“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.