engraving, and certainly his productiveness and his influence were on
quite an heroic scale; nor was the vulnerable heel wanting to complete
the simile. This was his spendthrift love of epicurean living, which
gradually dulled his artistic conscience until it made no attempt to
distinguish between the demands of art and a commercial popularity.
Luxurious in his habits, free with his hospitality, generous to a fault
with his purse, he looked with a satisfied eye on the ever-expanding
market for the coloured stipple-print, which practically he had
created, or, at least, auspicated with beautiful offerings. And as he
saw that the public would now accept almost anything tendered to it in
the name of a colour-print, however meretricious the design or poor
the engraving, he seems to have sacrificed artistic scruples to the
constant need of money-making. If his purse was a sieve, the popular
craze for colour prints must keep on filling it. So Bartolozzi, the
great and famous engraver, whose sure draughtsmanship had long been
as a leaning-staff to the printsellers and many an artist, actually
encouraged vain but incompetent amateurs, several of them quite
pleasant ladies with pretty ideas, to make feeble, mawkish designs,
which perhaps he would correct in drawing, before giving them to often
half-fledged engravers, and turning them upon the market in poorly,
hurriedly stippled plates, specious in coloured inks.
As his best pupils, Tomkins, Cheesman, Schiavonetti, Ogborne, Marcuard,
left him, and set up as independent engravers, Bartolozzi’s studio,
with its innumerable workers, gradually developed into little more
than a factory for turning out popular prints as rapidly as possible.
This hurry for the market seems, however, to have affected not only
Bartolozzi and his engravers, but the printselling world generally.
The art critic of the “Monthly Mirror” for 1796, while blaming the
printsellers as the cause, protested against the “slovenly and
imperfect manner” in which so many prints were being turned out,
declaring, moreover, that this was influencing the painters to an
indifference about the execution of such works as were intended for
prints, making them “contented to satisfy the print or bookseller with
the mere effect of light and shade.”
Earlier than this, however, Sir Robert Strange, who hated Bartolozzi,
and for whom line-engraving alone represented the dignity of the
engraver’s art, had predicted a sort of artistic _débâcle_ through the
popularity of stipple-engraving. “From the nature of the operation,”
he wrote, “and the extreme facility with which it is executed, it has
got into the hands of every boy, of every printseller in town, of every
manufacturer of prints, however ignorant and unskilful. I call them
manufacturers, because the general run of such productions does not
in reality merit the appellation of works of art and must ultimately
tend to depreciate the fine arts in general, to glut the public, and
to vitiate the growing taste of the nation. This art, if to it may be
called, is in itself extremely limited, admits of little variety, and
is susceptible of no improvement.” Naturally, the great line-engraver,
who had worked for his fame through long arduous years, was vexed
to see the very effects of soft flesh tones, which he produced to
admiration with laborious mastery of point and graver, rendered so
easily by stipple, and even more popularly appreciated. Yet there was a
good deal of truth in his protest. The public was in time glutted, not
with finely engraved colour-prints, but with inferior stippling of weak
designs, much of it crudely coloured by hand, or printed with no sense
of art; but the fine arts in general were not in the least depreciated
through such things.
And now the charming little art has, at its old-time best, found
enthusiastic lovers again, while the noble beauty of line-engraving
is to-day appreciated by only the limited few. “If Strange could but
re-visit the glimpses of Christie’s, it would more than astonish
him to see there none of his own superb line-engravings after the
great Italian masters, but to hear the keen bidding for his old
rival Bartolozzi’s best colour-prints after Reynolds, or the Downman
_Duchess of Devonshire_ and _Lady Duncannon_, the Cipriani infants,
_Contentment_, _Friendship_, the Hamilton _Months_, or Miss Benwell’s
_St. James’s_ and _St. Giles’s Beauties_, or the _Orange Girl_.
Not a little surprised would Strange be if also he could hear how the
modern collector values the work of Bartolozzi’s most distinguished
pupils in that same art which he in his day regarded so contemptuously.
Of these, Peltro William Tomkins was Bartolozzi’s own favourite. “He
is my son in the art,” said the master, always generous with praise
of good work; “he can do all I can in this way, and I hope he will do
more.” Tomkins inherited the graphic tendency from his father, William
Tomkins, A.R.A., a landscape painter; but, of course, it was from
Bartolozzi he learnt the sweetness and grace of draughtsmanship which
distinguish his copper-plates, whether in the engraving of his own
pretty fanciful designs of children, such as _He Sleeps_, _Innocent
Play_, _The Wanton Trick_, or the pictures of other artists. His
close-grained stippling, too, had that same soft and tender rotundity
of tone we find in the authentic works of the master, and of course it
was peculiarly adaptable to the simple tints of the eighteenth-century
colour-printer. A few of Tomkins’s most attractive prints will be
found among the illustrations to this volume, others I have named in
speaking of the painters. The extent of his work was enormous, and it
always had charm; so the collector can choose many appealing things
without exhausting the list of Tomkins’s capital prints. Engraver to
the Queen and drawing-master to the Princesses, he seems to have been a
favourite with the lady artists and amateurs, whose drawings frequently
employed his graver, such as Julia Conyers, Princess Elizabeth, Lady
Templetown, Lady Edward Bentinck, Miss Drax, and, of course, they
all demanded colour as a sort of prescriptive right. Among his more
serious work were some good plates after the old masters, as those in
Tresham’s “British Gallery of Pictures,” rather brilliant in colour.
_On a Virgin and Child and St. John_, after Raphael, engraved and
published by Tomkins at Fulham in 1789, I find “Printed in colour by C.
Floquet,” which suggests an amicable understanding between engraver and
printer; for the colourist was rarely credited with his share in the
old colour-prints.
Thomas Cheesman’s engravings have at their best the free and easy
charm of the artist accustomed to express his own conceptions. In his
youth he lodged with Hogarth’s widow, through whose influence he was
entrusted with the engraving of _The Last Stake_. The work must have
been a liberal education. Stippling, strengthened with etching, he
learnt from Bartolozzi, and how he excelled in it may be seen in such
charming prints as Romney’s _Spinster_ and _Seamstress_, Angelica
Kauffman’s _Marchioness of Townshend and Chila (Love and Beauty)_,
Reynolds’s _Reverie_, his own _Maternal Affection_, and others of
his graceful designs. Robert S. Marcuard was another of Bartolozzi’s
best pupils, and his fine engraving of his master’s portrait, after
Reynolds, has a richness of tone and distinction of character rarely
seen in stipple-plates, but found also in Marcuard’s transcripts of
others among Reynolds’s male portraits. He appears to have strengthened
his stippling of shadows with etching to a more than usual extent, a
practice suggested, perhaps, by his work in mezzotint.
Several noteworthy prints by Charles Knight have already been named.
He was quite a valuable engraver of remarkable industry, and so
studiously did he assimilate the Bartolozzi methods, while lacking only
the master’s inimitable delicacy, that he could be trusted to execute
important plates which needed but Bartolozzi’s own finishing touches
to make them worthy of his name. These the master would unhesitatingly
sign for publication, as in the case of the famous _Miss Farren_ after
Lawrence. The brilliant etching, with all the preliminary work, was
Knight’s; yet it is known as Bartolozzi’s print. But to the various
acknowledged prints of Knight’s already mentioned one may add, as good
examples in colours, _Cupid Disarmed_, and _Cupid’s Revenge_ after Miss
Benwell, and _The Valentine_ and _The Wedding Ring_ after Ansell.
John Ogborne and William Nutter learnt line-engraving from that
interesting engraver and valuable antiquarian, Joseph Strutt, a pupil
himself of Ryland; then they went to Bartolozzi to acquire the stipple
method, through which they both achieved distinction, Nutter adding
to Bartolozzi’s teaching the broader influence of J. R. Smith’s.
John Keyse Sherwin’s natural gifts were influenced to an easy grace
in Bartolozzi’s studio, and we owe to him a few charming stipples in
colour; but his brief and brilliant career, ruined by vanity, dandyism,
and fashionable favour, belongs to the story of line-engraving,
in which it fills a lively and interesting page. Another talented
individuality among the group of Bartolozzi’s disciples was Edmund
Scott, who did some very engaging stipples in colour, of which a few
have been named. His work was much favoured by the popular painters.
Naturally Bartolozzi’s European reputation, and rumours of the rapidity
with which money could be made by the stipple method, attracted to
his studio a number of pupils from the Continent, where, till the war
began in 1793, there was a very large and constant trade in English
prints. Several fine collections, by the way, were made at the time,
and some of these are still intact, notably one in Weimar. Among the
foreign pupils were, of course, several Italians, of whom the most
important were Luigi Schiavonetti and Giovanni Vendramini, whose names
are familiar chiefly through their charming plates in the _Cries of
London_ series. Schiavonetti, however, was brilliant also in etching
and line-work, and not less artistic than his stipples were his
engravings of Blake’s beautiful illustrations to Blair’s poem, _The
Grave_. Vendramini was personally so popular that he was induced to
take over Bartolozzi’s business and his house at North End, Fulham,
when the old man in 1802, seeing the waning of the public taste for his
prints, accepted a royal invitation to Portugal, where they gave him a
knighthood and a pension, and where he went on engraving and teaching
till, close on ninety years of age and in straitened circumstances,
he died in 1815. James Minasi, an engraver of taste, I have already
mentioned as one of Bartolozzi’s favourite pupils, devoted to the end.
His cousin, Mariano Bovi was another, and a very artistic touch he
had, as may be seen in his many engravings of Lady Diana Beauclerc’s
fantastic infantile groups, and the charming decorative frieze after
Cipriani, reproduced here. Other notable Italian disciples were
Pietro Bettelini and Michel Benedetti. Russia, which was always ready
at that time to encourage the prolonged visits of English artists,
sent Bartolozzi an assimilative pupil in Gabriel Scorodoomoff, who
did several pretty colour-prints. Of the French pupils, John Peter
Simon had perhaps the most artistic sense of the medium, and he will
always be esteemed for his brilliant engraving of Reynolds’s _Heads of
Angels_--a beautiful print in colours. Jean Marie Delattre, when once
he had learnt stipple, became the master’s right-hand man, “forwarding”
many of his plates to a considerable extent, touching up and correcting
the work of less competent pupils, and turning out a number of
good prints of his own. Other Frenchmen there were, too, among the
stipple-engravers who, though not actually pupils of Bartolozzi, could
not help reflecting his influence. Chief among these were Thomas
Gaugain, F. D. Soiron, and B. Duterreau, all of whom are represented
among our illustrations by charming prints after Morland. Gaugain began
his artistic life as a student of painting with Richard Houston, the
eminent mezzotint-engraver, and this training seems to have lent a
valuable quality of tone to his engraving. The last and rarest plate of
the _Cries of London--Turnips and Carrots_--was his.
John Condé was an ideal engraver of Cosway’s miniatures, which he
rendered with a touch of the utmost refinement and taste, and an
exquisite sense of their adaptabilities to the copper. Scarcely less
successful in this field was Schiavonetti’s gifted Flemish pupil,
Anthony Cardon, and it was doubtless through his master’s influence
that he, too, was engaged upon the _Cries of London_.
But the Bartolozzi influence was not quite supreme. No engraver, for
instance, used the stipple method with more originality or more truly
pictorial effect than John Jones, who was, of course, one of the
glories of the great English school of mezzotint. At his best only to
be compared for beauty with Burke, his was a broader conception of the
delicate medium; and, gauging its artistic capacity to a nicety, he
understood exactly how to balance breadth and depth of tone with the
fine shades, while avoiding that tendency to monotony of smoothness
which characterised even the best of the Bartolozzi school. His manner
was quite his own, strong in its refined simplicity, artistic in its
reticence, and among the most beautiful and individual colour-prints
in stipple, few are comparable with those that Jones did after Romney,
Reynolds and Downman. His exquisite _Serena_ was one of the prints
we had hoped to have included among our illustrations. Scarcely less
distinctive in stipple than Jones, J. R. Smith and William Ward, was
that other great artist in mezzotint, Thomas Watson, whose stippling
had the large pictorial feeling. Naturally he was happy with Reynolds,
as in the lovely _Una_, while in the _Mrs. Crewe_ and _Mrs. Wilbraham_,
he made the very best of Daniel Gardner, who appears to have learnt all
he could from Sir Joshua.
Of the stipple-engravers who made pretty and attractive colour-prints
their name is legion, while these pages are necessarily limited. So
I must regretfully leave but barely named such notable stipplers as
Joseph Collyer, with his vigorous touch; Francis Hayward, whose _Mrs.
Siddons as the “Tragic Muse”_ is so well known; William Bond; the
versatile Robert Pollard; R. M. Meadows; the dainty John S. Agar; those
three fine mezzotinters, Charles Turner, Richard Earlom, and William
Dickinson, whose _Duchess of Devonshire and Viscountess Duncannon_ has
often the high distinction of pairing with Burke’s _Lady Rushout and
Daughter_; the brothers Facius; Caroline Watson, with her exquisite
finish whether in pure stipple or in “mixed” methods; Joseph Grozer;
Christian Josi, to whom we are indebted for more than his engraving,
in his valuable publication of Ploos Van Amstel’s interesting second
pioneering series of aquatints printed in colour, _Collection
d’Imitations des Dessins_, twenty-three years after Van Amstel’s
death; John Eginton; Charles White, a favourite engraver of the lady
artists; James Hogg, whose _Handmaid_ after Walton is as charming as
its companion, _The Tobacco Box_; Robert Thew; R. M. Paye; and William
Blake, whose sure immortality is quite independent of such artistic
stippling as his _Mrs. Q._ after Huet Villiers, and his two Morland
prints.
The war with France, closing important markets for English engravings,
had a depressing influence on the production of prints, and the early
years of the nineteenth century saw fresh vagaries in the popular
taste. Even the Morlands were neglected. The coarse political and
social caricatures of James Gillray--once Bartolozzi’s pupil--and
of Thomas Rowlandson were intriguing and titillating the town with
their robustious humours and audacious licence. Yet Adam Buck was
strangely in favour; his inadequate drawings of babies and slender
women in Empire gowns, which a contemporary writer describes as
“happily combining the taste of the antique with that of the modern,”
suited the spurious classic fashion of the time. These were engraved,
some partly stippled, partly aquatinted, by Freeman, J. C. Stadler,
Roberts and even Cheesman. Artistically negligible, the excellence
of their colour-printing alone can excuse any demand at the present
day for such pretty-pretty trifles as _The Darling Asleep_, _The
Darling Awake_, _The Darling Dancing_, and so on. In their own day,
notwithstanding their passing vogue, they sounded the knell of the
stippled colour-print.
Coloured aquatints were now becoming the rage. That this charming and
delicate process, producing various gradations of tone by successive
“bitings” with acid through a porous, resinous ground, might long
before have competed with stipple, may be judged by the delightful
pair of colour-printed aquatints, _Courtship_ and _Matrimony_, by
Francis Jukes after W. Williams, published in 1787 by J. R. Smith.
But, invented in France about 1750 by Jean Baptiste Prince, practised
a little later with colour by Ploos Van Amstel, and introduced to
England in 1775 by Paul Sandby for the treatment of landscape, it was a
long while before the pictorial capacities of aquatint were adequately
understood and extended. In the artistic hands of the Daniells, the
Havells, J. C. Stadler, J. Bluck, J. Sutherland and F. C. Lewis, it
became, particularly under the ægis of Ackermann, a most popular
medium for colour, especially in the sporting and coaching prints
which the Regency spirit brought so extensively into demand. Then in
turn came lithography, with its ease of method and its sweet, soft
graces, bringing colour too; and R. J. Lane was the new hero of the
printsellers, while for long years Bartolozzi and his brother stipplers
on the copper-plate were shelved, neglected, forgotten, and Morland
prints were scarcely saleable. To-day they have come into their own
again--their own, and perhaps a little bit over.
NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS.
COUNTESS OF HARRINGTON AND HER CHILDREN (Plate I.). Sir Joshua painted
her twice also as Miss Fleming.--ROBINETTA (Plate II.). The Hon. Anna
Tollemache was the original of this picture, of which Reynolds painted
three versions: that in the National Gallery, Lord Lonsdale’s, and Lord
Tollemache’s, from which Jones made his engraving, dedicating it to the
picture’s then owner the Hon. William Tollemache.--MASTER HENRY HOARE
(Plate III.). The only son of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bart., F.R.S.,
the well-known antiquarian and historian of Wiltshire.--DUCHESS OF
DEVONSHIRE AND CHILD (Plate IV.). One of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s thirteen
exhibits in the Royal Academy of 1786, when Walpole depreciated
it. Here is the famous duchess in that tender mother-mood in which
Coleridge apostrophised her so exquisitely. The chubby baby, when
she grew up, very properly married the son and heir of that Earl of
Carlisle who in graceful verse had championed her mother’s introduction
of the fashion of feathers.--THE MASK (Plate V.). Part of the “Duke
of Marlborough and family,” which Sir Joshua painted in 1777. The
little Ladies Charlotte and Anne Spencer, being taken into the room at
Blenheim where Sir Joshua sat at his easel, the youngest drew back,
clutching at her nurse’s gown, crying “I won’t be painted!” a natural
action which appealed irresistibly to Reynolds. And little Lady Anne,
as Countess of Shaftesbury, lived until 1865, the last survivor of all
Sir Joshua Reynolds’s countless sitters.
BACCHANTE (Emma, Lady Hamilton) (Plate VI.). Painted in 1784 for
Sir William Hamilton, when, of course, there was no thought of the
marriage. The price was 50 guineas, just about a fifth of what a
brilliant impression of the print in colours would fetch to-day.
The Hon. Charles Greville, Sir William’s nephew and Emma’s lover at
the time, seems to have negotiated the business, for he wrote, in
October 1784 to his uncle, who was then in Naples: “Let me know how
the _Bacchante_ is to be paid. The dog was ugly, and I made him paint
it again.” Later Greville wrote: “Emma’s picture shall be sent by the
first ship. I wish Romney yet to mend the dog.” The picture is said to
have been lost at sea, on its way back from Naples, but at Greville’s
sale in 1810, the _Bacchante_--in that case a replica of the lost
canvas--was catalogued as “Diana, original of the well-known engraved
picture,” and bought by Mr. Chamberlayne for 130 guineas.--MRS. JORDAN
IN THE CHARACTER OF “THE COUNTRY GIRL” (Plate VII.). It was as Peggy in
Garrick’s comedy “The Country Girl,” adapted from Wycherly’s “Country
Wife,” that Dorothy Jordan first appeared at Drury Lane in 1785,
and immediately bewitched the public with the natural, irresistible
joyousness of her acting and the lovable charm of her personality. In
the following year she gave Romney thirteen sittings for this picture.
At the first he could not satisfy himself as to the best pose for
her. After many tries she pretended to be tired of the business, and,
jumping up from her chair, in the hoydenish manner and tone of Peggy,
she said, “Well, I’m a-going.” “Stay!” cried Romney; “that’s just what
I want.” And at once he began to sketch her for this picture. It was
bought in 1791 for 70 guineas by the Duke of Clarence, afterwards King
William IV., and thereby, of course, hangs the well-known tale of a
twenty years’ love, ten children, and unhappy separation. The print,
first published as _The Romp_ at 5s., may now fetch, if fine in colour,
like Major Coates’s copy, as much as £200.--HOBBINOL AND GANDERETTA
(Plate VIII.). William Somerville’s “Hobbinol” was a mock-heroic poem
on rural games, which Mr. Gosse describes as “ridiculous.”--COUNTESS
OF OXFORD (Plate IX.). This is in the National Gallery; but Hoppner
exhibited an earlier portrait in 1797. Jane Scott, daughter of a
Hampshire vicar, married, in her twentieth year, the fifth Earl of
Oxford, whom Byron described as “equally contemptible in mind and
body”; but then, she and the poet were lovers when she was forty and
he about twenty-five. “The autumn of a beauty like hers is preferable
to the spring in others,” he said in after years. “I never felt a
stronger passion, which,” he did not forget to add, “she returned
with equal ardour.” It was on Lady Oxford’s notepaper that Byron
wrote his final letter to Lady Caroline Lamb, and this in the very
year in which, it now appears, he revived his boyish passion for Mary
Chaworth.--VISCOUNTESS ANDOVER (Plate X.). Eldest daughter of William
Coke, of Holkham, the famous agriculturist, so long M.P. for Norfolk,
and later Earl of Leicester.