Old English colour prints

by Malcolm C. Salaman

III.

Bartolozzi had come to England as an acknowledged master of line-engraving, rival even of the splendid Sir Robert Strange, and the spontaneous charm and fluent beauty of his incomparable etchings after Guercino, and the lovely lines of his Clytie and his Silence after Annibale Carracci, had simply astonished the connoisseurs. His accomplished and prolific etching-point and graver carried an unaccustomed grace and delicacy into many a channel of the engraving industry. The benefit concert-ticket of the humblest musician was engraved as finely and brilliantly as the diploma of the Royal Academy, while the book-illustration of the day was largely enriched by the easy charm of his touch. Then, as we have seen, the little art of stipple came almost like a fairy-gift to his ready hand, so opportune was the moment. Bartolozzi’s sweet caressing sense of beauty found inevitable expression through the gentle possibilities of the medium, and the public became eagerly responsive. With the encouragement of a popularity daily on the increase, and the appreciation of his brother artiste, he produced those charming stipple prints which are among the masterpieces of the method, and make, for many people, the name of Bartolozzi synonymous with “beautiful old colour-prints.”

He was still the true artist, doing worthy things, interpreting beauty with an elusive magic of charm all his own. Pupils flocked to his studio; among them engravers of repute, who realised that the new and easy stipple was going to prove more remunerative than the laborious line-method, or even mezzotint. Pupils, too, there were who learnt from Bartolozzi so well, that they equalled their master while yet in their pupilage, as he admitted, either with generous praise, or by the ambiguous method of signing their plates with his own name. Unfortunately for his reputation this was a practice that grew upon him, for, since the name of Bartolozzi had a distinct market value, he appended it sometimes to prints quite unworthy of its bearer. For the modern collector this, of course, involves frequent snares and delusions.

Bartolozzi has been called the Achilles of eighteenth-century engraving, and certainly his productiveness and his influence were on quite an heroic scale; nor was the vulnerable heel wanting to complete the simile. This was his spendthrift love of epicurean living, which gradually dulled his artistic conscience until it made no attempt to distinguish between the demands of art and a commercial popularity. Luxurious in his habits, free with his hospitality, generous to a fault with his purse, he looked with a satisfied eye on the ever-expanding market for the coloured stipple-print, which practically he had created, or, at least, auspicated with beautiful offerings. And as he saw that the public would now accept almost anything tendered to it in the name of a colour-print, however meretricious the design or poor the engraving, he seems to have sacrificed artistic scruples to the constant need of money-making. If his purse was a sieve, the popular craze for colour prints must keep on filling it. So Bartolozzi, the great and famous engraver, whose sure draughtsmanship had long been as a leaning-staff to the printsellers and many an artist, actually encouraged vain but incompetent amateurs, several of them quite pleasant ladies with pretty ideas, to make feeble, mawkish designs, which perhaps he would correct in drawing, before giving them to often half-fledged engravers, and turning them upon the market in poorly, hurriedly stippled plates, specious in coloured inks.

As his best pupils, Tomkins, Cheesman, Schiavonetti, Ogborne, Marcuard, left him, and set up as independent engravers, Bartolozzi’s studio, with its innumerable workers, gradually developed into little more than a factory for turning out popular prints as rapidly as possible. This hurry for the market seems, however, to have affected not only Bartolozzi and his engravers, but the printselling world generally. The art critic of the “Monthly Mirror” for 1796, while blaming the printsellers as the cause, protested against the “slovenly and imperfect manner” in which so many prints were being turned out, declaring, moreover, that this was influencing the painters to an indifference about the execution of such works as were intended for prints, making them “contented to satisfy the print or bookseller with the mere effect of light and shade.”

Earlier than this, however, Sir Robert Strange, who hated Bartolozzi, and for whom line-engraving alone represented the dignity of the engraver’s art, had predicted a sort of artistic débâcle through the popularity of stipple-engraving. “From the nature of the operation,” he wrote, “and the extreme facility with which it is executed, it has got into the hands of every boy, of every printseller in town, of every manufacturer of prints, however ignorant and unskilful. I call them manufacturers, because the general run of such productions does not in reality merit the appellation of works of art and must ultimately tend to depreciate the fine arts in general, to glut the public, and to vitiate the growing taste of the nation. This art, if to it may be called, is in itself extremely limited, admits of little variety, and is susceptible of no improvement.” Naturally, the great line-engraver, who had worked for his fame through long arduous years, was vexed to see the very effects of soft flesh tones, which he produced to admiration with laborious mastery of point and graver, rendered so easily by stipple, and even more popularly appreciated. Yet there was a good deal of truth in his protest. The public was in time glutted, not with finely engraved colour-prints, but with inferior stippling of weak designs, much of it crudely coloured by hand, or printed with no sense of art; but the fine arts in general were not in the least depreciated through such things.

And now the charming little art has, at its old-time best, found enthusiastic lovers again, while the noble beauty of line-engraving is to-day appreciated by only the limited few. “If Strange could but re-visit the glimpses of Christie’s, it would more than astonish him to see there none of his own superb line-engravings after the great Italian masters, but to hear the keen bidding for his old rival Bartolozzi’s best colour-prints after Reynolds, or the Downman Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Duncannon, the Cipriani infants, Contentment, Friendship, the Hamilton Months, or Miss Benwell’s St. James’s and St. Giles’s Beauties, or the Orange Girl.

Not a little surprised would Strange be if also he could hear how the modern collector values the work of Bartolozzi’s most distinguished pupils in that same art which he in his day regarded so contemptuously. Of these, Peltro William Tomkins was Bartolozzi’s own favourite. “He is my son in the art,” said the master, always generous with praise of good work; “he can do all I can in this way, and I hope he will do more.” Tomkins inherited the graphic tendency from his father, William Tomkins, A.R.A., a landscape painter; but, of course, it was from Bartolozzi he learnt the sweetness and grace of draughtsmanship which distinguish his copper-plates, whether in the engraving of his own pretty fanciful designs of children, such as He Sleeps, Innocent Play, The Wanton Trick, or the pictures of other artists. His close-grained stippling, too, had that same soft and tender rotundity of tone we find in the authentic works of the master, and of course it was peculiarly adaptable to the simple tints of the eighteenth-century colour-printer. A few of Tomkins’s most attractive prints will be found among the illustrations to this volume, others I have named in speaking of the painters. The extent of his work was enormous, and it always had charm; so the collector can choose many appealing things without exhausting the list of Tomkins’s capital prints. Engraver to the Queen and drawing-master to the Princesses, he seems to have been a favourite with the lady artists and amateurs, whose drawings frequently employed his graver, such as Julia Conyers, Princess Elizabeth, Lady Templetown, Lady Edward Bentinck, Miss Drax, and, of course, they all demanded colour as a sort of prescriptive right. Among his more serious work were some good plates after the old masters, as those in Tresham’s “British Gallery of Pictures,” rather brilliant in colour. On a Virgin and Child and St. John, after Raphael, engraved and published by Tomkins at Fulham in 1789, I find “Printed in colour by C. Floquet,” which suggests an amicable understanding between engraver and printer; for the colourist was rarely credited with his share in the old colour-prints.

Thomas Cheesman’s engravings have at their best the free and easy charm of the artist accustomed to express his own conceptions. In his youth he lodged with Hogarth’s widow, through whose influence he was entrusted with the engraving of The Last Stake. The work must have been a liberal education. Stippling, strengthened with etching, he learnt from Bartolozzi, and how he excelled in it may be seen in such charming prints as Romney’s Spinster and Seamstress, Angelica Kauffman’s Marchioness of Townshend and Chila (Love and Beauty), Reynolds’s Reverie, his own Maternal Affection, and others of his graceful designs. Robert S. Marcuard was another of Bartolozzi’s best pupils, and his fine engraving of his master’s portrait, after Reynolds, has a richness of tone and distinction of character rarely seen in stipple-plates, but found also in Marcuard’s transcripts of others among Reynolds’s male portraits. He appears to have strengthened his stippling of shadows with etching to a more than usual extent, a practice suggested, perhaps, by his work in mezzotint.

Several noteworthy prints by Charles Knight have already been named. He was quite a valuable engraver of remarkable industry, and so studiously did he assimilate the Bartolozzi methods, while lacking only the master’s inimitable delicacy, that he could be trusted to execute important plates which needed but Bartolozzi’s own finishing touches to make them worthy of his name. These the master would unhesitatingly sign for publication, as in the case of the famous Miss Farren after Lawrence. The brilliant etching, with all the preliminary work, was Knight’s; yet it is known as Bartolozzi’s print. But to the various acknowledged prints of Knight’s already mentioned one may add, as good examples in colours, Cupid Disarmed, and Cupid’s Revenge after Miss Benwell, and The Valentine and The Wedding Ring after Ansell.