“Milo the Cretonian
An ox slew with his fist,
And ate it up at one meal,
Ye Gods! what a glorious twist.”
Twist was the old cant term for appetite.
The universal use of sign-boards furnished employment to many painters of inferior rank, and occasionally even to great artists, who, either as a freak of genius, to win a wager, to crown a carouse, or perhaps to earn with ease a needed sum, painted a sign-board. At the head of this list is Hogarth. Richard Wilson painted “The Three Loggerheads” for an ale-house in North Wales. George Morland has several assigned to him: “The Goat in Boots,” “The White Lion,” “The Cricketers.” Ibbetson paid his bill to Landlord Burkett after a sketching and fishing excursion by a sign with one pale and wan face and one equally rubicund. The accompanying lines read:—
“Thou mortal man that livest by bread,
What makes thy face to look so red?
Thou silly fop that looks so pale,
’Tis red with Tommy Burkett’s ale.”
Sign-board of
Three Crowns Tavern.
Gérôme, Cox, Harlow, and Millais swell the list of English sign-painters, while Holbein, Correggio, Watteau, Gerriault, and Horace Vernet make a noble company. The splendid “Young Bull” of Paul Potter, in the museum of The Hague, is said to have been painted for a butcher’s sign.
Benjamin West painted many tavern signs in the vicinity of Philadelphia, among them in 1771 that of the Three Crowns, a noted hostelry that stood on the King’s Highway in Salisbury Township, Lancaster County. This neighborhood was partly settled by English emigrants, and the old tavern was kept by a Tory of the deepest dye. The sign-board still bears the marks of the hostile bullets of the Continental Army, and the proprietor came near sharing the bullets with the sign. This Three Crowns was removed in 1816 to the Waterloo Tavern, kept by a relative of the old landlord. The Waterloo Tavern was originally the Bull’s Head, and was kept by a Revolutionary officer. Both sides of the Three Crowns sign-board are shown on [page 143]. By tradition West also painted the sign-board of the old Hat Tavern shown on [page 147]. This was kept by Widow Caldwell in Leacock Township, Lancaster County, on the old Philadelphia road.
The Bull’s Head Inn of Philadelphia had a sign suited to its title; it was sold in the middle of this century to an Englishman as the work of Benjamin West. The inn stood in Strawberry Alley, and West once lived in the alley; and so also did Bernard Wilton, a painter and glazier, in the days when the inn was young and had no sign-board. And as the glazier sat one day in the taproom, a bull ran foaming into the yard and thrust his head with a roar in the tavern window. The glazier had a ready wit, and quoth he: “This means something. This bull thrust his head in as a sign, so it shall be the sign of the inn, and bring luck and custom forever.” I think those were his words; at any rate, those were the deeds.