Part 4

Then there was William Hamilton, a prolific and prevalent artist. Sent to Italy in his youth by Robert Adam, the architect, he returned with a sort of Italianate style of storied design, classical, historical, allegorical, conventional; but, happily, he developed a light, pretty and decorative manner of treating simple familiar subjects, which was pleasing alike to engravers and public. The charming plates from Thomson’s _Seasons_, engraved by Tomkins and Bartolozzi; the graceful set of _The Months_ by Bartolozzi and Gardiner; the idyllic _Morning_ and _Evening_ by Tomkins, with _Noon_ and _Night_ by Delattre, the numerous designs of children at play, such as _Summer’s Amusement_, _Winter’s Amusement_, _How Smooth, Brother! feel again_, _The Castle in Danger_, by Gaugain; _Breaking-up_ and _The Masquerade_ by Nutter; _Blind Man’s Buff_ and _Sea-Saw_, _Children feeding Fowls_, _Children playing with a Bird_, by Knight; _Playing at Hot Cockles_, and others by Bartolozzi: these are among the prettiest colour-prints of the period and the most valued to-day--especially _The Months_. Hamilton’s work just synchronised with the popular vogue for the coloured stipple, and without these prints how much should we know of an artist so esteemed in his day, and so industrious? One might almost ask the same of Francis Wheatley, whose popularity also survives but through the engraver’s medium. It was only after his return from Dublin, where he might have continued to the end as a prosperous portrait-painter had not Dublin society discovered that the lady it had welcomed as Mrs. Wheatley was somebody else’s wife, that Wheatley began painting those idealised urban, rustic, and domestic subjects, which gave him such contemporary vogue and led to his prompt admission among the Royal Academicians. Had he never painted anything else he would always be remembered by his thirteen _Cries of London_, published by Colnaghi at intervals between 1793 and 1797, and so familiar to us through the accomplished copper-plates of the Schiavonetti brothers, Vendramini, Gaugain and Cardon, though, alas! so wretchedly hackneyed through the innumerable paltry reproductions. But what a fascinating, interesting set of prints it is! How redolent of old lavender! How clean, serene, and country-town-like the London streets appear; how sweet and fragrant they seem to smell; how idyllic the life in them! As one looks at these prints one can almost fancy one hears the old cries echoing through those quiet Georgian streets. Perhaps the London streets of 1795 were not quite so dainty as Wheatley’s sympathetic pencil makes them look to have been. But, remember, that in those days lovely ladies in muslin frocks and printed calicoes of the new fashion, who had sat to Reynolds, and whose portraits were in the print-shop windows, were still being carried in the leisurely sedan-chair, and there were many pretty airs and graces to be seen; while in those streets, too, the youthful Turner was seeing atmosphere and feeling his graphic way to immortality, and young Charles Lamb was walking about, “lending his heart with usury” to all the humanity he saw in those very streets which these Wheatley prints keep so fragrant. Of the numberless other colour-prints after Wheatley perhaps the most valued to-day are, in mezzotint, _The Disaster_, _The Soldier’s Return_ and _The Sailor’s Return_, by William Ward, _The Smitten Clown_, by S. W. Reynolds; in stipple, the _Summer_ and _Winter_ of the Bartolozzi “Season” set, of which Westall did the _Spring_ and _Autumn_; _The Cottage Door_ and _The School Door_, by Keating; _Setting out to the Fair_ and _The Fairings_, by J. Eginton, and the pretty _Little Turkey Cock_ by Delattre, all admirable examples of the kind of art that made Wheatley’s reputation.

The pleasant uninspired rusticities and sentimentalities of Henry Singleton were to popular as to engage the abilities of some of the leading engravers, who must certainly have made the best of them for the colour-printer, since Singleton’s colouring was accounted poor even in his own day. Among the most taking examples we have Nutter’s pretty pair _The Farmyard_ and _The Ale-house Door_, Burke’s _Vicar of the Parish_, Eginton’s _Ballad-Singer_, Knight’s _British Plenty_ and _Scarcity in India_, some children subjects by Meadows and Benedetti, and E. Scott’s _Lingo and Cowslip_, which shows that genuinely comic actor, John Edwin, and that audaciously eccentric and adventurous actress, Mrs. Wells, in O’Keefe’s notorious Haymarket farce, “The Agreeable Surprise,” a group which Downman also pictured, though with infinitely more spirit and character.

Subjects dealing with childhood were still greatly in demand, but the public now wanted the children to be more grown-up, and more mundane than the cupids and cherubim of Cipriani, or the Baby Loves and Bacchanals of Lady Diana Beauclerc, so admired by Horace Walpole, and so much flattered by the engravings of Bartolozzi, Tomkins and Bovi. The prolific Richard Westall was not behind his brother Academicians in adapting his inspiration to the market, so, combining rural fancy, as required, with the sentiment of child-life, he made many a parlour look homelier with his pleasant, plausible picturings. When the charm of the engraving glossed over the weaknesses, and colour-printing added its enticing advocacy under Westall’s personal direction, we can find some justification for their popularity in such prints as Nutter’s _The Rosebud_, _The Sensitive Plant_, and _Cupid Sleeping_; Josi’s _Innocent Mischief_, _Innocent Revenge_, and Schiavonetti’s _The Ghost_, a pretty but unequal companion to _The Mask_ of Reynolds.

Although at this productive period of the colour-print William Blake’s “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.