Old English colour prints

by Malcolm C. Salaman

Sweet Rutland, Venus in her prime;

You’ll die before you give the prize.”

So sang the enthusiastic poet; though the “satirical rogues” who wrote squibs and drew caricatures were not quite so kind, and a writer in the “Morning Post,” with a whimsical turn for statistics, actually drew up a “Scale of Bon Ton,” showing, in a round dozen of the leading beauties of the day the relative proportions in which they possessed beauty, figure, elegance, wit, sense, grace, expression, sensibility, and principles. It is an amusing list, in which we find the lovely Mrs. Crewe, for instance, credited with almost the maximum for beauty, but no grace at all; the Countess of Jersey with plenty of beauty, grace and expression, but neither sense nor principles; the Duchess of Devonshire with more principles than beauty, and more figure than either; her Grace of Gordon with her elegance at zero, and the Countess of Barrymore supreme in all the feminine attractions.

When personal gossip about these fashionable beauties was rampant upon every tongue; when the first appearance of one of them in a new mode was enough to ensure her being enviously or admiringly mobbed in the Mall, naturally the portrait-prints in colour responded to the general curiosity. But there was a public which, having other pictorial fancies than portraiture, even pretty faces could not satisfy without the association of sentiment and story. So there were painters who, recognising this, furnished the engravers with the popular subject-picture. It was well for their link with posterity that they did so, for how many of them would be remembered to-day were it not for these prints? One of the most prominent was William Redmore Bigg, who won a great popularity by painting, with the imagination of a country parson, simple incidents of rustic and domestic life, charged with the most obvious sentiment. The people took these pictures to their hearts, and they were a gold-mine to the engravers. As to their artistic qualities we have little opportunity of judging to-day except through the familiar prints. These are innumerable, and they all have a conventional prettiness. In colours the most pleasing, perhaps, are the Saturday Morning of Burke, the Saturday Evening and Sunday Morning of Nutter; Dulce Domum and Black Monday of John Jones; Romps and Truants of William Ward; Shelling Peas and The Hop Picker of Tomkins; College Breakfast, College Supper, and Rural Misfortunes of Ogborne, The Sailor Boy’s Return and The Shipwrecked Sailor Boy of Gaugain.

Then there was William Hamilton, a prolific and prevalent artist. Sent to Italy in his youth by Robert Adam, the architect, he returned with a sort of Italianate style of storied design, classical, historical, allegorical, conventional; but, happily, he developed a light, pretty and decorative manner of treating simple familiar subjects, which was pleasing alike to engravers and public. The charming plates from Thomson’s Seasons, engraved by Tomkins and Bartolozzi; the graceful set of The Months by Bartolozzi and Gardiner; the idyllic Morning and Evening by Tomkins, with Noon and Night by Delattre, the numerous designs of children at play, such as Summer’s Amusement, Winter’s Amusement, How Smooth, Brother! feel again, The Castle in Danger, by Gaugain; Breaking-up and The Masquerade by Nutter; Blind Man’s Buff and Sea-Saw, Children feeding Fowls, Children playing with a Bird, by Knight; Playing at Hot Cockles, and others by Bartolozzi: these are among the prettiest colour-prints of the period and the most valued to-day—especially The Months. Hamilton’s work just synchronised with the popular vogue for the coloured stipple, and without these prints how much should we know of an artist so esteemed in his day, and so industrious? One might almost ask the same of Francis Wheatley, whose popularity also survives but through the engraver’s medium. It was only after his return from Dublin, where he might have continued to the end as a prosperous portrait-painter had not Dublin society discovered that the lady it had welcomed as Mrs. Wheatley was somebody else’s wife, that Wheatley began painting those idealised urban, rustic, and domestic subjects, which gave him such contemporary vogue and led to his prompt admission among the Royal Academicians. Had he never painted anything else he would always be remembered by his thirteen Cries of London, published by Colnaghi at intervals between 1793 and 1797, and so familiar to us through the accomplished copper-plates of the Schiavonetti brothers, Vendramini, Gaugain and Cardon, though, alas! so wretchedly hackneyed through the innumerable paltry reproductions. But what a fascinating, interesting set of prints it is! How redolent of old lavender! How clean, serene, and country-town-like the London streets appear; how sweet and fragrant they seem to smell; how idyllic the life in them! As one looks at these prints one can almost fancy one hears the old cries echoing through those quiet Georgian streets. Perhaps the London streets of 1795 were not quite so dainty as Wheatley’s sympathetic pencil makes them look to have been. But, remember, that in those days lovely ladies in muslin frocks and printed calicoes of the new fashion, who had sat to Reynolds, and whose portraits were in the print-shop windows, were still being carried in the leisurely sedan-chair, and there were many pretty airs and graces to be seen; while in those streets, too, the youthful Turner was seeing atmosphere and feeling his graphic way to immortality, and young Charles Lamb was walking about, “lending his heart with usury” to all the humanity he saw in those very streets which these Wheatley prints keep so fragrant. Of the numberless other colour-prints after Wheatley perhaps the most valued to-day are, in mezzotint, The Disaster, The Soldier’s Return and The Sailor’s Return, by William Ward, The Smitten Clown, by S. W. Reynolds; in stipple, the Summer and Winter of the Bartolozzi “Season” set, of which Westall did the Spring and Autumn; The Cottage Door and The School Door, by Keating; Setting out to the Fair and The Fairings, by J. Eginton, and the pretty Little Turkey Cock by Delattre, all admirable examples of the kind of art that made Wheatley’s reputation.

The pleasant uninspired rusticities and sentimentalities of Henry Singleton were to popular as to engage the abilities of some of the leading engravers, who must certainly have made the best of them for the colour-printer, since Singleton’s colouring was accounted poor even in his own day. Among the most taking examples we have Nutter’s pretty pair The Farmyard and The Ale-house Door, Burke’s Vicar of the Parish, Eginton’s Ballad-Singer, Knight’s British Plenty and Scarcity in India, some children subjects by Meadows and Benedetti, and E. Scott’s Lingo and Cowslip, which shows that genuinely comic actor, John Edwin, and that audaciously eccentric and adventurous actress, Mrs. Wells, in O’Keefe’s notorious Haymarket farce, “The Agreeable Surprise,” a group which Downman also pictured, though with infinitely more spirit and character.

Subjects dealing with childhood were still greatly in demand, but the public now wanted the children to be more grown-up, and more mundane than the cupids and cherubim of Cipriani, or the Baby Loves and Bacchanals of Lady Diana Beauclerc, so admired by Horace Walpole, and so much flattered by the engravings of Bartolozzi, Tomkins and Bovi. The prolific Richard Westall was not behind his brother Academicians in adapting his inspiration to the market, so, combining rural fancy, as required, with the sentiment of child-life, he made many a parlour look homelier with his pleasant, plausible picturings. When the charm of the engraving glossed over the weaknesses, and colour-printing added its enticing advocacy under Westall’s personal direction, we can find some justification for their popularity in such prints as Nutter’s The Rosebud, The Sensitive Plant, and Cupid Sleeping; Josi’s Innocent Mischief, Innocent Revenge, and Schiavonetti’s The Ghost, a pretty but unequal companion to The Mask of Reynolds.

Although at this productive period of the colour-print William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” were issued, with their sweetly pictured pages of uniquely printed colour, and their magic simplicity of poetry, every page having “the smell of April” as Swinburne said, it does not appear that they exercised any imaginative influence on the artists who were producing children subjects for the popular prints. Yet certainly poetic sentiment informed the grace and charm which were the characteristics of Thomas Stothard, whose prodigiously industrious and productive pencil dominated in a great measure the book-illustration of the day. Five thousand designs are credited to him, and Blake himself engraved some of these in stipple; but our present concern with Stothard is in such engaging colour-prints as Knight’s Fifth of November, Feeding Chickens, The Dunce Disgraced, The Scholar Rewarded, Coming from School, and Buffet the Bear, Runaway Love, Rosina, Flora, and the popular Sweet Poll of Plymouth, Nutter’s First Bite, and Just Breeched; Strutt’s Nurs’d at Home and Nurs’d Abroad, and others of more adult interest too numerous to mention.

Another popular favourite with the buyers of colour-prints was the Rev. Matthew. William Peters, the only clergyman who ever wore the dignities of the Royal Academy, though, as a matter of fact, it was only after he had attained full academic honours that he took holy orders. Eventually, after some successful years with portraiture and fancy subjects, he resigned his R.A.’ship; but it must be said that while he was painting for popularity there was a good deal of the “world and the flesh” about his pictures, albeit his was a very winsome view of both, to wit, the seductively pretty Sylvia and Lydia, by Dickinson; White’s Love and The Enraptured Youth; John Peter Simon’s Much Ado about Nothing; Hogg’s Sophia, and J. R, Smith’s The Chanters. The Three Holy Children in Simon’s print, however, shows Peters more as we may imagine him in the light of a “converted” Royal Academician—converted to be chaplain to George “Florizel,” Prince of Wales.

John Russell, whose gracious portraits in pastel appealed to fashion with the special charm of their uncommon medium, also found happy interpretation on the copper-plate, especially from the delicate graver of P. W. Tomkins. The most attractive examples in colours are the charming Maria, Maternal Love (Mrs. Morgan and child), and Children Feeding Chickens. Collyer’s Mrs. Fitzherbert is also one of the most desirable among the numerous Russell colour-prints. When the engravings of Charles Ansell’s Death of a Racehorse in 1784 had an immense sale, none presumably would have believed that, a hundred and twenty-five years later, collectors would hold him in high regard, not for the horses that made him famous, but for four dainty little drawings of domestic “interiors,” thoroughly representative of their period, preserved in P. W. Tomkins’s stipple prints, especially charming and rare in colours. Tomkins engraved other things of Ansell’s, Knight also; but the set of The English Fireside and The French Fireside, The English Dressing-Room and The French Dressing-Room (the two latter reproduced here), if really fine in colour, must be a prize in the choicest collection. As these prints give us intimate glimpses into the home-life of the “smart set” of the period, so, thanks to the pictorial sense of that vivacious artist Edward Dayes, we are able to see just how the fashionable world comported itself in the parks. An Airing in Hyde Park and The Promenade in St. James’s Park, the one engraved by Gaugain, the other by Soiron, are alive with contemporary social and pictorial interest, and in colours they are rare to seek. Social interest, too, flavours chiefly the name of Henry William Bunbury. Classed generally with the caricaturists, among whom, even in that period of forcible and unrestricted caricature, he was certainly one of the most spontaneously humorous as he was the most refined, he had, like his brother caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson, his days of grace. In those days he did, not with flawless drawing perhaps, but with a vivid feeling for beauty, some charming things, which the engravers turned to good account in colour. Among these are Morning Employments by Tomkins, The Song and The Dance by Bartolozzi, The Modern Graces by Scott, and Black-eyed Susan by Dickinson.