John Ogborne and William Nutter learnt line-engraving from that interesting engraver and valuable antiquarian, Joseph Strutt, a pupil himself of Ryland; then they went to Bartolozzi to acquire the stipple method, through which they both achieved distinction, Nutter adding to Bartolozzi’s teaching the broader influence of J. R. Smith’s. John Keyse Sherwin’s natural gifts were influenced to an easy grace in Bartolozzi’s studio, and we owe to him a few charming stipples in colour; but his brief and brilliant career, ruined by vanity, dandyism, and fashionable favour, belongs to the story of line-engraving, in which it fills a lively and interesting page. Another talented individuality among the group of Bartolozzi’s disciples was Edmund Scott, who did some very engaging stipples in colour, of which a few have been named. His work was much favoured by the popular painters.
Naturally Bartolozzi’s European reputation, and rumours of the rapidity with which money could be made by the stipple method, attracted to his studio a number of pupils from the Continent, where, till the war began in 1793, there was a very large and constant trade in English prints. Several fine collections, by the way, were made at the time, and some of these are still intact, notably one in Weimar. Among the foreign pupils were, of course, several Italians, of whom the most important were Luigi Schiavonetti and Giovanni Vendramini, whose names are familiar chiefly through their charming plates in the Cries of London series. Schiavonetti, however, was brilliant also in etching and line-work, and not less artistic than his stipples were his engravings of Blake’s beautiful illustrations to Blair’s poem, The Grave. Vendramini was personally so popular that he was induced to take over Bartolozzi’s business and his house at North End, Fulham, when the old man in 1802, seeing the waning of the public taste for his prints, accepted a royal invitation to Portugal, where they gave him a knighthood and a pension, and where he went on engraving and teaching till, close on ninety years of age and in straitened circumstances, he died in 1815. James Minasi, an engraver of taste, I have already mentioned as one of Bartolozzi’s favourite pupils, devoted to the end. His cousin, Mariano Bovi was another, and a very artistic touch he had, as may be seen in his many engravings of Lady Diana Beauclerc’s fantastic infantile groups, and the charming decorative frieze after Cipriani, reproduced here. Other notable Italian disciples were Pietro Bettelini and Michel Benedetti. Russia, which was always ready at that time to encourage the prolonged visits of English artists, sent Bartolozzi an assimilative pupil in Gabriel Scorodoomoff, who did several pretty colour-prints. Of the French pupils, John Peter Simon had perhaps the most artistic sense of the medium, and he will always be esteemed for his brilliant engraving of Reynolds’s Heads of Angels—a beautiful print in colours. Jean Marie Delattre, when once he had learnt stipple, became the master’s right-hand man, “forwarding” many of his plates to a considerable extent, touching up and correcting the work of less competent pupils, and turning out a number of good prints of his own. Other Frenchmen there were, too, among the stipple-engravers who, though not actually pupils of Bartolozzi, could not help reflecting his influence. Chief among these were Thomas Gaugain, F. D. Soiron, and B. Duterreau, all of whom are represented among our illustrations by charming prints after Morland. Gaugain began his artistic life as a student of painting with Richard Houston, the eminent mezzotint-engraver, and this training seems to have lent a valuable quality of tone to his engraving. The last and rarest plate of the Cries of London—Turnips and Carrots—was his.
John Condé was an ideal engraver of Cosway’s miniatures, which he rendered with a touch of the utmost refinement and taste, and an exquisite sense of their adaptabilities to the copper. Scarcely less successful in this field was Schiavonetti’s gifted Flemish pupil, Anthony Cardon, and it was doubtless through his master’s influence that he, too, was engaged upon the Cries of London.
But the Bartolozzi influence was not quite supreme. No engraver, for instance, used the stipple method with more originality or more truly pictorial effect than John Jones, who was, of course, one of the glories of the great English school of mezzotint. At his best only to be compared for beauty with Burke, his was a broader conception of the delicate medium; and, gauging its artistic capacity to a nicety, he understood exactly how to balance breadth and depth of tone with the fine shades, while avoiding that tendency to monotony of smoothness which characterised even the best of the Bartolozzi school. His manner was quite his own, strong in its refined simplicity, artistic in its reticence, and among the most beautiful and individual colour-prints in stipple, few are comparable with those that Jones did after Romney, Reynolds and Downman. His exquisite Serena was one of the prints we had hoped to have included among our illustrations. Scarcely less distinctive in stipple than Jones, J. R. Smith and William Ward, was that other great artist in mezzotint, Thomas Watson, whose stippling had the large pictorial feeling. Naturally he was happy with Reynolds, as in the lovely Una, while in the Mrs. Crewe and Mrs. Wilbraham, he made the very best of Daniel Gardner, who appears to have learnt all he could from Sir Joshua.
Of the stipple-engravers who made pretty and attractive colour-prints their name is legion, while these pages are necessarily limited. So I must regretfully leave but barely named such notable stipplers as Joseph Collyer, with his vigorous touch; Francis Hayward, whose Mrs. Siddons as the “Tragic Muse” is so well known; William Bond; the versatile Robert Pollard; R. M. Meadows; the dainty John S. Agar; those three fine mezzotinters, Charles Turner, Richard Earlom, and William Dickinson, whose Duchess of Devonshire and Viscountess Duncannon has often the high distinction of pairing with Burke’s Lady Rushout and Daughter; the brothers Facius; Caroline Watson, with her exquisite finish whether in pure stipple or in “mixed” methods; Joseph Grozer; Christian Josi, to whom we are indebted for more than his engraving, in his valuable publication of Ploos Van Amstel’s interesting second pioneering series of aquatints printed in colour, Collection d’Imitations des Dessins, twenty-three years after Van Amstel’s death; John Eginton; Charles White, a favourite engraver of the lady artists; James Hogg, whose Handmaid after Walton is as charming as its companion, The Tobacco Box; Robert Thew; R. M. Paye; and William Blake, whose sure immortality is quite independent of such artistic stippling as his Mrs. Q. after Huet Villiers, and his two Morland prints.
The war with France, closing important markets for English engravings, had a depressing influence on the production of prints, and the early years of the nineteenth century saw fresh vagaries in the popular taste. Even the Morlands were neglected. The coarse political and social caricatures of James Gillray—once Bartolozzi’s pupil—and of Thomas Rowlandson were intriguing and titillating the town with their robustious humours and audacious licence. Yet Adam Buck was strangely in favour; his inadequate drawings of babies and slender women in Empire gowns, which a contemporary writer describes as “happily combining the taste of the antique with that of the modern,” suited the spurious classic fashion of the time. These were engraved, some partly stippled, partly aquatinted, by Freeman, J. C. Stadler, Roberts and even Cheesman. Artistically negligible, the excellence of their colour-printing alone can excuse any demand at the present day for such pretty-pretty trifles as The Darling Asleep, The Darling Awake, The Darling Dancing, and so on. In their own day, notwithstanding their passing vogue, they sounded the knell of the stippled colour-print.
Coloured aquatints were now becoming the rage. That this charming and delicate process, producing various gradations of tone by successive “bitings” with acid through a porous, resinous ground, might long before have competed with stipple, may be judged by the delightful pair of colour-printed aquatints, Courtship and Matrimony, by Francis Jukes after W. Williams, published in 1787 by J. R. Smith. But, invented in France about 1750 by Jean Baptiste Prince, practised a little later with colour by Ploos Van Amstel, and introduced to England in 1775 by Paul Sandby for the treatment of landscape, it was a long while before the pictorial capacities of aquatint were adequately understood and extended. In the artistic hands of the Daniells, the Havells, J. C. Stadler, J. Bluck, J. Sutherland and F. C. Lewis, it became, particularly under the ægis of Ackermann, a most popular medium for colour, especially in the sporting and coaching prints which the Regency spirit brought so extensively into demand. Then in turn came lithography, with its ease of method and its sweet, soft graces, bringing colour too; and R. J. Lane was the new hero of the printsellers, while for long years Bartolozzi and his brother stipplers on the copper-plate were shelved, neglected, forgotten, and Morland prints were scarcely saleable. To-day they have come into their own again—their own, and perhaps a little bit over.
NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS.
Countess of Harrington and her Children (Plate I.). Sir Joshua painted her twice also as Miss Fleming.—Robinetta (Plate II.). The Hon. Anna Tollemache was the original of this picture, of which Reynolds painted three versions: that in the National Gallery, Lord Lonsdale’s, and Lord Tollemache’s, from which Jones made his engraving, dedicating it to the picture’s then owner the Hon. William Tollemache.—Master Henry Hoare (Plate III.). The only son of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bart., F.R.S., the well-known antiquarian and historian of Wiltshire.—Duchess of Devonshire and Child (Plate IV.). One of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s thirteen exhibits in the Royal Academy of 1786, when Walpole depreciated it. Here is the famous duchess in that tender mother-mood in which Coleridge apostrophised her so exquisitely. The chubby baby, when she grew up, very properly married the son and heir of that Earl of Carlisle who in graceful verse had championed her mother’s introduction of the fashion of feathers.—The Mask (Plate V.). Part of the “Duke of Marlborough and family,” which Sir Joshua painted in 1777. The little Ladies Charlotte and Anne Spencer, being taken into the room at Blenheim where Sir Joshua sat at his easel, the youngest drew back, clutching at her nurse’s gown, crying “I won’t be painted!” a natural action which appealed irresistibly to Reynolds. And little Lady Anne, as Countess of Shaftesbury, lived until 1865, the last survivor of all Sir Joshua Reynolds’s countless sitters.
Bacchante (Emma, Lady Hamilton) (Plate VI.). Painted in 1784 for Sir William Hamilton, when, of course, there was no thought of the marriage. The price was 50 guineas, just about a fifth of what a brilliant impression of the print in colours would fetch to-day. The Hon. Charles Greville, Sir William’s nephew and Emma’s lover at the time, seems to have negotiated the business, for he wrote, in October 1784 to his uncle, who was then in Naples: “Let me know how the Bacchante is to be paid. The dog was ugly, and I made him paint it again.” Later Greville wrote: “Emma’s picture shall be sent by the first ship. I wish Romney yet to mend the dog.” The picture is said to have been lost at sea, on its way back from Naples, but at Greville’s sale in 1810, the Bacchante—in that case a replica of the lost canvas—was catalogued as “Diana, original of the well-known engraved picture,” and bought by Mr. Chamberlayne for 130 guineas.—Mrs. Jordan in the character of “The Country Girl” (Plate VII.). It was as Peggy in Garrick’s comedy “The Country Girl,” adapted from Wycherly’s “Country Wife,” that Dorothy Jordan first appeared at Drury Lane in 1785, and immediately bewitched the public with the natural, irresistible joyousness of her acting and the lovable charm of her personality. In the following year she gave Romney thirteen sittings for this picture. At the first he could not satisfy himself as to the best pose for her. After many tries she pretended to be tired of the business, and, jumping up from her chair, in the hoydenish manner and tone of Peggy, she said, “Well, I’m a-going.” “Stay!” cried Romney; “that’s just what I want.” And at once he began to sketch her for this picture. It was bought in 1791 for 70 guineas by the Duke of Clarence, afterwards King William IV., and thereby, of course, hangs the well-known tale of a twenty years’ love, ten children, and unhappy separation. The print, first published as The Romp at 5s., may now fetch, if fine in colour, like Major Coates’s copy, as much as £200.— Hobbinol and Ganderetta (Plate VIII.). William Somerville’s “Hobbinol” was a mock-heroic poem on rural games, which Mr. Gosse describes as “ridiculous.”—Countess of Oxford (Plate IX.). This is in the National Gallery; but Hoppner exhibited an earlier portrait in 1797. Jane Scott, daughter of a Hampshire vicar, married, in her twentieth year, the fifth Earl of Oxford, whom Byron described as “equally contemptible in mind and body”; but then, she and the poet were lovers when she was forty and he about twenty-five. “The autumn of a beauty like hers is preferable to the spring in others,” he said in after years. “I never felt a stronger passion, which,” he did not forget to add, “she returned with equal ardour.” It was on Lady Oxford’s notepaper that Byron wrote his final letter to Lady Caroline Lamb, and this in the very year in which, it now appears, he revived his boyish passion for Mary Chaworth.—Viscountess Andover (Plate X.). Eldest daughter of William Coke, of Holkham, the famous agriculturist, so long M.P. for Norfolk, and later Earl of Leicester.