Part 5

No wonder all the engravers were agog to make copper-plates from his quickly finished paintings. That charming spontaneity of picturesque impression, with luminous harmony of tones, which distinguishes all Morland’s pictures, even those painted in his least reputable days of hand-to-mouth living, is reflected in the best engravings of his multitudinous works. Of those printed in colours one may attempt a selection from the point of view of especially fine quality and rarity. Among the stipples, therefore, must be named again J. R. Smith’s _Rustic Employment_ and _Rural Amusement_, _Delia in Town_ and _Delia in the Country_, and the famous _Story of Letitia_ series--_Domestic Happiness_, _The Elopement_, _The Virtuous Parent_, _Dressing for the Masquerade_, _The Tavern Door_, and _The Fair Penitent_ (re-issued in 1811 with the ample costumes of 1786 incongruously altered to the current slim Empire fashion, upsetting, of course, the pictorial balance of design). Then there are _Constancy_ (Mrs. Ward), _Variety_ (Mrs. Morland), and _Morning_; _Thoughts on Amusement for the Evening_--a very rare oval--by William Ward; _Louisa_, a pair of large ovals, _The Lass of Livingstone_, and _How Sweet to meet with Love’s Return_, the famous _Dancing Dogs_, and _Guinea Pigs_, all by T. Gaugain (the last pair re-issued by Phillipe); _The Tea Garden_ and _St. James’s Park_, by F. D. Soiron; _The Squire’s Door_ and _The Farmer’s Door_, by Duterreau; _The Farmer’s Visit to his Married Daughter in Town_, by W. Bond, and _The Visit Returned in the Country_, by Nutter; _Industry_ and _Idleness_ (Mrs. Morland), by Knight, and _The Fair Seducer_, and _The Discovery_, by E. J. Dumée.

Many of Morland’s pictures on the mezzotint plates seem to have justified the colour-printer, but innumerable Morland prints were coloured by hand entirely or in part, and it is said that J. R. Smith employed his young pupil Joseph Mallord William Turner upon this work. I doubt, however, if even Mr. Rawlinson could detect Turner’s hand upon a Morland print, therefore we must be content to distinguish the finest and rarest of the mezzotints actually printed in colours. To those already named we may add _The Angling Party_ by Keating, and _The Angler’s Repast_ by William Ward, to whom we are also indebted for _The Coquette at her Toilet_, _The Pledge of Love_ (“Contemplating the Miniature”); _Contemplation_ (“Caroline of Lichfield”), very rare, and exquisitely suggestive of the original in Mr. Thomas Barratt’s wonderful Morland collection; _Cottagers_, _Travellers_, _The Thatcher_, _First of September--Morning_, _First of September--Evening_, _Inside of a Country Ale-house_, _The Public-House Door_, _The Effects of Extravagance and Idleness_, _The Turnpike Gate_, _The Sportsman’s Return_, and _The Farmer’s Stable_, Morland’s National Gallery masterpiece; _The Return from Market_, a beautiful thing, and _Feeding the Pigs_, by J. R. Smith; _Sunset: a View in Leicestershire_, by James Ward; _Summer_ and _Winter_ by W. Barnard; _Morning, or the Benevolent Sportsman_; _Evening, or the Sportsman’s Return_, by J. Grozer, and _Selling Cherries_ and _Shelling Peas_, a very rare pair, etched and mezzotinted by E. Bell. Then there is “The Deserter” set, by Keating, _Enlisting a Recruit_, _Recruit deserted and detected hiding in his wife’s room_, _The Deserter handcuffed and conveyed to a court martial_, _The Deserter pardoned and restored to his family_; a set of pictures studied with realism resulting from one of Morland’s characteristic adventures, possible, perhaps, only in the eighteenth century. _Snipe Shooting_, one of a set of four, by G. Catton, Jun., must not be forgotten; it is of particular interest as showing aquatint in effective combination with stipple and etching. How important a place Morland fills in the history of eighteenth-century prints, one realises only when, looking over a collection like Mr. Thomas Barratt’s at Hampstead, where the colour-prints are to be seen in their multitude, one attempts to note down a few gems, and finds a long list has quickly accumulated.

III.

Bartolozzi had come to England as an acknowledged master of line-engraving, rival even of the splendid Sir Robert Strange, and the spontaneous charm and fluent beauty of his incomparable etchings after Guercino, and the lovely lines of his _Clytie_ and his _Silence_ after Annibale Carracci, had simply astonished the connoisseurs. His accomplished and prolific etching-point and graver carried an unaccustomed grace and delicacy into many a channel of the engraving industry. The benefit concert-ticket of the humblest musician was engraved as finely and brilliantly as the diploma of the Royal Academy, while the book-illustration of the day was largely enriched by the easy charm of his touch. Then, as we have seen, the little art of stipple came almost like a fairy-gift to his ready hand, so opportune was the moment. Bartolozzi’s sweet caressing sense of beauty found inevitable expression through the gentle possibilities of the medium, and the public became eagerly responsive. With the encouragement of a popularity daily on the increase, and the appreciation of his brother artiste, he produced those charming stipple prints which are among the masterpieces of the method, and make, for many people, the name of Bartolozzi synonymous with “beautiful old colour-prints.”

He was still the true artist, doing worthy things, interpreting beauty with an elusive magic of charm all his own. Pupils flocked to his studio; among them engravers of repute, who realised that the new and easy stipple was going to prove more remunerative than the laborious line-method, or even mezzotint. Pupils, too, there were who learnt from Bartolozzi so well, that they equalled their master while yet in their pupilage, as he admitted, either with generous praise, or by the ambiguous method of signing their plates with his own name. Unfortunately for his reputation this was a practice that grew upon him, for, since the name of Bartolozzi had a distinct market value, he appended it sometimes to prints quite unworthy of its bearer. For the modern collector this, of course, involves frequent snares and delusions.

Bartolozzi has been called the Achilles of eighteenth-century 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.