Tight boxes neatly sash’d, and in a blaze
With all a July sun’s collected rays,
Delight the citizen, who, gasping there,
Breathes clouds of dust, and calls it country air.”
Horace Smith, Lord Byron, and Thomas Hood all touched more or less satirically on this subject.
[34] There is a confusion here. Walpole in his Anecdotes of Painting deals only with Jonathan Richardson the elder (1665-1745), portrait painter and critic; Smith refers to his son (1694-1771). The two were greatly attached to each other. There was a story that they sketched each other’s faces every day. Old Richardson, who wrote a treatise on Paradise Lost, was able to study the classics only through his son, on whom he doted. Hogarth made a caricature, which he suppressed, of the father using his son as a telescope to read the writers of Greece and Rome. W. H. Pyne says of Old Richardson in Wine and Walnuts: “He seldom rambled city-ways, though sometimes he stepped in at the ‘Rainbow,’ where he counted a few worthies, or looked in at Dick’s and gave them a note or two. He would not put his foot on the threshold of the ‘Devil,’ however, for he thought the sign profane. Fielding would run a furlong to escape him; he called him Doctor Fidget.”
[35] The milkmaids’ chief haunt was Islington, whence hundreds of them carried the milk into London every morning. In his print “Evening,” the scene of which is laid outside the “Middleton Head,” Hogarth has an Islington milkmaid milking a cow, and in his “Enraged Musicians,” a milkmaid with her cry of Milk Belouw contributes to the town noises. The “garlands of massive plate” which the milkmaids carried round on May Day were borrowed of pawnbrokers on security. One pawnbroker, says Hone, was particularly resorted to. He let his plate at so much per hour, under bond from housekeepers for its safe return. In this way one set of milkmaids would hire the garland from ten o’clock till one, and another from one till six, and so on during the first three days of May. These customs had all but passed away when Smith wrote his Rainy Day, but long after the milkmaids had ceased to celebrate the London May Day the chimney-sweepers brought out their Jacks-in-the-green, specimens of which have been seen in the streets in the last twenty years. In 1825, Hone speaks of the dances round the “garland” as a “lately disused custom.”
[36] The boxes and pavilions at Vauxhall were decorated with paintings at the suggestion of Hogarth, who permitted his “Four Times of the Day” to be copied by Francis Hayman. He also presented Tyers with a picture from his own hand, “Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn,” receiving in acknowledgment a gold ticket inscribed “In perpetuam Beneficii memoriam,” and giving admission to “a coachfull” of people. The Vauxhall paintings chiefly represented sports and sentimental scenes. Among Hayman’s works were, “The Game of Quadrille,” “Children Playing at Shuttlecock,” “Leap Frog,” “Falstaff’s Cowardice Detected,” etc. In November 1841, twenty-four of these pictures, all in a dirty condition, were sold in the Gardens at prices varying from 30s. to £10.
[37] Marcellus Lauron, or Laroon (1653-1702), was born at the Hague, and came to London, where he painted draperies for Sir Godfrey Kneller and executed his “Cryes of London,” engraved by Tempest. His son, Captain Marcellus Lauron, or Laroon, was soldier, artist, and actor, and a friend of Hogarth.
[38] Probably Dr. George Armstrong, brother of Dr. John Armstrong, author of the poem, “The Art of Preserving Health.”