_To the Editor._
Sir,--Presuming you may not have been acquainted with the late Mr.
William Capon, whose excellence as a gothic architectural scene-painter
has not been equalled by any of his compeers, I venture a few
particulars respecting him.
My acquaintance with Mr. Capon commenced within only the last five or
six years, but his frank intimacy and hearty good-will were the same as
if our intercourse had been of longer date. A memoir of him, in the
“Gentleman’s Magazine,” seems to me somewhat deficient in its
representation of those qualities.
The memoir just noticed assigns the date of his birth at Norwich to have
been October 6, 1757; and truly represents, that though wanting but ten
days of arriving at the seventieth year of his age when he died, his
hale appearance gave little indication of such a protracted existence.
He laboured under an asthmatic affection, of which he was accustomed to
complain, while his fund of anecdote, and his jocular naïveté in
recitation, were highly amusing. His manner of relating many of the
follies of theatrical monarchs, now defunct, was wont to set the table
in a roar; and could his reminiscences be remembered, they would present
a detail quite as amusing as some that have recently diverted the town.
Kemble he deified; he confessed that he could not get rid of old
prejudices in favour of his old friend; and, to use his own phrase,
“there never was an actor like him.” I have often seen him in ecstasy
unlock the glazed front of the frame over his drawing-room
chimney-piece, that enclosed a singularly beautiful enamel portrait of
that distinguished actor, which will shortly be competed for under the
auctioneer’s hammer. Some of his finest drawings of the Painted Chamber
at Westminster, framed with the richness of olden times, also decorated
this room, which adjoined his study on the same floor. His larger
drawings had green silk curtains before them; and these he would not
care to draw, unless he thought his visitors’ ideas corresponded with
his own respecting the scenes he had thus depicted. The most valuable
portion of his collection was a series of drawings of those portions of
the ancient city of Westminster, which modern improvements have wholly
annihilated. During the course of demolition, he often rose at daybreak,
to work undisturbed in his darling object; and hence, some of the tones
of morning twilight are so strictly represented, as to yield a hard and
unartist-like appearance.
It was a source of disquiet to Mr. Capon that the liberality of
publishers did not extend to such enlargements of Smith’s Westminster,
as his own knowledge would have supplied. In fact, such a work could not
be accomplished without a numerous list of subscribers; and as he never
issued a prospectus, the whole of his abundant antiquarian knowledge has
died with him, and the pictorial details alone remain.
Mr. Capon was, greatly to his inconvenience, a creditor of the late
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, of whom he was accustomed to speak with
evident vexation. He had been induced to enter into the compromise
offered him by the committee of management of Drury-lane theatre, and
give a receipt barring all future claims. This galled him exceedingly;
and more than once he hinted suspicions respecting the conflagration of
the theatre, which evinced that he had brooded over his losses till his
judgment had become morbid.
But he is gone, and in him society has lost an amiable and respected
individual. To the regret of numerous friends he expired on the 26th of
September at his residence, No. 4, North-street, Westminster.