In 1844 five hundred and eighty-nine portraits are extant from a dozen different cities, and then we come down to eight pictures taken in 1845, four only in 1846, and four only in the next three years.
The reason for this falling off in numbers is so extraordinary that we give it in continuing Edouart’s life-story. It is probable that the artist was just as industrious during the last five years of his tour in America as he had been in the first four, but his work is destroyed.
In December, 1849, he packed all his folios in great cases, and set out for home, sailing in the ship “Oneida,” laden with bales of Maryland cotton. When off the coast of Guernsey she was caught in a great gale, and was wrecked in Vazon Bay on December 21st. The crew and passengers were saved and some of the baggage; a case, containing fourteen of the precious folios, some old letters and list-books, was saved; all the rest was lost, with much of the cargo, when the ship broke up two days after she had gone on the rocks.
Edouart suffered much from exposure, for he was then an old man, and the loss of the greater part of his life’s work so preyed upon his mind that he never again practised his profession. The Lukis family, resident at Guernsey, hospitably entertained the old artist, and he gave his remaining volumes, fourteen in number, containing his European collection and his American portraits, to Frederica Lukis before he left for Guines, near Calais, where he died in 1861, in his seventy-third year.
The writer was fortunately enabled to secure these volumes through the medium of The Connoisseur Magazine, and has included illustrations from them in the present work.
CHAPTER VII.
SCRAP-BOOKS.
A Royal Cutter and her Work.
In the Georgian days the cutting of animals, landscapes, groups, and single profiles was the fashionable pastime of a large number of amateurs. Girl-friends cut for each other mementos in black paper or in white; these were then gummed on to a black or coloured ground. They vied with each other in cutting some clever little piece of scissor-work, which, for safe storage, would be placed in an album or scrap-book. Sometimes the little cutting is found gummed in amongst tiny steel engravings, some Bartolozzi tickets, a treasured sheet of music, or wreaths and scraps of faded flowers. The fragrance of such a collection does not lie only in the shrivelled rose or violet leaves; there is an aroma of sentiment, a reminder of those past days when everyone had leisure and the polite elegances of the little arts had full sway.