'"I see two.
'"I see seven."
'G. M. "Proceed."
'P. "Louth—g has retired—the scene changes, I see seven angels," etc. etc.
Cagliostro was ordered by the Inquisition to explain the meaning of this paper. He professed the profoundest ignorance as to its purport. There will probably be no great harm in concluding, therefore, that it did not possess meaning of any kind. But the reader is left to form his own opinion on the subject.
Soon De Loutherbourg was found to be again in England. But he practised no more as an inspired physician; he now followed sedulously his legitimate profession. His eccentricities and escapades were overlooked; it seems to have been agreed that he had been more fool than knave—that he had imposed upon himself quite as much as upon other people.
A highly esteemed painter, he was permitted to resume his place in society. In proof of the regard in which he was held, it may be noted that the guardians of the De Quinceys deemed it worth while to pay De Loutherbourg a premium of one thousand guineas, to receive as a pupil William, the elder brother of Thomas De Quincey, who had given promise of skill in drawing. The young fellow died, however, in his sixteenth year, about 1795, in the painter's house at Hammersmith. A more moderate sum had some years previously been demanded of Mr. Charles Bannister, the actor, for the art-education of his son John. For a payment of fifty pounds per annum for four years, it was agreed that John Bannister should be taught, boarded, and lodged. But the arrangement came to nothing. De Loutherbourg demanded the payment of the money in advance. He mistrusted the players. They had caricatured him on the stage as 'Mr. Lanternbug,' in General Bourgoyne's comedy, The Maid of the Oaks; and then his mocking artist brethren caught at the nickname, corrupting it, however, to 'Leatherbag.' Mr. Bannister was unable or unwilling to comply with the painter's requirements: so young John was sent to the school of the Royal Academy, which he soon deserted, and finally trod the boards, and charmed the town as an actor. Another pupil of De Loutherbourg, and a close imitator of his worst manner, who is yet worthy of public notice as the founder of the Dulwich Gallery, was Francis Bourgeois, knighted by the King of Poland. Edward Dayes, artist, critic, and biographer of artists, is said to have exclaimed eccentrically in reference to Sir Francis: 'Dietricy begat Casanova, Casanova begat De Loutherbourg, De Loutherbourg begat Franky Bourgeois, a dirty dog, who quarrelled with nature, and bedaubed her works!'
By his pictures of 'Lord Howe's Victory on the 1st of June 1794,' and 'The Storming of Valenciennes,' De Loutherbourg acquired great popularity.[18] For Macklin's Bible (most luxurious of editions, in seven folio volumes, published in seventy parts at one guinea each!) he painted 'The Angel destroying the Assyrian Host,' and 'The Deluge;' the latter a particularly spirited and effective performance. Dayes, his contemporary, suggests, however, that he was made a historical painter by the printsellers, rather than by the sufficiency of his own genius in that respect. For the higher purposes of art, his composition was too defective, his drawing not masterly enough, and his execution too small and delicate. But Dayes greatly admired De Loutherbourg's 'Review of Warley Camp,' in the Royal Collection; especially praising the animals introduced, and the cool grey of the general effect; the painter as a rule being prone to a somewhat coppery tone of colour.
In 1808, Turner, appointed Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy, went to live at Hammersmith, in order, it has been suggested, to be near De Loutherbourg, of whose works he was known to be an admirer. That he should have aided in the art-training and forming of the greatest of landscape painters is a real tribute to the merits of De Loutherbourg. It is something to have been even the fuel that helped the fire of a great genius to burn the more brightly.
The characteristics of the old scene-painter's art which attracted the attention of Turner, were doubtless the boldness and strength of his effects: his rolling clouds and tossing waters; his sudden juxta-positions of light and shade; his bright and transparent, if occasionally impure and unnatural, system of colour. He was of another and inferior school to Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, and Constable, who, differing widely in their points of view and in their methods of art, are yet linked together by a common love of the natural aspects of the objects they studied, and a preference for a tender and temperate over what may be called a hectic and passionate rendering of landscape. But succeeding or failing, De Loutherbourg certainly aimed at the reproduction of certain pictorial tours de force which they would never have attempted. He was an innovator in the studio as on the stage. According to modern modes of thought he was not, of course, a conscientious worker. His landscapes were indeed begun, continued, and completed in his painting-room. A few crude pencil lines upon a card were enough for him to take home with him; for the rest he relied upon his memory or his invention. But in such wise was the general method of his time. Painters produced their representations of land and sea after close toil by their firesides. There was not much taking of canvases into the open air in the days of De Loutherbourg. Pursuing such a system, he became, necessarily, very mannered; and yet, with other and greater men, he helped to destroy a conventional manner in art. Rules had been laid down restricting the artist to an extent that threatened to oust nature altogether from painting. It had been decreed, for instance, that in every landscape should appear a first, second, and third light, and, at least, one brown tree. Departure from such a principle was, according to Sir George Beaumont and others, flat heresy. De Loutherbourg avowed himself a heretic. And he ventured to object to the old-established, well-known classically-composed landscape, which was becoming an art nuisance. The thing has disappeared now, but the reader has probably a dim acquaintance with the classically-composed landscape. It was somewhat in this wise: in no particular country, a temple of ruins on the right hand was balanced by a trio of towering firs on the left. In the middle distance was raised another temple in a more tenantable state of repair, above a river crossed by a broken bridge, the ragged arches strongly reflected in the water; at the back, in the centre of the horizontal line (gracefully waved with lilac mountains), was the sun, rising or setting, it was never quite certain which; whilst little ill-drawn, inch-high figures straggled about in the foreground, and furnished a name to the picture: Æneas and Dido, Venus and Adonis, Cephalus and Aurora, Apollo and Daphne, etc. etc. De Loutherbourg's dashing sea-views and stormy landscapes, although they might savour a little of the lamp and the theatre, did service in hindering the further production of the 'classical compositions' of the last century.