SIGNS PAINTED BY ARTISTS
In the “good old days,” when an artist was supposed to be drunken and
dissolute in proportion to his genius, and when a very large number of
them accordingly lived up to that supposition, either in self-defence or
out of their own natural depravity, it was no uncommon thing to see the
wayside ale-house sporting a sign that to the eye of instructed travellers
displayed merits of draughtsmanship and colour of an order entirely
different from those commonly associated with mere sign-boards.
Fresh from perusing the domestic records of the eighteenth century, you
have a confused mental picture of artists poor in pocket but rich in
genius, pervading the country, hoofing it muzzily along the roads, and
boozing in every village ale-house. You see such an one, penniless,
offering to settle a trivial score by painting a new sign or retouching an
old one, and you very vividly picture mine host ungraciously accepting the
offer, because he has no choice. Then, behold, the artist goes his way,
like the Prodigal Son, to his husks and his harlots, to run up more scores
and liquidate them in the like manner; and presently there enters, to
your mental vision, a traveller whose educated eye perceives that sign,
and discovers in its yet undried and tacky oils the touch of a master. He
buys that masterpiece for golden guineas from the gaping and
unappreciative innkeeper, whose score was but a matter of silver
shillings; and he--he is a Duke or something in the Personage way--takes
that “Barley Mow” or “Ship and Seven Stars,” or whatever the subject may
be, tenderly home to his palace and places it, suitably framed, among his
ancestral Titians, Raphaels, or Botticellis.
That, I say, is the golden, misty picture of Romance presented to you,
and, in sober fact, incidents of that nature were not unknown; but that
they happened quite so often as irresponsible weavers of legends would
have us believe, we may take leave to doubt.
Artists of established repute sometimes, even then, painted inn-signs from
other motives. Hogarth, for example, that stern pictorial moralist, was
scarcely the man to be reduced to such straits as those already hinted;
but he was a jovial fellow, and is said to have painted a number of signs
for friendly innkeepers. The classic example of those attributed to him
is, of course, the well-known sign of the “Man Loaded with Mischief,” the
name of a public-house, formerly 414, Oxford Street.[6] The name was
changed, about 1880, to the “Primrose,” and the painted panel-sign
removed. In its last years it--whether the original or an old copy seems
uncertain--was fixed against the wall of the entrance-lobby. The picture
was one of crowded detail. The Man, another Atlas, carried on his back a
drunken woman holding a glass of gin in her hand, and had on either
shoulder a monkey and a jackdaw. In the background were “S. Gripe’s”
pawnshop, the “Cuckold’s Fortune” public-house, crowned with a pair of
horns, two quarrelling cats, a sleeping sow, and a jug labelled “Fine
Purl.” This scathing satire, peculiarly out of place in a drink-shop, was
“Drawn by Experience” and “Engraved by Sorrow,” and was finished off by
the rhyme:
A Monkey, a Magpie, and a Wife
Is the true Emblem of Strife.
A somewhat similar sign exists at the present time at Madingley, near
Cambridge.
[Illustration: THE “MAN LOADED WITH MISCHIEF.”]
The correctness, or otherwise, of the Oxford Street sign being attributed
to Hogarth has never been determined, but it is quite characteristic of
him, and all through Hogarth’s works there runs a curious familiarity
with, and insistence upon, signs. You find the sign of the “Duke of
Cumberland” pictorially insisted upon in his “Invasion of England,”
although it is merely an accessory to the picture; and in “Gin Lane,”
“Southwark Fair,” the “March to Finchley,” and others, every detail of
incidental signs is shown. This distinguishing characteristic is nowhere
more remarkable than in his “Election: Canvassing for Votes,” where, above
the heads of the rival agents in bribery is the sign of the “Royal Oak,”
half obscured by an election placard. In the distance is seen a mob, about
to tear down the sign of the “Crown,” and above the two seated and
drinking and smoking figures in the foreground is part of the “Portobello”
sign. A curious item in this picture is the fierce effigy of a lion,
looking as though it had been the figurehead of a ship, and somewhat
resembling those still existing at the “Star” inn, Alfriston, and the
“Red Lion,” Martlesham.
The classic instance of the dissolute artistic genius, ever drinking in
the wayside beerhouse, and leaving long trails of masterpieces behind him
in full settlement of paltry scores, is George Morland. He painted
exquisitely, for the same reason that the skylark sings divinely, because
he could not do otherwise; and no one has represented so finely or so
naturally the rustic life of England at the close of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the nineteenth, as he. His chosen companions
were “ostlers, potboys, pugilists, moneylenders, and pawnbrokers”--the
last two classes, it may be suspected, less from choice than from
necessity. He painted over four thousand pictures in his short life of
forty-one years, and died in a “sponging-house” for debtors, leaving the
all-too-true epitaph for himself, “Here lies a drunken dog.”
He lived for a considerable time opposite the “White Lion” inn, at the
then rural village of Paddington, and his masterpiece, the “Inside of a
Stable,” was painted there.
Morland was no neglected genius. His natural, unaffected style, that was
no style, in the sense that he showed rustic life as it was, without the
“classic” artifice of a Claude or the finicking unreality of a Watteau,
appealed alike to connoisseurs and to the uneducated in art; and he might,
but for his own hindrance, have been a wealthy man. Dealers besieged him,
purse in one hand and bottle in the other. He paid all debts with
pictures, and in those inns where he was known the landlords kept a room
specially for him, furnished with all the necessaries of his art: only too
pleased that, in his ready-made fame, he should settle scores in his
characteristic way.
Oddly enough, although Morland is reputed to have painted many inn-signs,
not one has survived; or perhaps, more strictly speaking, not one of the
existing paintings by him has been identified with a former sign.
Morland died in 1824, and twenty years later one “J. B. P.,” in _The
Somerset House Gazette_, described how, walking from Laleham to Chertsey
Bridge, and sheltering at the “Cricketers,” a small public-house there, he
noticed, while sitting in the parlour, a painting of a cricket-match. The
style seemed familiar, and he at last recognised it as Morland’s.
Questioning the landlord, he learned that forty-five years earlier the inn
was the “Walnut Tree,” and that a “famous painter” had lodged there and
painted the picture. It grew so popular with local cricketers that at last
the name of the house was altered.
The stranger offered to buy, but the landlord declared he would not sell.
It seemed that he took it with him when he set up a booth at Egham and
Staines races, “an’ cricket-matches and such-like.” It was, in fact, his
trade-mark.
Mine host thought in shillings, but the stranger in guineas.
“How,” he asked, “if I offered you £10 10_s._?”
“Ah, well!” rejoined the publican: “it should go, with all my heart,”--and
go it did.
Thus did the purchaser describe his bargain: “The painting, about a yard
in length and of a proportionate height, is done on canvas, strained upon
something like an old shutter, which has two staples at the back, suited
to hook it for its occasional suspension on the booth-front in the host’s
erratic business at fairs and races. The scene I found to be a portrait of
the neighbouring cricket-green called Laleham Borough, and contains
thirteen cricketers in full play, dressed in white, one arbiter in red and
one in blue, besides four spectators, seated two by two on chairs. The
picture is greatly cracked, in the reticulated way of paint when much
exposed to the sun; but the colours are pure, and the landscape in a very
pleasing tone, and in perfect harmony. The figures are done as if with the
greatest ease, and the mechanism of Morland’s pencil and his process of
painting are clearly obvious in its decided touches, and in the gradations
of the white particularly. It cannot be supposed that this freak of the
pencil is a work of high art; yet it certainly contains proof of Morland’s
extraordinary talent, and it should seem that he even took some pains with
it, for there are marks of his having painted out and re-composed at least
one figure.”
The appreciation of Morland in his lifetime is well shown by a story of
himself and Williams, the engraver, tramping, tired, hungry, thirsty and
penniless, from Deal to London. They came at last to “the ‘Black Bull’ on
the Dover Road”--wherever precisely that may have been--and Morland
offered the landlord to repaint his faded sign for a crown, the price of a
meal. The innkeeper knew nothing of Morland, and was at first unwilling;
but he at length agreed, and rode off to Canterbury for the necessary
materials.
The friends eventually ran up a score a few shillings in excess of that
contemplated originally by the landlord, and left him dissatisfied with
his bargain. Meanwhile, artist and engraver tramped to town, and, telling
the story to their friends in the hearing of a long-headed admirer of
Morland’s work, he rode down and, we are told, purchased the “Black Bull”
sign from the amazed landlord for £10 10_s._
The story is probably in essentials true, but that unvarying ten-guinea
price is inartistic and unconvincing.
Richard Wilson, an earlier than Morland, fought a losing fight as a
landscape painter, and “by Britain left in poverty to pine,” at last died
in 1782. Classic landscape in the manner of Claude was not then
appreciated, and the unfortunate painter sold principally to pawnbrokers,
at wretched prices, until even they grew tired of backing him. He lived
and died neglected, and had to wait for Fame, as “Peter Pindar,” that
shrewdest and best of art-critics, foretold,
Till thou hast been dead a hundred year.
He painted at least one inn-sign: that of the “Loggerheads” at Llanverris,
in Denbighshire; a picture representing two jovial, and not too
intellectual, grinning faces, with the inscription, “We Three Loggerheads
Be.” The fame of this sign was once so great that the very name of the
village itself became obscured, and the place was commonly known as
“Loggerheads.” Wilson’s work was long since repainted.
But what _is_ a “loggerhead,” and why should the two grinning faces of the
sign have been described as “three”? The origin of the term is, like the
birth of Jeames de la Pluche, “wrop in mistry”; but of the meaning of it
there is little doubt. A “loggerhead” is anything you please in the
dunderhead, silly fool, perfect ass, or complete idiot way, and the gaping
stranger who looks inquisitively at the _two_ loggerheads on the
sign-board automatically constitutes himself the _third_, and thus
completes the company. It is a kind of small-beer, fine-drawn jape that
has from time immemorial passed for wit in rustic parts, and may be traced
even in the pages of Shakespeare, where, in Act II. Scene 2 of _Twelfth
Night_, it is the subject of allusion as the picture of “We Three.”
The “Mortal Man” at Troutbeck, in the Lake district, once possessed a
pictorial sign, painted by Julius Cæsar Ibbetson, a gifted but dissolute
artist, friend of, and kindred spirit with, Morland. It represented two
faces, the one melancholy, pallid and thin, the other hearty,
good-humoured, and “ruddier than the cherry.” Beneath these two
countenances was inscribed a verse attributed to Thomas Hoggart, a local
wit, uncle of Hogarth, the painter:
“Thou mortal man, that liv’st by bread,
What makes thy face to look so red?”
“Thou silly fop, that look’st so pale,
’Tis red with Tony Burchett’s ale.”
First went the heads, and at last the verses also, and to-day the “Mortal
Man” has only a plain sign.
John Crome, founder of the “Norwich School” of artists, known as “Old”
Crome, in order to distinguish him from his son, contributed to this list
of signs painted by artists. It is not surprising that he should have done
so, seeing that he won to distinction from the very lowest rungs of the
ladder; leaving, as a boy, the occupation of running errands for a doctor,
and commencing art in 1783 as apprentice to a coach-, house-, and
sign-painter. One work of his of this period is the “Sawyers” sign. It is
now preserved at the Anchor Brewery, Pockthorpe, Norwich. Representing a
saw-pit, with two sawyers at work, it shows the full-length figure of the
top-sawyer and the head and shoulders of the other. It is, however, a very
inferior and fumbling piece of work, and its interest is wholly
sentimental.
J. F. Herring, afterwards famous for his paintings of horses and farmyard
scenes, began as a coach-painter and sign-board artist at Doncaster, in
1814. He painted at least twelve inn-signs in that town, but they have
long since become things of the past.
Charles Herring never reached the heights of fame scaled by his brother,
and long painted signs for a great firm of London brewers.
However difficult it might prove nowadays to rise from the humble
occupations of house- or coach-painter, to the full glory of a Royal
Academician, it seems once to have been a comparatively easy transition.
All that was requisite was the genius for it, and sometimes not very much
of that. A case in point is that of Sir William Beechey, who not only won
to such distinction in 1793 from the several stages of house-painter and
solicitor’s clerk, but achieved the further and more dazzling success of
knighthood, although never more than an indifferent portrait-painter. A
specimen of his art, in the shape of the sign-board of the “Dryden’s
Head,” near Kate’s Cabin, on the Great North Road, was long pointed out.
The painting of sign-boards, in fact, was long a kind of preparatory
school for higher flights of art, and indeed the fashion of pictorial
signs nursed many a dormant genius into life and activity. Robert Dalton,
who rose to be Keeper of the Pictures to George the Third, had been a
painter of signs and coaches; Gwynne, who first performed similar
journey-work, became a marine-painter of repute; Smirke, who eventually
became R.A.; Ralph Kirby, drawing-master to the Prince of Wales,
afterwards George the Fourth; Thomas Wright, of Liverpool, and many more,
started life decorating coach-panels or painting signs. Opie, the Cornish
peasant-lad who rose to fame in paint, declared that his first steps were
of the like nature: “I ha’ painted Duke William for the signs, and stars
and such-like for the boys’ kites.”
The Royal Academicians of our own time did not begin in this way, and as a
pure matter of curious interest it will be found that your sucking painter
is too dignified for anything of the kind, and that modern signs painted
by artists are usually done for a freak by those who have already long
acquired fame and fortune. It is an odd reversal.
Thus, very many years ago, Millais painted a “George and Dragon” sign for
the “George” inn, Hayes Common. There it hung, exposed to all weathers,
and at last faded into a neutral-tinted, very “speculative” affair, when
the landlord had it repainted, “as good as new,” by some one described as
“a local artist.” Now even the local painter’s work has disappeared, and
the great hideous “George” is content without a picture-sign.
The most famous of all signs painted by artists is, of course, that of the
“Royal Oak” at Bettws-y-Coed, on the Holyhead Road. It was painted by
David Cox, in 1847, and, all other tales to the contrary notwithstanding,
it was _not_ executed by him, when in sore financial straits, to liquidate
a tavern score. David Cox was never of the Morland type of dissolute
artist, did not run up scores, paid his rates and taxes, never bilked a
tradesman, and was just a home-loving, domesticated man. That he should
at the same time have been a great artist, supreme in his own particular
field, in his own particular period, is so unusual and unaccountable a
thing that it would not be surprising to find some critic-prophet arising
to deny his genius because of all those damning circumstances of the
commonplace, and the clinching facts that he never wore a velvet jacket,
and had his hair cut at frequent intervals.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “ROYAL OAK,” BETTWS-Y-COED.]
The genius of David Cox was not fully realised in his lifetime, and he
received very inadequate prices for his works, but he was probably never
“hard up,” and he painted the sign-board of the “Royal Oak” merely as a
whimsical compliment to his friend, Mrs. Roberts, the landlady of the
house, which was still at that time a rural inn.
The old sign had become faded by long exposure to the weather, and was
about to be renewed at the hands of a house-painter, when Cox, who
happened then to be on one of his many visits to Bettws, ascended a short
ladder reared against the house and repainted it, then and there. The
coaching age still survived in North Wales at that period, and Bettws was
still secluded and rustic, and he little looked for interruption; but,
while busily at work, he was horrified by hearing a voice below exclaim,
“Why, it _is_ Mr. Cox, I declare!” A lady, a former pupil of his,
travelling through the country on her honeymoon, had noticed him, and
although he rather elaborately explained the how and the why of his acting
the part of sign-painter, it seems pretty clear that it was from this
source the many old stories derived of Cox being obliged by poverty to
resort to this humble branch of art.
In 1849 he retouched the sign, and in 1861, two years after his death, it
was, at the request of many admirers, removed from the outside wall and
placed in a situation of honour, in the hall of what had by that time
become an “hotel.”
The painting, on wooden panel, is a fine, bold, dashing picture of a
sturdy oak, in whose midst you do but vaguely see, or fancy you see, His
Majesty, hiding. Beneath are troopers, questing about on horseback. It is
very Old Masterish in feeling, low-toned and mellow in colour, and rich in
impasto. It is fixed as part of a decorative overmantel, and underneath is
a prominent inscription stating that it “forms part of the freehold of the
hotel belonging to the Baroness Howard de Walden.” Sign and freehold have
now descended to the Earl of Ancaster.
Behind that inscription lies a curious story of disputed ownership in the
painting. It seems that in 1880 the then landlady of the “Royal Oak”
became bankrupt, and the trustees in bankruptcy claimed the sign as a
valuable asset, a portion of the estate; making a statement to the effect
that a connoisseur had offered £1,000 for it. This at once aroused the
cupidity of the then Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, owner of the freehold,
and an action was brought against the trustees, to determine whose
property it was. The trustees in the first instance, in the Bangor
District Court of Bankruptcy, were worsted by Judge Horatio Lloyd, who
held that it was a fixture, and could not be sold by the innkeeper. This
decision was challenged, and the question re-argued before Sir James
Bacon, who, in delivering judgment for the trustees, said the artist had
made a present of the picture, and that it belonged to the innkeeper as
much as the coat or the dress on her back. He therefore reversed the
decision of the Judge in Bankruptcy; but the case was carried eventually
to the Supreme Court, and the Lords finally declared the painting to be
the property of the freeholder.
Their decision was based upon the following reasoning: “Assuming that the
picture was originally what may be called a ‘tenant’s fixture,’ which he
might have removed, it appeared that he had never done so. Therefore, the
picture not having been removed by the original tenant within his term, on
a new lease being granted it became the property of the landlord, and had
never ceased to be so.”
In these days of the revival of this, of that, and of t’ other, you think
inevitably of that very wise saying of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes: “The
thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is
that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” WARGRAVE-ON-THAMES.
_Painted by G. D. Leslie, R.A._]
The most readily allowed excuse for anything in such times as these is the
plea that it is a revival of something that existed of old. That at once
sets upon it--little matter what it be--the seal of approval. Of late
years there has in this way been a notable revival of inn-signs painted by
artists of repute.
The oldest of these moderns is perhaps that of the “George and Dragon” at
Wargrave-on-Thames: a double-sided sign painted by the two Royal
Academicians, G. D. Leslie and J. E. Hodgson. In a gossipy book of
reminiscences Mr. Leslie tells how this sign came to be painted, about
1874: “It was during our stay at Wargrave that my friend Mr. Hodgson and I
painted Mrs. Wyatt’s sign-board for her--the ‘George and Dragon.’ I
painted my side first, a regular orthodox St. George on a white horse,
spearing the dragon. Hodgson was so taken with the idea of painting a
sign-board that he asked me to be allowed to do the other side, to which
I, of course, consented, and as he could only stop at Wargrave one day, he
managed to do it on that day--indeed, it occupied him little more than a
couple of hours. The idea of his composition was suggested by Signor
Pellegrini, the well-known artist of _Vanity Fair_. The picture
represented St. George, having vanquished the dragon and dismounted from
his horse, quenching his thirst in a large beaker of ale. These pictures
were duly hung up soon after, and very much admired. They have since had a
coat of boat-varnish, and look already very Old Masterly. Hodgson’s, which
gets the sun on it, is a little faded; but mine, which faces the north,
towards Henley, still looks pretty fresh.”
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” WARGRAVE-ON-THAMES.
_Painted by J. E. Hodgson, R.A._]
Goring-on-Thames has a now very faded pictorial sign, the “Miller of
Mansfield,” painted by Marcus Stone, R.A. The Thames-side villages are
indeed especially favoured, and at Wallingford the sign of the “Row
Barge,” by G. D. Leslie, is prominent in a bye-street. The inn itself is a
very modest and very ancient place of entertainment. A document is still
extant which sets forth how the licence was renewed in 1650, when, owing
to the puritanical ways of the age, many other houses in the same town had
to forfeit theirs, and discontinue business. Once the property of the
Corporation of Wallingford, it seems to have obtained its unusual name
from having been the starting-point of the Mayor’s State Barge. With these
facts in mind, the artist painted an imaginary state barge, pulled by six
sturdy watermen, and containing the Mayor and Corporation of Wallingford,
accompanied by the mace-bearer, who occupies a prominent position in the
prow. G. D. Leslie also painted the sign of the “King Harry” at St.
Stephen’s, outside St. Albans, but it has long been replaced by a quite
commonplace daub.
[Illustration: THE “ROW BARGE,” WALLINGFORD. _Painted by G. D. Leslie,
R.A._]
[Illustration: THE “SWAN,” PRESTON CROWMARSH.]
This does not quite exhaust the list of riverside places thus
distinguished, for “Ye Olde Swan,” Preston Crowmarsh, has a sign painted
by Mr. Wildridge. It overlooks one of the prettiest ferries on the river.
[Illustration: THE “WINDMILL,” TABLEY.]
[Illustration: THE “SMOKER” INN, PLUMBLEY.]
Two modern artistic signs in Cheshire owe their existence to a lady. These
are the effective pictures of the “Smoker” inn at Plumbley and the
“Windmill,” Tabley. They are from the brush of Miss Leighton, a niece of
the late Lord de Tabley. The “Smoker” by no means indicates a place
devoted with more than usual thoroughness to smoking, but is named after a
once-famous race-horse belonging to the family in the early years of the
nineteenth century. On one side of the sign is a portrait of the horse,
the reverse displaying the arms of the De Tableys, supported by two
ferocious-looking cockatrices.
The sign of the “Windmill” explains itself: it is Don Quixote, tilting at
one of his imaginary enemies.
[Illustration: THE “FERRY” INN, ROSNEATH.]
In 1897 the Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, designed and painted a
pictorial sign for the “Ferry” inn at Rosneath. It is only remarkable as
being the work of a Royal Princess. The three-masted ancient ship, or
galleon, is the heraldic charge known as a “lymphad,” borne by many
Scottish families, among them the Campbells, Dukes of Argyll.
Some three years later Mr. Walter Crane enriched the little Hampshire
village of Grayshott with a pictorial sign for the “Fox and Pelican,” a
converted inn conducted on the principles of one of the feather-brained
nostrums of the age.
[Illustration: THE “FERRY” INN, ROSNEATH.]
The name of the house commemorates Fox, the great Bishop of Winchester,
whose device was “A Pelican in her Piety.” It represents a pelican
guarding a nest of three young birds, and feeding them with blood from
her breast. The device is painted on one side of the board, and the name
of the house is inscribed on a scroll on the other.
[Illustration: THE “FOX AND PELICAN,” GRAYSHOTT.]
Many other pictorial inn-signs have of late years replaced the merely
lettered boards, and although the artists are not famous, or even
well-known, the average merit of the work is high. A particularly good
example is the double-sided sign of a little thatched rural inn, the “Cat
and Fiddle,” between Christchurch and Bournemouth; where on one side you
perceive the cat seated calmly, in a domestic manner, while on the other
he is reared upon his hind-legs, fiddle-playing, according to the
nursery-rhyme:
Hey, diddle, diddle,
The Cat and the Fiddle,
The Cow jumped over the Moon,
The Little Dog laughed to see such sport,
And the Dish ran away with the spoon.
Serious antiquaries--a thought too serious--have long attempted to find a
hidden meaning in the well-known sign of the “Cat and Fiddle.” According
to some commentators, it derived from “_Caton fidèle_,” one Caton, a
staunch Protestant governor of Calais in the reactionary reign of Queen
Mary, who could justly apply to himself the praise: “I have fought the
good fight, I have kept the Faith,” while in the rhyme it has been sought
to discover some veiled political allusion, carefully wrapped up in
nursery allegory, in times when to interfere openly in politics, or to
criticise personages or affairs of State was not merely dangerous, but
fatal. Ingenious people have discovered in the wild jingle an allusion to
Henry the Eighth and the Disestablishment of the Monasteries, and others
have found it to be a satire on James the Second and the Great Rebellion.
Given the requisite ingenuity, there is no national event to which it
could not be compared; but why not take it merely for what it is: a bundle
of inconsequent rhymes for the amusement of the childish ear?
[Illustration: THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR CHRISTCHURCH.]
[Illustration: THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR CHRISTCHURCH.]
From every point of view the revival and spread of the old fashion of
artistic sign-boards is to be encouraged, for it not only creates an
interest in the different localities, but serves to perpetuate local
history and legend.
A remarkable feature of the “Swan” at Fittleworth is the number of
pictures painted by artists on the old panelling of the coffee-room.
Caton Woodville painted a sign for this house, but it has long been
considered too precious to be hung outside, exposed to the chances of wind
and wet, and perhaps in danger of being filched one dark night by some
connoisseur more appreciative than honest. It has therefore been removed
within. It represents on one side the swan, ridden by a Queen of the
Fairies, while a frog, perched on the swan’s tail, holds a lantern, whose
light is in rivalry with a star.
On the other side a frog, seated in a pewter pot, is observed contentedly
smoking a “churchwarden” pipe while he is being conveyed down stream.