Old English colour prints

by Malcolm C. Salaman

Gainsborough—at least, the Gainsborough of unapproachable mastery and inimitable beauty, the greatest glory of our eighteenth century art—seems to have been beyond the colour-printer’s ambition. With the exception of the Hobbinol and Ganderetta (Tomkins), reproduced here, and the Lavinia (Bartolozzi), both of which were painted for Macklin’s “British Poets,” I doubt if anything important of Gainsborough’s was reproduced in coloured stipple, and, of course, these things cannot be said adequately to represent the master; while, as to mezzotint, W. Whiston Barney’s version of Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire was, I understand, printed in colours, though impressions are extremely rare. Romney’s exquisite art, on the other hand, with its gracious simplicity of beauty, lent itself more readily to the colour-printed copper-plate. Among the numberless tinted engravings with which the small-paned windows of the eighteenth-century print-shops were crowded, none ingratiated themselves more with the connoisseurs than the Romneys. So, in any representative collections of colour-prints to-day, among the finest and most greatly prized examples must be the lovely Emma and Serena (Miss Sneyd) of John Jones, Mrs. Jordan as “The Romp” of Ogborne, Miss Lucy Vernon as “The Seamstress,” and Lady Hamilton as “The Spinster” of Cheesman, the beautiful Emma also as a “Bacchante” by Knight, as “Sensibility” by Earlom, and as “Nature” in the two mezzotint versions, just mentioned, by J. R. Smith and Henry Meyer.

Of course the pictorial miniatures of the fashionable Richard Cosway, with their light, bright scheme of draughtsmanship, their dainty tints, their soft and sinuous graces, their delicate decision of character, were exceedingly happy in the stipple-engraver’s hands. In colour the prints had a charm of reticence which was peculiarly persuasive. Several of the most engaging were done by the artistic Condé, such at Mrs. Bouverie, Mrs. Tickell, Mrs. Jackson, Mrs. Fitzherbert, Mrs. Robinson as “Melania”, and the beautiful youth Horace Beckford; J. S. Agar did delicately Harriet, Lady Cockerell, as a Gipsy Woman, Lady Heathcote, and Mrs. Duff; Cardon, with his distinguished touch, engraved the charming Madame Récamier, Schiavonetti the Mrs. Maria Cosway and Michel and Isabella Oginesy, Bartolozzi the Mrs. Harding, Mariano Bovi the Lady Diana Sinclair, and Charles White the pretty Infancy (Lord Radnor’s children). Only less fashionable than Cosway’s were the miniatures of Samuel Shelley. In portrait-manner, and in fanciful composition, Reynolds was his model and inspiration, but the result, in spite of high finish and a certain charm of elegance, was a very little Reynolds, for Shelley’s drawing generally left something for criticism. Naturally, miniature-painting found happy interpretation in coloured stipple, and Shelley was fortunate in his engravers, especially Caroline Watson, with her exquisite delicacy and brilliantly minute finish, and William Nutter, who was equally at home with the styles of many painters.

An artist whose dainty and original manner of portraiture, enjoying a great vogue in its day, was also particularly well suited to the tinted stipple was John Downman. A man of interesting personality and individual talent, he began, as a pupil and favourite of Benjamin West, to take himself seriously and ambitiously as an “historical painter,” to borrow a definition of the period. Indeed, after he had won a fashionable reputation for the singular charm and style of his portraits, and become an A.R.A., we find a contemporary critic of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1796 confessing surprise at seeing a scriptural subject painted with such exceptional care and simplicity of expression by “a hand accustomed to delineate the polished and artificial beauties of a great metropolis.” But it was to these portrait-drawings that the artist owed his popularity, and these and the engravings of them, neglected for three-quarters of a century, are the things that to-day make Downman a name to conjure with among collectors. His portraits, exceptionally happy in their suggestion of spontaneous impression and genial intuition of character, were drawn with pencil, or with finely-pointed black chalk or charcoal. The light tinting of hair, cheeks, lips and eyes, with the more definite colouring, in the case of the female portraits, of an invariable sash and ribbon on a white dress, was effected in a manner peculiar to himself. Instead of the usual way, the colour was put on the back of the drawing, and showed through the specially thin paper he used with softened effect. How he happened upon this method of tinting his drawings is rather a romantic story. Seized by the press-gang and taken to sea, about the beginning of the American War of Independence, he was kept abroad for nearly two years, and when, at last, he managed to return to England he found his wife and children in a state of destitution at Cambridge. There his happy gift of portraiture brought him a livelihood. One day he left by chance a drawing face downward upon the table, and one of his children began daubing some pink paint on what was seemingly a blank piece of paper. Downman, finding his drawing with daubs upon the back, perceived delicate tints upon the face, and so he looked with a discoverer’s eye, and thought the thing out; and the novel way he had accidentally found of transparently tinting his drawings proved his way to prosperity. It introduced him into the houses of the socially great to the royal palace even, and the fashionable beauties of the day, as well as those who would have liked to be fashionable beauties, and the favourite actresses, all readily offered their countenances to Downman’s charming pencil, knowing it would lend them the air of happy young girls. Of course there was a willing market for prints from these gladsome and novel presentations of faces which the people seemed never to tire of; so among the collector’s prizes to-day are the Mrs. Siddons by Tomkins, the Duchess of Devonshire and the Viscountess Duncannon by Bartolozzi, Lady Elizabeth Foster by Caroline Watson, Miss Farren (Countess of Derby) by Collyer, and Frances Kemble by John Jones.

The social reign of the Court beauties lasted over a long period, and survived many changes of fashion, from the macaroni absurdities and monstrous headdresses to the simple muslin gown and the straw “picture” hat. The days of “those goddesses the Gunnings” seemed to have come again when the three rival Duchesses, Devonshire, Rutland, and Gordon, were the autocrats of “the ton,” ruling the modish world not only with the sovereignty of their beauty, elegance, wit and charm, but with the fascinating audacity of their innovations and the outvieing heights of their feathers.

“Come, Paris, leave your hills and dells,

You’ll scorn your dowdy goddesses,

If you once see our English belles,

For all their gowns and boddices.

Here’s Juno Devon all sublime;

Minerva Gordon’s wit and eyes;