designs on the staircase
at Burleigh ('Burleigh-house by Stamford-town'), or by any of the
efforts which his pious biographer and daughter-in-law fondly ranked
with Raphael and Rubens, that he best deserves remembrance. Time,
dealing summarily with an unmanageable inheritance, has a trick of
making rough and ready distinctions; and Time has decided, not that he
did these things ill, but that he did other things better--for instance,
book illustrations. And the modern collector is on the side of Time.
Stothard as a colourist (and here perhaps is some injustice) he
disregards: Stothard as a history-painter he disavows. But for Stothard
as the pictorial interpreter of 'David Simple' and 'Betsy Thoughtless,'
of 'The Virtuous Orphan' and the 'Tales of the Genii,' of 'Clarissa' and
'Sir Charles Grandison,' or (to cite another admirer, Charles Lamb) of
that 'romantic tale'=
```'Where Glunis and Gawries wear mysterious things,
```That serve at once for jackets and for wings,'--=
to wit, 'The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins,' * he cares very
much indeed. He is not surprised that they gained their designer the
friendship of Flaxman; and if he is not able to say with Elia,--=
```'In several ways distinct you make us feel,--
```Graceful as Raphael, as Watteau genteel,'--=
epithets which, in our modern acceptation of them, sound singularly
ill-chosen, he can at least admit that if his favourite is occasionally
a little monotonous and sometimes a little insipid, there are few
artists in England in whose performances the un-English gift of grace is
so unmistakably present. **
* Coleridge is also extravagant on this theme in his 'Table
Talk.' 'If it were not for a certain tendency to
affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high,' he
says, 'for Stothard's designs [to Peter Wilkins].'
* * Strangely enough he set little more by this quality, but
apparently valued himself more for his 'correctness' ('Bryan
Waller Procter,' Bell, 1877, pp. 83-90).
Fifty years ago there were but few specimens of Stothard's works in the
Print Room of the British Museum, and even those were not arranged so as
to be easily accessible. To-day, this complaint, which Pye makes in that
miscellany of unexpected information, his 'Patronage of British Art,'
can no longer be renewed. In the huge Balmanno collection, a labour of
five-and-twenty years, the student may now study his Stothard to his
heart's content. Here is brought together his work of all sorts, his
earliest and latest, his strongest and his feeblest, from the first
tentative essays he made for the 'Lady's Magazine' and Hervey's 'Naval
History' to those final designs, which, aided by the supreme imagination
of Turner, did so much to vitalise the finicking and overlaboured blank
verse of his faithful but fastidious patron at St. James's Place.=
```'Of Roger's "Italy," Luttrell relates,
```It-would surely be dished, if 'twere not for the plates,'=
said the wicked wits of 1830; and the sarcasm has its parallel in the
'Ce poëte se sauve du naufrage de planche en planche,' which the
Abbé Galiani applied to Dorât embellished by Marillier and Eisen. But
Stothard did many things besides illustrating Samuel Rogers. Almanack
heads and spelling-books, spoon-handles and decanter labels,--nothing
came amiss to his patient industry. And in his book illustrations he
had one incalculable advantage,--he lived in the silver age of
line-engraving, the age of the Cooks and Warrens and Heaths and Findens.
Shakespeare and Bunyan, Macpherson and Defoe, Boccaccio and
Addison,--most of the older classics passed under his hand. It is the
fashion in booksellers' catalogues to vaunt the elaborate volumes he did
in later life for the banker poet. But it is not in these, nor his more
ambitious efforts, that the true lover of Stothard finds his greatest
charm. He is the draughtsman of fancy rather than imagination; and he
is moreover better in the mellow copper of his early days than the 'cold
steel' of his decline. If you would view your Stothard aright, you must
take him as the illustrator of the eighteenth-century novelists, of
Richardson, of Fielding, of Sterne, of Goldsmith, where the costume in
which he delighted was not too far removed from his own day, and where
the literary note was but seldom pitched among the more tumultuous
passions. In this semidomestic atmosphere he moves always easily and
gracefully. His conversations and interviews, his promenade and garden
and tea-table scenes, his child-life with its pretty waywardnesses, his
ladies full of sensibility and in charming caps, his men respectful and
gallant in their ruffles and silk stockings,--in all these things he
is at home. The bulk of his best work in this way is in Harrison's
'Novelist's Magazine,' and in the old double-column edition of the
essayists, where it is set off for the most part by the quaint and
pretty framework which was then regarded as an indispensable decoration
to plates engraved for books. If there be anything else of his which the
eclectic (not indiscriminate) collector should secure, it is two of the
minor Rogers volumes for which the booksellers care little. One is the
'Pleasures of Memory' of 1802, if only for Heath's excellent engraving
of 'Hunt the Slipper;' the other is the same poems of 1810
with Luke Clennell's admirable renderings of the artist's
quill-drawings,--renderings to rival which, as almost faultless
reproductions of pen-and-ink, we must go right back to Hans
Lutzelburger, and Holbein's famous 'Dance of Death.'
There is usually one thing to be found in Stothard's designs which many
of his latter-day successors, who seem to care for little except making
an effective 'compo,' are often in the habit of neglecting. He is
generally fairly loyal to his text, and honestly endeavours to interpret
it pictorially. Take, for example, a sketch at random,--the episode of
the accident to Count Galiano's baboon in Sharpe's 'Gil Blas.' You need
scarcely look at Le Sage; the little picture gives the entire
story. There, upon the side of the couch, is the Count in an
undress,--effeminate, trembling, almost tearful. Beside him is his
wounded favourite, turning plaintively to its agitated master, while the
hastily summoned surgeon, his under lip protruded professionally, binds
up the injured limb. Around are the servants in various attitudes of
sycophantic sympathy. Or take from a mere annual, the 'Forget-me-not' of
1828, this little _genre_ picture out of Sterne. Our old friend Corporal
Trim is moralizing in the kitchen to the hushed Shandy servants on
Master Bobby's death. He has let fall his hat upon the ground, 'as if a
heavy lump of clay had been kneaded into the crown of it.' 'Are we not
here now,' says Trim, 'and are we not gone! in a moment.' Holding her
apron to her eyes, the sympathetic Susannah leans her hand confidingly
upon Trim's shoulder; Jonathan the coachman, a mug of ale upon his
knee, stares--with dropped chin--at the hat, as if he expected it to do
something; Obadiah wonders at Trim; the cook pauses as she lifts the lid
of a cauldron at the fire, and the 'foolish fat scullion'--the 'foolish
fat scullion' who 'had been all autumn struggling with a dropsy' and
is still immortal--looks up inquiringly from the fish-kettle she is
scouring on her knees. It is all there; and Stothard has told us all of
it that pencil could tell.
In the vestibule at Trafalgar Square is a bust of Stothard by Baily,
which gives an excellent idea of the dignified yet deferential old
gentleman, who said 'Sir' in speaking to you, like Dr. Johnson, and
whose latter days were passed as Librarian of the Royal Academy. Another
characteristic likeness is the portrait, now in the National Portrait
Gallery, which was engraved by Scriven in 1833 for Arnold's 'Library of
the Arts,' and once belonged to Samuel Rogers. The story of Stothard's
life has little memorable but the work that filled and satisfied it.
Placid, placable, unpretentious, modestly unsolicitous of advancement,
labouring assiduously but cheerfully for miserable wage, he seems to
have existed at equipoise, neither exalted nor depressed by the extremes
of either fortune. He was an affectionate father and a tender husband;
and yet so even-pulsed that on his wedding-day he went as üsual to the
drawing-school; and he bore more than one heart-rending bereavement with
uncomplaining patience. For nearly forty years he lived contentedly in
one house (28, Newman Street) with little change beyond an occasional
country excursion, when he would study butterflies for his fairies'
wings, or a long walk in the London streets and suburbs, when he
would note at every turn some new gesture or some fresh group for his
ever-growing storehouse of imagination. It is to this unremitting habit
of observation that we owe the extraordinary variety and fecundity
of his compositions; to the manner of it also must be traced their
occasional executive defects. That no two men will draw from the
living model in exactly the same way, is a truism. But the artist,
who, neglecting the model almost wholly, draws by preference from his
note-book, is like a man who tells a story heard in the past of which
he has retained the spirit rather than the details. He will give it the
_cachet_ of his personal qualities; he will reproduce it with unfettered
ease and freedom; but those who afterwards compare it with the original
will find to their surprise that the original was not exactly what they
had been led to expect. In a case like the present where the artist's
mind is so uniformly pure and innocent, so constitutionally gentle
and refined, the gain of individuality is far greater than the loss of
finish and academic accuracy. If to Stothard's grace and delicacy we
add a certain primness of conception, a certain prudery of line, it is
difficult not to recognize the fitness of that happy title which was
bestowed upon him by the late James Smetham. He is the 'Quaker of Art.'