OLD ENGLISH COLOUR-PRINTS
“Otherpictures we look at—his prints we read,” said Charles Lamb, speaking with affectionate reverence of Hogarth. Now, after “reading” those wonderful Progresses of the Rake and the Harlot, which had for him all the effect of books, intellectually vivid with human interest, let us suppose our beloved essayist looking at those “other pictures,” Morland’s “Story of Letitia” series, in John Raphael Smith’s charming stipple-plates, colour-printed for choice, first issued while Lamb was hardly in his teens. Though they might not be, as in Hogarth’s prints, “intense thinking faces,” expressive of “permanent abiding ideas” in which he would read Letitia’s world-old story, Lamb would doubtless look at these Morland prints with a difference. He would look at them with an interest awakened less by their not too poignant intention of dramatic pathos than by the charm of their simple pictorial appeal, heightened by the dainty persuasion of colour.
There is a fascination about eighteenth-century prints which tempts me in fancy to picture the gentle Elia stopping at every printseller’s window that lay on his daily route to the East India House in Leadenhall Street. How many these were might “admit a wide solution,” since he arrived invariably late at the office; but Alderman Boydell’s in Cheapside, where the engraving art could be seen in its dignified variety and beauty, and Mr. Carington Bowles’s in St. Paul’s Churchyard, with the humorous mezzotints, plain and coloured, must have stayed him long. Then, surely among the old colour-prints which charm us to-day there were some that would make their contemporary appeal to Elia’s fancy, as he would linger among the curious crowd outside the windows of Mr. J. R. Smith in King Street, Covent Garden, or Mr. Macklin’s Poet’s Gallery in Fleet Street, Mr. Tomkins in Bond Street, or Mr. Colnaghi—Bartolozzi’s “much-beloved Signor Colnaghi”—in Pall Mall. Not arcadian scenes, perhaps, with “flocks of silly sheep,” nor “boys as infant Bacchuses or Jupiters,” nor even the beautiful ladies of rank and fashion; but theCries of Londonat Colnaghi’s must have arrided so true a Londoner, and may we not imagine the relish with which Lamb would stop to look at the prints of the players? The DownmanMrs. Siddons, say, or theMiss Farren, or that most joyous of Romney prints,Mrs. Jordan as “The Romp”,which would seem to give pictorial justification for Lamb’s own vivid reminiscence of the actress, as his words lend almost the breath of life to the picture. Yet these had not then come to the dignity of “old prints,” with a mellow lure of antique tone.Their beautiful soft paper—hand-made as a matter of course, since there was no other—which we handle and hold up to the light with such sensitive reverence, was not yet grown venerable from the touch of long-vanished hands. They were as fresh as a busy industry of engravers, printers, and paper-makers could turn them out, and of a contemporary popularity that died early of a plethora.
What, then, is their peculiar charm for us to-day, those colour-prints of stipple or mezzotint engravings which pervaded the later years of the eighteenth century, and the earliest of the nineteenth? No serious student, perhaps, would accord them a very high or important place in the history of art. Yet a pleasant little corner of their own they certainly merit, representing, as they do, a characteristic contemporary phase of popular taste, and of artistic activity, essentially English. Whatever may be thought of their intrinsic value as works of art, there is no denying their special appeal of pictorial prettiness and sentiment and of dainty decorative charm. Nor, to judge from the recent records of the sale-rooms, would this appeal seem to be of any uncertain kind. It has lately been eloquent enough to compete with the claims of artistic works of indisputable worth, and those collectors who have heard it for the first time only during the last ten years or so have had to pay highly for their belated responsiveness. Those, on the other hand, who listened long ago to the gentle appeal of the old English colour-prints, who listened before the market had heard it, and, loving them for their own pretty sakes, or their old-time illustrative interest, or their decorative accompaniment to Sheraton and Chippendale, would pick them up in the printsellers’ shops for equitable sums that would now be regarded as “mere songs,” can to-day look round their walls at the rare and brilliant impressions of prints which first charmed them twenty or thirty years ago, and smile contentedly at the inflated prices clamorous from Christie’s. For nowadays the decorative legacy of the eighteenth century—a legacy of dignity, elegance, beauty, charm—seems to involve ever-increasing legacy duties, which must be paid ungrudgingly.
A collector, whose house is permeated with the charm and beauty of eighteenth-century arts and crafts, asked recently my advice as to what he should next begin to collect. I suggested the original pictures of the more accomplished and promising of our younger living painters, a comparatively inexpensive luxury. He shook his head, and, before the evening, a choice William Ward, exceptional in colour, had proved irresistible. Yes, it is a curious and noteworthy fact that the collector of old English colour-prints has rarely, if ever, any sympathy with modern art, however fine, however beautiful. He will frankly admit this, and, while he tellsyou that he loves colour, you discover that it is only colour which has acquired the mellowing charm of time and old associations. So your colour-print collector will gladly buy a dainty drawing by Downman, delicately tinted on the back, or a pastel by J. R. Smith, somewhat purple, maybe, in the flesh-tints, while the sumptuous colouring of a Brangwyn will rouse in him no desire for possession, a Lavery’s harmonies will stir him not at all, and the mystic beauty of tones in anyLate Moonrisethat a Clausen may paint will say to him little or nothing. But then, one may ask, why is he content with the simple colour-schemes of these dainty and engaging prints, when the old Japanese, and still older Chinese, colour-prints offer wonderful and beautiful harmonies that no English colour-printer ever dreamt of? And why, if we chance to meet this lover of colour at the National Gallery, do we find him, not revelling joyously in the marvellously rich, luminous tones of a Filippino Lippi, for example, or the glorious hues of a Titian, but quietly happy in front of, say, Morland’sInside of a Stable, or Reynolds’sSnake in the Grass?
Well, we have only to pass a little while in his rooms, looking at his prints in their appropriate environment of beautiful old furniture, giving ourselves up to the pervading old-time atmosphere, and we shall begin to understand him and sympathise with his consistency. And, as the spell works, we shall find ourselves growing convinced that even a Venice set of Whistler etchings would seem decoratively incongruous amid those particular surroundings. For it is the spell, not of intrinsic artistic beauty, but of the eighteenth century that is upon us. It is the spell of a graceful period, compact of charm, elegance and sensibility, that these pretty old colour-prints, so typically English in subject and design, cast over us as we look at them. Thus they present themselves to us, not as so many mere engravings printed in varied hues, but rather as so many pictorial messages—whispered smilingly, some of them—from those years of ever-fascinating memory, when the newly-born Royal Academy was focussing the artistic taste and accomplishment of the English people, and Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, were translating the typical transient beauty in terms of enduring art, while the great engravers were extending the painters’ fame, and the furniture-makers and all the craftsmen were supporting them with a new and a classic grace; when Johnson was talking stately, inspiring common-sense, Goldsmith was “writing like an angel,” and Sheridan was “catching the manners living as they rose”; when Fanny Burney was keeping her vivid diaries, and Walpole and Mrs. Delany were—we thank Providence—writing letters; when the doings of the players at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, or the fashionable revellers at Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and the Pantheon, were as momentous to “thetown” as the debates at Westminster, and a lovely duchess could immortalise a parliamentary election with a democratic kiss. These prints, hinting of Fielding and Richardson, Goldsmith and Sterne, tell us that sentiment, romantic, rustic and domestic, had become as fashionable as wit and elegance, and far more popular; while a spreading feeling for nature, awakened by the poetry of Thomson, Gray and Collins, and nurtured later by Cowper, Crabbe and Burns, was forming a popular taste quite out of sympathy with the cold academic formalism and trammelled feeling of the age of Pope.
These literary influences are important to consider for any true appreciation of these old colour-prints, which, being a reflex in every respect of the popular spirit and character of the period in which they were produced, no other period could have bequeathed to us exactly as they are. And it is especially interesting to remember this, for, from the widespread popularity of these very prints, we may trace, in the pictures their great vogue called for, the origin of that abiding despot of popular English art which Whistler has, in his whimsical way, defined as the “British Subject.”
That the evolution of the colour-print, from its beginnings inchiaroscuro, can boast a long and fascinating history has been proved to admiration in the romantic and informing pages of Mrs. Frankau’s “Eighteenth-Century Colour-Prints”—a pioneer volume; but my present purpose is to tell the story only in so far as it concerns English art and taste.
Now, although during the seventeenth century we had in England a number of admirable and industrious engravers, we hear of no attempts among them to print engravings in anything but monochrome; so that, if they heard of the colour-experiments of Hercules Seghers, the Dutch etcher, whom Rembrandt admired, as doubtless they did hear, considering how constant and friendly was their intercourse with the Dutch and Flemish painters and engravers, none apparently thought it worth while to pursue the idea. But, after all, Seghers merely printed his etchings in one colour on a tinted paper, which can hardly be described as real colour-printing; and, if there had been any artistic value in the notion, would not the enterprising Hollar have attempted some use of it? Nor were our English line-engravers moved by any rumours they may have heard, or specimens they may have seen, of the experiments in colour-printing, made somewhere about 1680, by Johannes Teyler, of Nymegen in Holland, a painter, engraver, mathematical professor and military engineer. His were unquestionably the first true colour-prints, being impressions taken from one plate, the engraved lines of which were carefully painted with inks of different hues; and these prints may be seen in the British Museum, collected in alltheir numerous variety in the interesting and absolutely unique volume which Teyler evidently, to judge from the ornately engraved title-page, designed to publish as “Opus Typochromaticum.”
The experiment was of considerable interest, but one has only to look at these colour-printed line-engravings, with their crude juxtaposition of tints, to feel thankful that our English line-engravers were not lured from their allegiance to the black and white proper to their art. Doubtless they recognised that colour was opposed to the very spirit of the line-engraver’s art, just as, a hundred years later, the stipple-engravers realised that it could often enhance the charm of their own. In the black and white of a fine engraving there is a quality in the balancing of relative tones which in itself answers to the need of colour, which, in fact, suggests colour to the imagination; so the beauty and dignity of the graven line in a master’s hands must repel any adventitious chromatic aid. A Faithorne print, for instance, with its lines and cross-hatchings in colours is inconceivable; although one might complacently imagine Francis Place and Gaywood having, not inappropriately, experimented with Barlow’s birds and beasts after the manner of those in Teyler’s book. If, however, there were any English engravings of that period on which Teyler’s method of colour-printing might have been tried with any possibility of, at least, a popular success, they were surely Pierce Tempest’s curiousCryes of the City of London, after “Old” Laroon’s designs, which antedated by just over a hundred years the charming Wheatley “Cries,” so familiar, so desirable, in coloured stipple. But this was not to be, and not until the new and facile mezzotint method had gradually over-shadowed in popularity the older and more laborious line-engraving was the first essay in colour-printing made in England. In the year 1719 came Jacob Christopher Le Blon with his new invention, which he called “Printing Paintings.”
This invention was in effect a process of taking separate impressions, one over the other, from three plates of a desired picture, engraved in mezzotint, strengthened with line and etching, and severally inked each with the proportion of red, yellow, or blue, which, theorising according to Newton, Le Blon considered would go to make, when blended, the true colour-tones of any picture required. In fact, Le Blon practically anticipated the three-colour process of the present day; but in 1719 all the circumstances were against his success, bravely and indefatigably as he fought for it, influentially as he was supported.
Jacob Christopher Le Blon was a remarkable man, whose ingenious mind and restless, enthusiastic temperament led him through an artistic career of much adventure and many vicissitudes.Born in Frankfort in 1667—when Chinese artists were producing those marvels of colour-printing lately discovered by Mr. Lawrence Binyon in the British Museum—he studied painting and engraving for a while with Conrad Meyer, of Zurich, and subsequently in the studio of the famous Carlo Maratti at Rome, whither he had gone in 1696, in the suite of Count Martinetz, the French Ambassador. His studies seem to have been as desultory as his way of living. His friend Overbeck, however, recognising that Le Blon had talents which might develop with concentrated purpose, induced him in 1702 to settle down in Amsterdam and commence miniature-painter. The pictures in little which he did for snuff-boxes, bracelets, and rings, won him reputation and profit; but the minute work affected his eyesight, and instead he turned to portrait-painting in oils. Then the idea came to him of imitating oil-paintings by the colour-printing process, based on Newton’s theory of the three-colour composition of light, as I have described. Experimenting with promising results on paintings of his own, he next attempted to reproduce the pictures of the Italian masters, from which, under Maratti’s influence, he had learnt the secrets of colour. Without revealing his process, he showed his first “printed paintings” to several puzzled admirers, among them Prince Eugène of Savoy and, it is said, the famous Earl of Halifax, Newton’s friend, who invented the National Debt and the Bank of England. But, sanguine as Le Blon was that there was a fortune in his invention, he could obtain for it neither a patent nor financial support, though he tried for these at Amsterdam, the Hague, and Paris.
His opportunity came, however, when he met with Colonel Sir John Guise. An enthusiastic connoisseur of art, a collector of pictures (he left his collection to Christchurch College, Oxford), an heroic soldier, with a turn for fantastic exaggeration and romancing, which moved even Horace Walpole to protest, and call him “madder than ever,” Guise was just the man to be interested in the personality and the inventive schemes of Le Blon. Easily he persuaded the artist to come to London, and, through his introduction to many influential persons, he enlisted for Le Blon the personal interest of the King, who granted a royal patent, and permitted his own portrait to be done by the new process, of which this presentment of George I. is certainly one of the most successful examples, happiest in tone-harmony. Then, in 1721, a company was formed to work under the patent, with an establishment known as the “Picture Office,” and Le Blon himself to direct operations. Everything promised well, the public credit had just been restored after the South Sea Bubble, the shares were taken up to a substantial extent, and for a time all went well. An interesting prospectuswas issued, with a list of colour-prints after pictures, chiefly sacred and mythological, by Maratti, Annibale Carracci, Titian, Correggio, Vandyck, some of them being identical in size with the original paintings, at such moderate prices as ten, twelve, and fifteen shillings. Lord Percival, Pope’s friend, who, like Colonel Guise, had entered practically into the scheme, was enthusiastic about the results. Sending some of the prints, with the bill for them, to his brother, he wrote: “Our modern painters can’t come near it with their colours, and if they attempt a copy make us pay as many guineas as now we pay shillings.” Certainly, if we compare Le Blon’sMadonnaafter Baroccio—priced fifteen shillings in the prospectus—for instance, with such an example of contemporary painting as that by Sir James Thornhill and his assistants, taken from a house in Leadenhall Street, and now at South Kensington, we may find some justification for Lord Percival’s enthusiasm. For colour quality there is, perhaps, little to choose between them, but as a specimen of true colour-printing, and the first of its kind, thatMadonnais wonderful, and I question whether, in the later years, there was any colour-printing of mezzotint to approach it in brilliance of tone. Then, however, accuracy of harmonies was assured by adopting Robert Laurie’s method, approved in 1776, of printing from a single plate, warmed and lightly wiped after application of the coloured inks.
Discouragement soon fell upon the Picture Office. In March 1722 Lord Percival wrote:—“The picture project has suffered under a great deal of mismanagement, but yet improves much.” In spite of that improvement, however, a meeting of shareholders was held under the chairmanship of Colonel Guise, and Le Blon’s management was severely questioned. The shareholders appear to have heckled him quite in the modern manner, and he replied excitedly to every hostile statement that it was false. But there was no getting away from figures. At a cost of £5,000 Le Blon had produced 4,000 copies of his prints—these were from twenty-five plates—which, if all had been sold at the prices fixed, would have produced a net loss of £2,000. Even Colonel Guise could hardly consider these as satisfactory business methods, and the company had already been reorganised, with a new manager named Guine, who had introduced a cheaper and more profitable way of producing the prints. It was all to no purpose. Prints to the value of only £600 were sold at an expenditure of £9,000, while the tapestry-weaving branch of the business—also Le Blon’s scheme—showed an even more disproportionate result. Bankruptcy followed as a matter of course, and Le Blon narrowly escaped imprisonment.
The colour-printing of engravings, though artistically promising,while still experimental, had certainly proved a financial failure, but Le Blon, nothing daunted, sought to explain and justify his principles and his practice in a little book, called “Coloritto, or the Harmony of Colouring in Painting, reduced to mechanical practice, under easy precepts, and infallible rules.” This he dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole, hoping, perhaps, that the First Lord of the Treasury, who had just restored the nation’s credit, might do something for an inventive artist’s. Next he was privileged to submit his inventions to the august notice of the Royal Society. Le Blon had always his opportunities, an well a his rebuff from fortune, but his faith in himself and his ideas was unswerving; moreover, he had the gift of transmitting this faith to others. At last a scheme for imitating Raphael’s cartoons in tapestry, carried on at works in Chelsea, led to further financial disaster and discredit, and Le Blon was obliged to fly from England.
In Paris he resumed his colour-printing, inspiring and influencing many disciples and imitators, among them Jacques Fabian Gautier D’Agoty, who afterwards claimed to have invented Le Blon’s process, and transmitted it to his sons. In Paris, in 1741, Le Blon died, very, very poor, but still working upon his copper-plates. It was doubtless during Le Blon’s last years in Paris that Horace Walpole met him. “He was a Fleming (sic), and very far from young when I knew him, but of surprising vivacity and volubility, and with a head admirably mechanic; but an universal projector, and with, at least, one of the qualities that attend that vocation, either a dupe or a cheat: I think the former, though, as most of his projects ended in the air, the sufferers believed the latter. As he was much an enthusiast, perhaps like most enthusiasts he was both one and t’other.” As a matter of fact, Le Blon was neither a dupe nor a cheat; he was simply a pioneer with all the courage of his imagination and invention; and no less an authority than Herr Hans W. Singer, of Vienna, has considered him, with all his failures and shortcomings, of sufficient artistic importance to be worthy of a monograph.
If, by a more judicious selection of pictures for copying, Le Blon had been able to create a popular demand, and to ensure general encouragement for his venture, how different might have been the story of colour-printing, how much fuller its annals. For Le Blon’s ultimate failure was not owing to the comparative impossibility or getting infallibly the required harmonics of his tones with only the three cardinal colours, and the necessity to add a fourth plate with a qualifying black, or to the difficulty in achieving the exactness of register essential to the perfect fusing of the tones of several plates. Those were serious obstacles, certainly, hindering complete artistic success; but, judging from the surprising excellence of the best ofLe Blon’s actual achievements, they would doubtless have been surmounted for all practical purposes. The real cause of the failure was, I suggest, that the pictures actually reproduced made no appeal to the people of England, consequently there was no public demand for the prints. It was a close time for the fine arts in this country. The day of the public picture-exhibition was nearing, but it had not yet arrived. The aristocratic collector and the fashionable connoisseur represented the taste of the country, for popular taste there was none. Romance and sentiment were quite out of fashion, and the literature of the day was entirely opposed to them. Nor were there any living painters with even one touch of nature. The reign of George I. was indeed a depressing time for the graphic arts. Society, heavily bewigged and monstrously behooped, was too much concerned with its pastimes and intrigues, its affectations, caprices and extravagances, to cultivate any taste or care for beauty. Kent, the absurdly fashionable architect, was ruling in place of the immortal Wren, and Kneller was so long and so assuredly the pictorial idol of the country that Pope, its poet-in-chief, could actually write of him that “great Nature fear’d he might outvie her works.” Then, all else of pictorial art meant either Thornhill’s wearisome ceilings and stair-cases, or the stiff and tasteless portraiture, with stereotyped posture, of the lesser Knellers, such as Jonathan Richardson, Highmore, and Jervas, whom Pope made even more ridiculous by his praises.
With only such painters as these to interpret, what chance had even such admirable engravers as John Smith, George White, John Simon, Faber, Peter Pelham, whose mezzotints even were beginning to wane in favour for lack of pictorial interest? It is no great wonder then that, seeing Le Blon’s failure, in spite of all his influence and achievement, the engravers in mezzotint were not eager to try the principles of his “Coloritto” in their own practice, and so colour-printing suffered a set-back in this country. But Le Blon’s prints are of great value to-day. What, then, has become of those 9,000 copies printed by the Picture Office? The £600 worth sold before the bankruptcy must have represented about a thousand, yet these impressions from Le Blon’s fifty-plates are of extreme rarity even in the museums of the world, and it has been suggested by Herr Singer, and also by Mr. A. M. Hind, in his valuable “History of Engraving and Etching,” that many copies of the large prints, varnished over, may be hanging in old houses under the guise of oil paintings, thus fulfilling their original purpose. It is an interesting conjecture, and how plausible one may judge from the varnished copies in the British Museum.
Le Blon’s really important venture inspired no imitators in England, but it was followed by a few experimental attempts toembellish engravings with colour. These were chiefly adaptations of the oldchiaroscuromethod, surface-colour being obtained by using several wood-blocks in combination with engraved copper-plates. Arthur Pond and Charles Knapton, painters both, imitated a number of drawings in this manner, the designs being etched; while, some years earlier, Elisha Kirkall (“bounteous Kirkall” of the “Dunciad”) had successfully used the coloured wood-blocks with mezzotint plates, strengthened with etched and graven lines. His pupil, J. B. Jackson, however, engraved only wood for his remarkable prints. But these experiments were merely sporadic; they led to nothing important and continuous in the way of colour-printing.
Meanwhile, the prints of Hogarth, with their marvellous pictorial invention, mordant satire, and moral illumination, took the fancy of the town without the lure of colour, and cultivated in the popular mind a new sense of picture, concerned with the live human interest of the passing hour. Other line-engravers, too,—Vivares, Woollett, Ravenet, Major, Strange,—with more masterly handling of the graver, were, through the new appeal of landscape, or the beauties of Rembrandt and the Italian masters, or the homely humours of Dutchgenre, winning back the popular favour for their art.
Though the call for the colour-print had not yet arrived, the way was preparing for it. With this widening public interest in pictorial art, a dainty sense of tone was awakened by the porcelain now efflorescing all aver the country. Then, when Reynolds was bringing all the graces to his easel, the urbane influence for beauty spread from the master’s painting-room at 47, Leicester Fields—as the Square was then called—to all the print-shops in town. And the year—1764—that saw the death of Hogarth was the year in which Francesco Bartolozzi came to England, bringing with him into the engraving-world fresh influences of grace and delicacy which gradually ripened for colour.