From his popular task of whipping with genial graphic satire the social follies and foibles of the day. Bunbury’s pencil would on occasion “lightly turn to thoughts of love,” as in A Tale of Love, so artistically engraved by J. K. Sherwin; and it was in this mood that his discourse on love and romance would somewhat shock Fanny Burney. She did not think it quite nice in a Court equerry, who was also a husband and a father, to dilate so rhapsodically on such topics; but he adored “The Sorrows of Werther,” which she told him she could not read; and, after all, was he not the devoted husband of Catherine Horneck, Goldsmiths “Little Comedy”? Rowlandson had not, of course, Bunbury’s culture and refinement, but with all his rollicking Rabelaisian humour, he had faultless draughtsmanship with, when he chose, a daintiness of touch and a magic grace of curve. Among his countless coloured plates, however, those that can be accepted as true colour-prints can be numbered almost on one hand. Opera Boxes and the interesting and vivid Vauxhall, spiritedly engraved by Pollard, and capitally aquatinted by Francis Jukes, were not, as generally supposed, actually printed in colours; but The Syrens and Narcissa, both things of voluptuous charm, are etched and stippled and veritably colour-printed in part. With very few exceptions, Rowlandson’s prints were only etched by him, then aquatinted and coloured by other hands, he supplying a tinted drawing.
When the mantle of the fashionable portrait-painter had slipped naturally from the shoulders of Reynolds to those of John Hoppner, and the older beauties were not as young as they used to be, and a new set of beautiful young women had meanwhile grown up, the curious public called for the new faces. So Hoppner, already finely interpreted by the best mezzotint men, now readily allied himself with Charles Wilkin, a portrait-painter in oil and miniature of some repute, who, as a very talented and individual stipple-engraver, had won his spurs with Sir Joshua, notably in his rich engraving of the famous Lady Cockburn and her Children. The new venture was A Select Series of Portraits of Ladies of Rank and Fashion. These, charming and desirable in monochrome, are delightful, but very rare, in colour. Seven of the portraits were done by Hoppner, and show him in most gracious vein: these are Viscountesses St. Asaph and Andover, Countess of Euston, the new Duchess of Rutland, Lady Charlotte Campbell, Lady Langham, and Lady Charlotte Duncombe. The other three are from the spirited pencil of the engraver himself—Ladies Gertrude Villiers, Catherine Howard and Gertrude Fitzpatrick, who as a child had sat to Reynolds for his Collina. Hoppner’s Hon. Mrs. Paget as Psyche is also a charming coloured stipple, engraved by Henry Meyer. The colour-printed mezzotint seems to have found exceptional favour with Hoppner, for in that medium we have the lovely Countess of Oxford—a choice example—and Mrs. Whitbread, by S. W. Reynolds; J. R. Smith’s Sophia Western and Mrs. Bouverie, with an engaging suggestion of pastel; Charles Turner’s Lady Cholmondeley and Child; John Jones’s Mrs. Jordan as “Hippolyta”; John Young’s Lady Charlotte Greville, Mrs. Hoppner as “Eliza,” Mrs. Orby Hunter, the Godsall children (The Setting Sun), and Lady Lambton and Children (one of them Lawrence’s Master Lambton); William Ward’s pretty Salad Girl, Mrs. Benwell, and The Daughters of Sir Thomas Franklana, so well known in monochrome, but so exceedingly rare in colour; James Ward’s Juvenile Retirement (the Douglas children); Children Bathing (Hoppner’s own); Mrs. Hibbert, and the graceful Miranda (Mrs. Michael Angelo Taylor), of which only one impression is known in colours, exquisite in quality, that in the very choice collection of Mr. Frederick Behrens.
Although Hoppner’s pre-eminence among the portrait-painters was so long established, it was seriously challenged in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1790 by the portrait of An Actress from the brush of a painter only twenty-one years of age, who was destined to preside over the Academy and become the most fashionable painter of his day. This was Thomas Lawrence, and the portrait was that of the popular and beautiful Miss Elizabeth Farren—Countess of Derby seven years later—in her fur-lined white cloak and muff, which was engraved by Charles Knight, with finishing touches by Bartolozzi, who signed it, and is now one of the most desired of colour-prints, as it is one of the most constantly reproduced.
The acknowledged beauties, however, did not monopolise the “placidness of content or consciousness of superiority,” which Dr. Johnson, so Johnsonianly, held was necessary to “expand the human face to its full expression.” Happily there were artists to see everywhere dainty and charming women who could be attractively pictured with the artistic sense of nature and actuality, perhaps even more picturesquely for not being able always to keep their temperaments out of their faces and attitudes. One of these artists was also an eminent engraver, and at the same time an extensive printseller and publisher, with always one eye to his art and the other to the main chance. John Raphael Smith loomed very large in the London print-world of the later eighteenth century, because he had not only the artistic ability to do the thing popularly wanted, but also the commercial intuition as to what would be likely to please the public in its varying fancies. A master of mezzotint, and monarch among the translators of Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney, he used with lighter touch the same medium for engraving many of his own vivacious picturings of contemporary social scenes, with their manners and fashions very much alive. A generous, convivial, cheerful liver himself, filling every hour with the activities of art, commerce and pleasure, J. R. Smith had the vivid pictorial eye for what was gay and pleasing in the life around him. Also he possessed an instinctive sense of fashion. Therefore, in the numerous attractive drawings of petty women in varied attitudes of busy idleness, we get a more real impression of the fashions of the passing hour than even the stately canvasses of Sir Joshua could give us with all their artistic defiance of the modistes. Smith would engrave these himself in stipple suggesting crayon effects, with the original artist’s freedom, and the mezzotinter’s broad handling of tones; or he would entrust them to other engravers. Being a painter, he used colour on his plates judiciously, and among the most highly-prized colour-prints of the period J. R. Smith’s spirited engravings hold quite an individual place. To name, perhaps, the most characteristic: À Loisir; Black, Brown and Fair; Maid; Wife; Widow; and What you Will; A Christmas Holiday; Flirtilla and Narcissa; The Fortune Tellers; The Mirror, Serena and Flirtilla; Thoughts on a Single Life, with its companion, Thoughts on Matrimony, engraved quite as well by William Ward, at whose hands The Widow’s Tale makes a charming appearance in coloured mezzotint. In this medium also The Promenade at Carlisle House enjoys an elusive existence. Then there are Smith’s Lecture on Gadding and The Moralist, stippled by Nutter, and his Credulous Lady and the Astrologer, by Simon. But not even his own designs inspired his mezzotint-scraper to finer results than the splendid Almeria (Mrs. Meynott), after Opie, or his stipple-graver to surer beauty than in his Mrs. Mills after Engelheart, or his Snake in the Grass, after Reynolds, or those charming and familiar Morland prints Delia in Town and Delia in the Country, Rustic Employment and Rural Amusement, and the Letitia set, of course in their original form.
J. R. Smith’s was a dominating personality, and his influence on his talented pupil, William Ward, was very strong. He taught him by example, paying him the compliment of engraving in mezzotint and charmingly colour-printing his pupil’s felicitous, Morlandish picture, The Visit to the Grandfather. He certainly made him work, and the results show not only in the innumerable fine plates which Ward produced in mezzotint and stipple after various painters, but in his own dainty drawings of charming femininity. These, such as the well-known Louise, Alinda, Lucy of Leinster, Almeida, The Soliloquy, Hesitation, Louisa Mildmay, and The Cyprian Votary, were all translated to the copper with a verve and charm, produced by an exact understanding of the artistic economies of the stippled crayon manner, unsurpassed, perhaps not equalled, by any other engraver. When finely tinted, they show the colour-printer’s craft at its daintiest, and their collector’s taste at its highest. In the same genre are Private Amusement (“Reflection”) and Public Amusement (“Temptation”), engraved by Ward after Ramberg—a favourite pair. But very different, of course, in character are his fine mezzotints of the rural pictures of his talented, irascible younger brother James. Of these, perhaps, the best print in colours are The Citizen’s Retreat, Selling Rabbits, Compassionate Children, The Haymakers, Outside of a Country Ale-house, Summer and Winter, and the well-known Vegetable Market, the companion to which, A Poultry Market, was finely engraved by James Ward himself, whose own attractive plates of The Rocking Horse and Rustic Felicity and A Cottager going to Market and A Cottager returning from Market, have also been printed in colours. William Ward’s popular fame as an engraver, however, will doubtless rest mainly on his innumerable transcripts in stipple and mezzotint of the pictures of his brother-in-law, that natural artist, that dissolute, happy-go-lucky vagabond, that homely, facile painter of genius, George Morland.
In exploiting Morland as he did, John Raphael Smith proved his unerring instinct for the right popular thing. He was answering an unconscious call for artistic virility and freshness of vision. The prints of the widest public appeal, however simple their intentions in rusticity or domesticity of subject, were merely repeating pictorial conventions, illustrating stereotyped sentiments. Bigg, Hamilton, Wheatley, Singleton, Westall, they were all doing pleasing, pretty things enough, and the public were buying the prints, and hanging them on the walls of their homes, without even suspecting that Nature as the true inspiration of art had but little to do with all this picture-making. Then came Morland, with his natural instinct for the true, the simple picture, his free and facile art, his charming wizardry of the palette, his happy, unaffected realism. The others had been idealising the commonplace; Morland knew that nothing is commonplace if seen and treated with relative truth. J. R. Smith saw, both as artist and prosperous publisher of prints, that here at last was a virile genius that could charm the people’s love of pictures to a clearer understanding of beauty through a true pictorial vision of nature.
It was a curious coincidence that just about the same time an obscure publisher in Kilmarnock had given the Scotch lovers of song the means of recognising in the natural lyric note of Burns a reviving impulse for English poetry. Here in Morland was a Burns on canvas, a Burns who sang with his paint-brush, who could put the moods of Green Grow the Rashes, O, of My Nannie, O, or The Jolly Beggars, into enduring pigments as the poet had put them into immortal song. And Morland’s simple pictures are classic to-day, because in them, irrespective of subject, is the painter’s true poetry of form and colour.
Always susceptible to the ready comradeship, in the first consciousness of his brilliant easy powers, with his artistic ambitions bound up in his joy of living, Morland came quickly under the influence of Smith’s convivial yet energising personality. The publisher, urged by the public’s clamorous response, stimulated him to a prolific activity, and, with such engravers as Smith himself and the Wards to interpret him with masterly understanding and sympathy, and all the other engravers of note eager to do the same, Morland soon commanded the market—or, at least, his exploiters did. It seemed that Morland could do everything the public appeared to want, so, before he developed into the Morland exclusively of the stable and the farmyard and picturesque vagabondage, he challenged the popular genre painters on their own ground, and beat them with the magic simplicity of nature. Could the domestic Bigg do anything in his own line as charmingly life-like as A Visit to the Child at Nurse and A Visit to the Boarding School? Look at William Ward’s mezzotints of these pictures in colour, and then compare with their sweet actuality of scene and sentiment the same engraver’s version of Bigg’s The Birth of an Heir, with its scenic posturing and sentimentality. Then, what colour-prints of children could Hamilton or Stothard ever have designed to compare, for true suggestion of the bright buoyancy of childhood, with such gems as Ward’s mezzotints Children Birds-nesting, Juvenile Navigators, Blind Man’s Buff, The Kite Entangled; Keating’s Playing at Soldiers, and Nurse and Children in a Field; Dayes’ Children Nutting, and Tomkins’s stipple Children Feeding Goats. Morland enjoyed to let the children of the neighbourhood play and romp about his studio, and thus he could paint them naturally, with no self-consciousness on their parts and happy sympathy on his.
No wonder all the engravers were agog to make copper-plates from his quickly finished paintings. That charming spontaneity of picturesque impression, with luminous harmony of tones, which distinguishes all Morland’s pictures, even those painted in his least reputable days of hand-to-mouth living, is reflected in the best engravings of his multitudinous works. Of those printed in colours one may attempt a selection from the point of view of especially fine quality and rarity. Among the stipples, therefore, must be named again J. R. Smith’s Rustic Employment and Rural Amusement, Delia in Town and Delia in the Country, and the famous Story of Letitia series—Domestic Happiness, The Elopement, The Virtuous Parent, Dressing for the Masquerade, The Tavern Door, and The Fair Penitent (re-issued in 1811 with the ample costumes of 1786 incongruously altered to the current slim Empire fashion, upsetting, of course, the pictorial balance of design). Then there are Constancy (Mrs. Ward), Variety (Mrs. Morland), and Morning; Thoughts on Amusement for the Evening—a very rare oval—by William Ward; Louisa, a pair of large ovals, The Lass of Livingstone, and How Sweet to meet with Love’s Return, the famous Dancing Dogs, and Guinea Pigs, all by T. Gaugain (the last pair re-issued by Phillipe); The Tea Garden and St. James’s Park, by F. D. Soiron; The Squire’s Door and The Farmer’s Door, by Duterreau; The Farmer’s Visit to his Married Daughter in Town, by W. Bond, and The Visit Returned in the Country, by Nutter; Industry and Idleness (Mrs. Morland), by Knight, and The Fair Seducer, and The Discovery, by E. J. Dumée.
Many of Morland’s pictures on the mezzotint plates seem to have justified the colour-printer, but innumerable Morland prints were coloured by hand entirely or in part, and it is said that J. R. Smith employed his young pupil Joseph Mallord William Turner upon this work. I doubt, however, if even Mr. Rawlinson could detect Turner’s hand upon a Morland print, therefore we must be content to distinguish the finest and rarest of the mezzotints actually printed in colours. To those already named we may add The Angling Party by Keating, and The Angler’s Repast by William Ward, to whom we are also indebted for The Coquette at her Toilet, The Pledge of Love (“Contemplating the Miniature”); Contemplation (“Caroline of Lichfield”), very rare, and exquisitely suggestive of the original in Mr. Thomas Barratt’s wonderful Morland collection; Cottagers, Travellers, The Thatcher, First of September—Morning, First of September—Evening, Inside of a Country Ale-house, The Public-House Door, The Effects of Extravagance and Idleness, The Turnpike Gate, The Sportsman’s Return, and The Farmer’s Stable, Morland’s National Gallery masterpiece; The Return from Market, a beautiful thing, and Feeding the Pigs, by J. R. Smith; Sunset: a View in Leicestershire, by James Ward; Summer and Winter by W. Barnard; Morning, or the Benevolent Sportsman; Evening, or the Sportsman’s Return, by J. Grozer, and Selling Cherries and Shelling Peas, a very rare pair, etched and mezzotinted by E. Bell. Then there is “The Deserter” set, by Keating, Enlisting a Recruit, Recruit deserted and detected hiding in his wife’s room, The Deserter handcuffed and conveyed to a court martial, The Deserter pardoned and restored to his family; a set of pictures studied with realism resulting from one of Morland’s characteristic adventures, possible, perhaps, only in the eighteenth century. Snipe Shooting, one of a set of four, by G. Catton, Jun., must not be forgotten; it is of particular interest as showing aquatint in effective combination with stipple and etching. How important a place Morland fills in the history of eighteenth-century prints, one realises only when, looking over a collection like Mr. Thomas Barratt’s at Hampstead, where the colour-prints are to be seen in their multitude, one attempts to note down a few gems, and finds a long list has quickly accumulated.