And quite forgot the funeral was his own.”
[144] Antonio Zucchi, A.R.A., who became Angelica Kauffmann’s second husband, was employed by the brothers Adam, the architects of the Adelphi. The cost of the mantelpiece is given by Mr. Wheatley as £300, the probable figure. Mrs. Garrick died in the same house in 1822.
[145] The “English Grotto,” as it was called, was one of the Islington group of tea-gardens. Its proprietor, Jackson, pleased his public by an ingenious water-mill, an “enchanted fountain,” and a display of gold and silver fish. A pleasingly rustic view in the Crace collection is reproduced by Mr. Wroth in London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century.
[146] Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., was an original member of the Royal Academy, and he engraved its diploma. His rapid rise, and his appointment to be engraver to the King at £300 a year, were disturbing to Sir Robert Strange, who treated him with misplaced contempt. “Let Strange beat that if he can,” exclaimed Bartolozzi, on executing his “Clytia.” Unfortunately he was improvident, and his studio became a manufactory of facile chalk studies, to many of which he put only the finishing touches. After a brilliant career in England, he went to Lisbon, where he was knighted, and died there in 1815, in his 88th year.
[147] John Hinchliffe (1731-94), the son of a livery-stable keeper in Swallow Street, was born in Westminster, and educated at Westminster School. He was consecrated Bishop of Peterborough, Dec. 17, 1769. He bought some of Smith’s youthful imitations of Rembrandt and Ostade. A note on Sherwin will be found under 1782.
[148] In 1781, Mary Robinson (1758-1800), known as “Perdita,” had ceased to be the mistress of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV., whose bond for £20,000, never paid, was exchanged for the pension of £500 a year awarded her by Fox in 1783. She was portrayed by Reynolds twice, and by Romney, Gainsborough, Hoppner, Zoffany, and twice by Cosway.
The original name of Mrs. Robinson’s family had been M’Dermott, which had been changed by an ancestor to Darby. Mrs. Darby had brought up her daughter under difficult circumstances. Obliged to earn her own living during her husband’s absence in America, she started a ladies’ boarding school in Little Chelsea, in which the future “Perdita” (as we learn from her autobiography) taught English literature to the daughters of the well-to-do citizens, and read to them “sacred and moral lessons on saints’ days and Sunday evenings.” The “high personage” referred to in this paragraph is of course the Prince, in whom Richard Cosway, the courtly miniaturist, found a lavish patron.
[149] Anticipating, on a higher scale, Dickens’s servant-girl bride, who, on stepping into a hackney-coach after the ceremony, “threw a red shawl, which she had, no doubt, brought on purpose, negligently over the number on the door, evidently to delude pedestrians into the belief that the hackney-coach was a private carriage” (Sketches by Boz).
[150] Smith’s first master, John Keyse Sherwin, had been a pupil of Bartolozzi. In his studio in St. James’s Street, he was patronised by the Duchesses of Devonshire and Rutland, Lady Jersey, and other ladies of rank, many of whom were eager to figure in his drawing of “The Finding of Moses,” in which the Princess Royal appeared as Pharaoh’s daughter. He was a wonderfully skilful portrait artist: “I have often seen him,” says Smith, “begin at the toe, draw upwards, and complete it at the top of the head in a most correct and masterly manner. He had also an extraordinary command over the use of both his hands.” He was an irregular worker, however, and debt and dissipation helped to kill him at the age of 39.
The sitting given to Sherwin by Mrs. Siddons took place soon after her re-appearance at Drury Lane Theatre, the beginning of her real fame, October 10, 1782. After opening with Isabella in Garrick’s version of The Fatal Marriage, she played Euphrasia in The Grecian Daughter.