Old English colour prints

It is noted that some of the plates are only showing part fractions - these have been left as printed.
TEXT BY MALCOLM C. SALAMAN
(AUTHOR OF ‘THE OLD ENGRAVERS OF ENGLAND’)
EDITED BY CHARLES HOLME
MCMIX OFFICES OF ‘THE STUDIO’ LONDON, PARIS AND NEW YORK
The Editor desires to express his thanks to the following Collectors who have kindly lent their prints for reproduction in this volume:—Mrs. Julia Frankau, Mr. Frederick Behrens, Major E. F. Coates, M.P., Mr. Basil Dighton, Mr. J. H. Edwards, and Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, P.C., G.C.B. Also to Mr. Malcolm C. Salaman, who, in addition to contributing the letterpress, has rendered valuable assistance in the preparation of the work.
“Other pictures 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 the Cries of London at 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 Downman Mrs. Siddons , say, or the Miss 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.