In 1733 Hubert Gravelot was invited from France by Du Bosc to help in illustrating Picart’s Religious Ceremonies. He illustrated Gay’s Fables in 1738, Richardson’s Pamela in 1742, Theobald’s Shakespeare in 1740, and, mainly after Hayman, Hanmer’s in 1744-6. Neither of the sets of Shakespeare plates deserves any higher praise than that of being neat and pretty, but at least they were a whole plane above those in Rowe’s edition.
The year after Gravelot came to England, in 1733, Pine produced the first volume of his Horace, engraved throughout, and with head- and tailpieces in admirable taste. The second volume followed in 1737, and in 1753 the first of an illustrated Virgil which Pine did not live to complete.
Besides his work on Hanmer’s Shakespeare, Francis Hayman designed illustrations to Moore’s Fables of the Female Sex (1744), which were well engraved, some of them by Charles Grignion, a pupil of Gravelot’s, born in England (1717), but of foreign parentage. Hayman also illustrated the Spectator (1747), Newton’s Milton (1749-52), and later on, with the aid of Grignion, Smollett’s Don Quixote (1755), and Baskerville’s edition of Congreve’s Poems (1761). The plates to the earlier edition of Don Quixote, that of 1738, had been chiefly engraved by Gerard van der Gucht after Vanderbank, but two are by Hogarth.
| XL. LONDON, T. HOPE, 1760 WALTON, COMPLEAT ANGLER W. W. RYLANDS AFTER S. WALE |
Samuel Wale (died 1786), a pupil of Hayman, was also an illustrator, and in 1760 supplied Sir John Hawkins with fourteen drawings for his edition of Walton’s Angler. These were engraved by the luckless W. W. Rylands, who was hanged for forgery in 1783, and the Walton thus produced is one of the prettiest and least affected of the illustrated books of its day (see Plate XL). Wale also drew designs for Wilkie’s Fables (1768) and Goldsmith’s Traveller (1774). He also worked for the magazines which about the middle of the century made rather a feature of engravings, often as headpieces to music. A few of the isolated books may be named, thus Paltock’s Peter Wilkins (1750) was illustrated very well by Louis Peter Boitard, who had previously contributed numerous plates to Spence’s Polymetis, and in 1751 supplied a frontispiece to each of the six books of the Scribleriad by R. O. Cambridge. Another book which, like Peter Wilkins, was concerned with flight, Lunardi’s Account of the first aerial voyage in England (1784), has a portrait of the author by Bartolozzi and two plates. For Baskerville’s edition of the Orlando Furioso (Birmingham, 1773) recourse was had to plates by De Launay, after Moreau and Eisen.
[65] “In quo precipue tractat: An amico sepe ad scribendum prouocato ut scribat, non respondenti sit amplius scribendum.”
[66] It was probably from his Horae plates that Plantin illustrated the rerum Sacrarum Liber of Laur. Gambara in 1577. They are printed with the text and are of average merit.
[67] They were bought to accompany the fine set of De Bry collected by Mr. Grenville, but have since been transferred to the Department of Prints and Drawings.
[68] Contributed to the work by Sir Sidney Colvin, Early Engravers and Engraving in England, already quoted.