II.
The sentimental mood for the storied picture was now being fostered by the universal reading of the novel, which in its mid-eighteenth-century form gave its readers new experiences in the presentation of actual contemporary life, with analysis of their feelings and cultivation of there sensibilities. Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, Sophia Western and Amelia, Olivia, Maria, were as living in interest as any of the beautiful high-born ladies whose portraits in mezzotint, translated from the canvasses of the great painters, appealed from the printsellers’ windows in all the monochrome beauty of their medium. The public, steeped now in sentiment, wanted to see their imaginary heroines in picture: nor had theylong to wait. The Royal Academy had become a vital factor in forming public taste, and the printsellers’ shops were its mirrors. But not all its members and exhibitors were Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses. There were, for instance, Angelica Kauffman and Cipriani, with their seductive Italian graces of design; there was Bartolozzi, with his beautiful draughtsmanship, and his brilliant facile craft on the copper-plate, but the medium that should bring these into familiar touch with popular taste was still to seek. However, it was at hand, and the man who found this medium, and brought it to the service of popular art, was William Wynne Ryland, “engraver to the King.”
Whether the so-called crayon method of engraving, in imitation of soft chalk drawings, was invented by Jean Charles François, or Gilles Demarteau, or Louis Bonnet—all three claimed the credit of it—it was, at all events, from François, whose claim had obtained official recognition, that Ryland, the pupil of Ravenet and Le Bas, and, in a measure, of Boucher, learned the method while he was still a student in Paris. Only later in his career, however, long after he had left behind him his student days in Paris and Rome, and achieved prosperity in London as a line-engraver and printseller, with royal patronage, and with social success as a man of fashion and pleasure, did he remember the process that François had imparted to him. Then, in his necessity, when his extravagances had brought him to bankruptcy, he called the dotted crayon manner to memory, and saw in stipple-engraving, if suitably employed, a possible asset of importance. Compared with line and even with mezzotint it was a very easy and rapid way of engraving, and though, of course, it could not compare with either in nobility, richness and brilliance of effect, Ryland realised that its soft rendering of tones by artistically balanced masses of dots might be adapted to dainty and delicate drawings. The most fortunate opportunity for proving this was at hand. He had some personal acquaintance with Angelica Kauffman, whom Lady Wentworth had brought to London some ten years before, and whose beauty, talents and personal charm had meanwhile made her a fashionable artistic idol, with Society and its beauties flocking to her studio to be painted or to buy her pictures. Having first tested his stippling with his own designs, gracefully French in manner, which he published soon afterwards as “Domestic Employments,” Ryland suggested the idea of stipple-engraving to the sympathetic young painter. When he had experimented with one or two of her drawings, she gladly recognised that stipple was the very medium for the interpretation of her work to the public. The first prints sold “like wildfire,” and so satisfied was Ryland of the profitableprospect, that, on the strength of it, he promptly re-established himself in a printselling business at 159, Strand. His confidence was amply justified, the public being quick to show their appreciation of the new method, introduced as it was with all the persuasion of the fair Angelica’s graceful, fanciful designs of classic story and allegory. This was in 1775, and within a very short time Ryland found that, rapidly as she designed and he engraved, he could scarcely keep pace with the demand for these prints, which, the more readily to crave the popular fancy, he printed in red ink, to imitate red chalk, later to be known as the “Bartolozzi red.”
Ryland had called Bartolozzi into consultation, and the gifted Italian engraver, with his greater mastery of technique, his delicate sense of beauty, and his finer artistic perceptions, had seen all that might be done with the new way of stipple; he saw also its limitations. With enthusiasm Bartolozzi and Ryland had worked together till they had evolved from the crayon manner of François a process of engraving which proved so happily suited to the classes of fanciful and sentimental prints now fast becoming the vogue, that it simply jumped into a popularity which no other medium of the engraver’s art had ever attained.
The stipple method may be thus described. The copper-plate was covered with an etching-ground, on to which the outlined picture was transferred from paper. Then the contours of the design were lightly etched in a series of dots, all the dark and middle shadows being rendered by larger or more closely etched dots, the later engravers using even minute groups of dots. This accomplished, the acid was next applied with very great care, and all the etched dots bitten in. The waxen ground was then removed from the plate, and the work with the dry-point and the curved stipple-graver was commenced. With these tools the lighter shadows were accomplished, and the bitten portions of the picture were deepened and strengthened wherever required, to attain greater fulness or brilliance of effect.
Engraving in dots was, of course, no new thing; as an accessory to line-engraving it had often been called into service by the earlier artists. Giulio Campagnola, Albert Dürer, Agostino Veneziano, Ottavio Leoni, for example, had used it; we frequently find it employed by our own seventeenth-century line-men the better to suggest flesh-tones, and Ludwig von Siegen, in describing his invention of mezzotint in 1642, includes the “dotted manner” among the known forms of engraving. Then there was theopus mallei, or method of punching dots in the plate with a mallet and awl, which was successfully practised by Jan Lutma, of Amsterdam, late in the seventeenth century. This may be considered the trueprecursor of stipple, just as the harpsichord, with the same keyboard, but a different manner of producing the notes, was the precursor of the pianoforte; but it must have been a very laborious process, and Lutma found few imitators.
Under the ægis of Ryland and Bartolozzi, however, and with the inspiration of Angelica Kauffman’s “harmonious but shackled fancy,” as a contemporary critic put it, for its initial impetus, stipple was developed as a separate and distinctive branch of the engraver’s art. Its popularity was now to be further enhanced by the gentle and persuasive aid of colour. Ryland had seen many specimens of colour-printing in Paris, when he was with François and with Boucher; he now bethought him that, just as the public fancy had been captured by red-chalk imitations, so might it be enchanted by engraved representations of water-colour drawings actually printed in colours. Angelica Kauffman and Bartolozzi eagerly encouraged the idea, and the two engravers, after many experiments, determined the best process of colouring and printing from the plates. Apparently they rejected the multi-plate method tried six years previously by that interesting artist Captain William Baillie; and Ryland’s earliest colour-prints were partially tinted only with red and blue. Mrs. Frankau tells us, on the authority of a tradition handed down in his old age from James Minasi, one of Bartolozzi’s most trusted pupils, that an Alsatian named Seigneuer was responsible for all the earlier colour-printed impressions of Ryland’s and Bartolozzi’s stipples after Angelica Kauffman and Cipriani, that then he set up on his own account as a colour-printer, much recommended by Bartolozzi, and largely employed by the publishers, and that his printing may be traced, though unsigned, by a transparency of tone due to the use of a certain vitreous white which he imported in a dry state from Paris. Minasi must, of course, have been a perfect mine of Bartolozzi traditions, but when my father in his boyhood knew him and his musical son, the distinguished engraver would talk of nothing but music, for in 1829, with steel plates superseding the copper, and lithography triumphant, there seemed no prospect that the coloured stipples, already some time out of fashion, would eighty years later be inspiring curiosity as to how they were done. One sees, of course, many feeble colour-prints of the period, which of old the undiscriminating public accepted as readily as to-day they buy, for “old prints,” modern cheap foreign reproductions which would disgrace a sixpenny “summer number.” On the other hand, the really fine examples of the old-time colour-printing, combined with brilliant engraving—and, of course, only fine things are the true collector’s desiderata, irrespective of margins and “state” letterings, and otherfoolish fads—are certainly works of art, though a very delicate art of limited compass.
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 charmingCupid bound to a Tree by Nymphs, among our illustrations, and many other pleasing plates, such asVenus 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’sTelemachus at the Court of Sparta, and it was onlynatural 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 asLady 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,UnaandAbra, 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 prettyFavourite Chickens—Saturday Morning—Going to Market, after the popular W. R. Bigg, andThe 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 himso 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 theHon. Anne BinghamandLavinia, 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, andMaster Henry Hoare, theHon. Mrs. Stanhopeas“Contemplation,”Lady Beauchamp(afterwards Countess of Hertford),A Bacchante(Mrs. Hartley, the actress, and her child), the Spencer children inThe Mask, andThe 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’sBacchanteandNature(Lady Hamilton), Henry Meyer’sNaturetoo, some of the Morland prints by the Wards, Smith, and Keating; S. W. Reynolds’sCountess of Oxford, J. R. Smith’sMrs. Bouverie, and a few other important Hoppner prints, C. Turner’sPenn Family, after Reynolds, Smith’sSynnot Children, after Wright of Derby, andMrs. 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 theHobbinol and Ganderetta(Tomkins), reproduced here, and theLavinia(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 representthe master; while, as to mezzotint, W. Whiston Barney’s version of Gainsborough’sDuchess of Devonshirewas, 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 lovelyEmmaandSerena(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 atMrs. Bouverie,Mrs. Tickell,Mrs. Jackson,Mrs. Fitzherbert,Mrs. Robinson as “Melania”,and the beautiful youthHorace Beckford; J. S. Agar did delicatelyHarriet, Lady Cockerell, as a Gipsy Woman,Lady Heathcote, andMrs. Duff; Cardon, with his distinguished touch, engraved the charmingMadame Récamier, Schiavonetti theMrs. Maria CoswayandMichel and Isabella Oginesy, Bartolozzi theMrs. Harding, Mariano Bovi theLady Diana Sinclair, and Charles White the prettyInfancy(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 favouriteof 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 anA.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 theMrs. Siddonsby Tomkins, theDuchess of Devonshireand theViscountess Duncannonby Bartolozzi,Lady Elizabeth Fosterby Caroline Watson,Miss Farren(Countess of Derby) by Collyer, andFrances Kembleby 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 “theton,” 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 greatpopularity 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 theSaturday Morningof Burke, theSaturday EveningandSunday Morningof Nutter;Dulce DomumandBlack Mondayof John Jones;RompsandTruantsof William Ward;Shelling PeasandThe Hop Pickerof Tomkins;College Breakfast,College Supper, andRural Misfortunesof Ogborne,The Sailor Boy’s ReturnandThe Shipwrecked Sailor Boyof Gaugain.
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’sSeasons, engraved by Tomkins and Bartolozzi; the graceful set ofThe Monthsby Bartolozzi and Gardiner; the idyllicMorningandEveningby Tomkins, withNoonandNightby Delattre, the numerous designs of children at play, such asSummer’s Amusement,Winter’s Amusement,How Smooth, Brother! feel again,The Castle in Danger, by Gaugain;Breaking-upandThe Masqueradeby Nutter;Blind Man’s BuffandSea-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—especiallyThe 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 thirteenCries 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, Gaugainand 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 ReturnandThe Sailor’s Return, by William Ward,The Smitten Clown, by S. W. Reynolds; in stipple, theSummerandWinterof the Bartolozzi “Season” set, of which Westall did theSpringandAutumn;The Cottage DoorandThe School Door, by Keating;Setting out to the FairandThe Fairings, by J. Eginton, and the prettyLittle Turkey Cockby 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 pairThe FarmyardandThe Ale-house Door, Burke’sVicar of the Parish, Eginton’sBallad-Singer, Knight’sBritish PlentyandScarcity in India, some children subjects by Meadows and Benedetti, and E. Scott’sLingo 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’sThe Rosebud,The Sensitive Plant, andCupid Sleeping; Josi’sInnocent Mischief,Innocent Revenge, and Schiavonetti’sThe Ghost, a pretty but unequal companion toThe Maskof 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’sFifth of November,Feeding Chickens,The Dunce Disgraced,The Scholar Rewarded,Coming from School, andBuffet the Bear,Runaway Love,Rosina,Flora, and the popularSweet Poll of Plymouth, Nutter’sFirst Bite, andJust Breeched; Strutt’sNurs’d at HomeandNurs’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 hisR.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 prettySylviaandLydia, by Dickinson; White’sLoveandThe Enraptured Youth; John Peter Simon’sMuch Ado about Nothing; Hogg’sSophia, and J. R, Smith’sThe Chanters.The Three Holy Childrenin 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 charmingMaria,Maternal Love(Mrs. Morgan and child), andChildren Feeding Chickens. Collyer’sMrs. Fitzherbertis also one of the most desirable among the numerous Russell colour-prints. When the engravings of Charles Ansell’sDeath of a Racehorsein 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 ofThe English FiresideandThe French Fireside,The English Dressing-RoomandThe 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 ParkandThe 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 areMorning Employmentsby Tomkins,The SongandThe Danceby Bartolozzi,The Modern Gracesby Scott, andBlack-eyed Susanby 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 inA 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 ofCatherine 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 Boxesand the interesting and vividVauxhall, spiritedly engraved by Pollard, and capitally aquatinted by Francis Jukes, were not, as generally supposed, actually printed in colours; butThe SyrensandNarcissa, 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 famousLady Cockburn and her Children. The new venture wasA 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 hisCollina. Hoppner’s Hon. Mrs. Paget asPsycheis 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 lovelyCountess of Oxford—a choice example—andMrs. Whitbread, by S. W. Reynolds; J. R. Smith’sSophia WesternandMrs. Bouverie, with an engaging suggestion of pastel; Charles Turner’sLady Cholmondeley and Child; John Jones’sMrs. Jordan as “Hippolyta”; John Young’sLady Charlotte Greville,Mrs. Hoppner as “Eliza,”Mrs. Orby Hunter, the Godsall children (The Setting Sun), andLady Lambton and Children(one of them Lawrence’sMaster Lambton); William Ward’s prettySalad Girl,Mrs. Benwell, andThe Daughtersof Sir Thomas Franklana, so well known in monochrome, but so exceedingly rare in colour; James Ward’sJuvenile Retirement(the Douglas children);Children Bathing(Hoppner’s own);Mrs. Hibbert, and the gracefulMiranda(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 ofAn Actressfrom 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 artisticdefiance 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; andWhat you Will;A Christmas Holiday;FlirtillaandNarcissa;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 handsThe Widow’s Talemakes a charming appearance in coloured mezzotint. In this medium alsoThe Promenade at Carlisle Houseenjoys an elusive existence. Then there are Smith’sLecture on GaddingandThe Moralist, stippled by Nutter, and hisCredulous Lady and the Astrologer, by Simon. But not even his own designs inspired his mezzotint-scraper to finer results than the splendidAlmeria(Mrs. Meynott), after Opie, or his stipple-graver to surer beauty than in hisMrs. Millsafter Engelheart, or hisSnake in the Grass, after Reynolds, or those charming and familiar Morland printsDelia in TownandDelia in the Country,Rustic EmploymentandRural Amusement, and theLetitiaset, 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-knownLouise,Alinda,Lucy of Leinster,Almeida,The Soliloquy,Hesitation,Louisa Mildmay, andThe 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 samegenrearePrivate Amusement(“Reflection”) andPublic 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 areThe Citizen’s Retreat,Selling Rabbits,CompassionateChildren,The Haymakers,Outside of a Country Ale-house,SummerandWinter, and the well-knownVegetable Market, the companion to which,A Poultry Market, was finely engraved by James Ward himself, whose own attractive plates ofThe Rocking HorseandRustic FelicityandA Cottager going to MarketandA 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 ofGreen Grow the Rashes, O, ofMy Nannie, O, orThe 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 prolificactivity, 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 populargenrepainters 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 asA Visit to the Child at NurseandA 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’sThe 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 mezzotintsChildren Birds-nesting,Juvenile Navigators,Blind Man’s Buff,The Kite Entangled; Keating’sPlaying at Soldiers, andNurse and Children in a Field; Dayes’Children Nutting, and Tomkins’s stippleChildren 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.
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’sRustic EmploymentandRural Amusement,Delia in TownandDelia in the Country, and the famousStory of Letitiaseries—Domestic Happiness,The Elopement,The Virtuous Parent,Dressing for the Masquerade,The Tavern Door, andThe 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 areConstancy(Mrs. Ward),Variety(Mrs. Morland), andMorning;Thoughts on Amusement for the Evening—a very rare oval—by William Ward;Louisa, a pair of large ovals,The Lass of Livingstone, andHow Sweet to meet with Love’s Return, the famousDancing Dogs, andGuinea Pigs, all by T. Gaugain (the last pair re-issued by Phillipe);The Tea GardenandSt. James’s Park, by F. D. Soiron;The Squire’sDoorandThe Farmer’s Door, by Duterreau;The Farmer’s Visit to his Married Daughter in Town, by W. Bond, andThe Visit Returned in the Country, by Nutter;IndustryandIdleness(Mrs. Morland), by Knight, andThe Fair Seducer, andThe 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 addThe Angling Partyby Keating, andThe Angler’s Repastby William Ward, to whom we are also indebted forThe 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, andThe Farmer’s Stable, Morland’s National Gallery masterpiece;The Return from Market, a beautiful thing, andFeeding the Pigs, by J. R. Smith;Sunset: a View in Leicestershire, by James Ward;SummerandWinterby W. Barnard;Morning, or the Benevolent Sportsman;Evening, or the Sportsman’s Return, by J. Grozer, andSelling CherriesandShelling 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.