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.