Part 3

These colour-prints were done with a single printing, and the plate had to be freshly inked for each impression. The printer would have a water-colour drawing to work from, and having decided upon the dominant tint, with this he would ink over the whole engraved surface of the plate. Then he would wipe it almost entirely out of the incisions and punctures on the copper which had retained it, leaving just a sufficient harmonising ground-tint for the various coloured inks, carefully selected as to tints, which were next applied in the exact order and degree to ensure the right harmonies. All this required the nicest care directed by a very subtle sense of colour. Most difficult of all, and reserved for the last stage of the inking, was adding the flesh-tints, an operation of extreme delicacy. Then, before putting the plate in the printing-press, it had to be warmed to the exact degree of sensitiveness which should help the colours to fuse with tenderness and softness, without losing any brilliant quality of tone. This was not the least anxious part of the work, needing highly-trained artistic sensibility on the part of the printer. How artistically important this matter of warming the plates must have been in printing a combination of coloured inks may be judged when I say that I have been privileged to watch Whistler warming his etched plates ready for the printing-press, and seen him actually quivering with excited sensibility as the plate seemed to respond sensitively to the exigence of his own exquisite sense of tone. But, of course, no eighteenth-century colour-prints, however charming in tone, suggest that there were any Whistlers engaged in the printing of them. Perhaps that is why our modern master of the copper-plate never cared for these dainty things, as he did greatly care for Japanese colour-prints. The old printers, however, had their own definite manner of work, and their own tricks of experience for producing pleasing and brilliant effects. By the dusting of a little dry colour on to the moist, here and there, during the printing process, they could heighten tones, or by very, very lightly dragging a piece of muslin over the surface of the plate they could persuade the tints to a more tender and harmonious intimacy. Of course, when the plate was printed, the colour was taken only by the dots and lines of the engraving, the white paper peeping between. If would-be buyers of colour-prints would only remember this simple fact, and examine the stippling closely to see whether it really shows the colour, they would not so constantly be deceived into buying entirely hand-coloured prints. Whether the old printers and engravers authorised and sponsored the touching-up of the prints with water-colour which one almost invariably finds, at least to some slight extent, even in the best examples, with rare exceptions, it is impossible to determine. At all events, it is presumable that the eyes and lips were touched up before the prints left the publishers’ shops.

It must not be supposed, however, that colour had ousted from public favour the print in monochrome. As a matter of fact, it was usually only after the proofs and earlier brilliant impressions in monochrome had been worked off, and the plate was beginning to look a little worn, that the aid of colour was called in to give the print a fresh lease of popularity. Indeed, with mezzotint a slightly worn plate generally took the colours most effectively. This is why one sees so very seldom an engraver’s proof in colours, the extreme rarity of its appearance making always a red-letter moment at Christie’s. Therefore, in spite of the ever-widening vogue of the colour-print, it was always the artist and engraver that counted, while the printer in colours was scarcely ever named. And the new industry of stipple-engraving may be said to have been, in its first days of popularity, monopolised almost by Ryland and Bartolozzi, in association with Angelica Kauffman and John Baptist Cipriani.

Cipriani had, by his elegant and tasteful designs, won immediate favour on his arrival in England, and even the Lord Mayor’s coach was decorated with panels of his painting. His style prepared the way for Angelica Kauffman, and together they soon brought a new pictorial element to the service of home-decoration. Their graceful rhythmic treatment of classic fables was just what the brothers Adam wanted for their decorative schemes, and the two Italian artists were extensively employed to paint panels for walls and ceilings. In time the fair Angelica outdistanced Cipriani in popularity, and, painting panels for cabinets, commodes, pier-table tops, and other pieces of decorative furniture, her taste was soon dominating that of the fashionable world. No wonder then that, when Ryland and Bartolozzi, through the medium of their facile and adaptable engravings, made her charming, if not flawlessly drawn, compositions readily accessible, the public eagerly bought them, and, framing them, generally without any margin, according to their own oval and circular forms, found them the very mural adornments that the prevailing Adam taste seemed to suggest. In monochrome or in colours, the prints, with their refined and fluent fancies, pictured from Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Homer, and Angelica’s beautiful face and figure vivid in several, had an extraordinarily wide appeal. They flattered the fashionable culture of the day, when to quote Horace familiarly in ordinary conversation was almost a patent of gentility. On the continent they were even copied for the decoration of porcelain.

For Ryland this meant another spell of prosperity: it also meant 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.