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.