CHAPTER XXVI.
THE LESSER CARICATURISTS OF THE REIGN OF GEORGE III.—PAUL SANDBY.—COLLET; THE DISASTER, AND FATHER PAUL IN HIS CUPS.—JAMES SAYER; HIS CARICATURES IN SUPPORT OF PITT, AND HIS REWARD.—CARLO KHAN’S TRIUMPH.—BUNBURY; HIS CARICATURES ON HORSEMANSHIP.—WOODWARD; GENERAL COMPLAINT.—ROWLANDSON’S INFLUENCE ON THE STYLE OF THOSE WHOSE DESIGNS HE ETCHED.—JOHN KAY OF EDINBURGH: LOOKING A ROCK IN THE FACE.
The school of caricature which had grown amid the political agitation of the reigns of the two first Georges, gave birth to a number of men of greater talent in the same branch of art, who carried it to its highest degree of perfection during that of George III. Among them are the three great names of Gillray, Rowlandson, and Cruikshank, and a few who, though second in rank to these, are still well remembered for the talent displayed in their works, or with the effect they produced on contemporaries. Among these the principal were Paul Sandby, John Collet, Sayer, Bunbury, and Woodward.
Sandby has been spoken of in the last chapter. He was not by profession a caricaturist, but he was one of those rising artists who were offended by the sneering terms in which Hogarth spoke of all artists but himself, and he was foremost among those who turned their satire against him. Examples of his caricatures upon Hogarth have already been given, sufficient to show that they display skill in composition as well as a large amount of wit and humour. After his death, they were republished collectively, under the title, “Retrospective Art, from the Collection of the late Paul Sandby, Esq., R.A.” Sandby was, indeed, one of the original members of the Royal Academy. He was an artist much admired in his time, but is now chiefly remembered as a topographical draughtsman. He was a native of Nottingham, where he was born in 1725,[103] and he died on the 7th of November, 1809.[104]
No. 213. A Disaster.
John Collet, who also has been mentioned in a previous chapter, was born in London in 1725, and died there in 1780. Collet is said to have been a pupil of Hogarth, and there is a large amount of Hogarthian character in all his designs. Few artists have been more industrious and produced a greater number of engravings. He worked chiefly for Carrington Bowles, in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and for Robert Sayers, at 53, Fleet Street. His prints published by Bowles were engraved generally in mezzotinto, and highly coloured for sale; while those published by Sayers were usually line engravings, and sometimes remarkably well executed. Collet chose for his field of labour that to which Hogarth had given the title of comedy in art, but he did not possess Hogarth’s power of delineating whole acts and scenes in one picture, and he contented himself with bits of detail and groups of characters only. His caricatures are rarely political—they are aimed at social manners and social vanities and weaknesses, and altogether they form a singularly curious picture of society during an important period of the last century. The first example I give (No. 213) is taken from a line engraving, published by Sayers in 1776. At this time the natural adornments of the person in both sexes had so far yielded to artificial ornament, that even women cut off their own hair in order to replace it by an ornamental peruque, supporting a head-dress, which varied from time to time in form and in extravagance. Collet has here introduced to us a lady who, encountering a sudden and violent wind, has lost all her upper coverings, and wig, cap, and hat are caught by her footman behind. The lady is evidently suffering under the feeling of shame; and hard by, a cottager and his wife, at their door, are laughing at her discomfiture. A bill fixed against a neighbouring wall announces “A Lecture upon Heads.”
At this time the “no-popery” feeling ran very high. Four years afterwards it broke out violently in the celebrated lord Gordon riots. It was this feeling which contributed greatly to the success of Sheridan’s comedy of “The Duenna,” brought out in 1775. Collet drew several pictures founded upon scenes in this play, one of which is given in our cut No. 214. It forms one of Carington Bowles’s rather numerous series of prints from designs by Collet, and represents the well-known drinking scene in the convent, in the fifth scene of the third act of “The Duenna.” The scene, it will be remembered, is “a room in the priory,” and the excited monks are toasting, among other objects of devotion, the abbess of St. Ursuline and the blue-eyed nun of St. Catherine’s. The “blue-eyed nun” is, perhaps, the lady seen through the window, and the patron saint of her convent is represented in one of the pictures on the wall. There is great spirit in this picture, which is entitled “Father Paul in his Cups, or the Private Devotions of a Convent.” It is accompanied with the following lines:—
See with these friars how religion thrives,
Who love good living better than good lives;