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Editor: Charles Holme

Release date: October 1, 2023

Original publication: London: Offices of 'The Studio', 1909

EDITED BY CHARLES HOLME

PREFATORY NOTE.

OLD ENGLISH COLOUR-PRINTS.

PREFATORY NOTE.

The Editor desires to express his thanks to the following Collectors who have kindly lent their prints for reproduction in this volume:--Mrs. Julia Frankau, Mr. Frederick Behrens, Major E. F. Coates, M.P., Mr. Basil Dighton, Mr. J. H. Edwards, and Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, P.C., G.C.B. Also to Mr. Malcolm C. Salaman, who, in addition to contributing the letterpress, has rendered valuable assistance in the preparation of the work.

" XL. "The Love-Letter." Stipple-Engraving, probably by Thos. Cheesman.

OLD ENGLISH COLOUR-PRINTS

"Other pictures we look at--his prints we read," said Charles Lamb, speaking with affectionate reverence of Hogarth. Now, after "reading" those wonderful Progresses of the Rake and the Harlot, which had for him all the effect of books, intellectually vivid with human interest, let us suppose our beloved essayist looking at those "other pictures," Morland's "Story of Letitia" series, in John Raphael Smith's charming stipple-plates, colour-printed for choice, first issued while Lamb was hardly in his teens. Though they might not be, as in Hogarth's prints, "intense thinking faces," expressive of "permanent abiding ideas" in which he would read Letitia's world-old story, Lamb would doubtless look at these Morland prints with a difference. He would look at them with an interest awakened less by their not too poignant intention of dramatic pathos than by the charm of their simple pictorial appeal, heightened by the dainty persuasion of colour.

What, then, is their peculiar charm for us to-day, those colour-prints of stipple or mezzotint engravings which pervaded the later years of the eighteenth century, and the earliest of the nineteenth? No serious student, perhaps, would accord them a very high or important place in the history of art. Yet a pleasant little corner of their own they certainly merit, representing, as they do, a characteristic contemporary phase of popular taste, and of artistic activity, essentially English. Whatever may be thought of their intrinsic value as works of art, there is no denying their special appeal of pictorial prettiness and sentiment and of dainty decorative charm. Nor, to judge from the recent records of the sale-rooms, would this appeal seem to be of any uncertain kind. It has lately been eloquent enough to compete with the claims of artistic works of indisputable worth, and those collectors who have heard it for the first time only during the last ten years or so have had to pay highly for their belated responsiveness. Those, on the other hand, who listened long ago to the gentle appeal of the old English colour-prints, who listened before the market had heard it, and, loving them for their own pretty sakes, or their old-time illustrative interest, or their decorative accompaniment to Sheraton and Chippendale, would pick them up in the printsellers' shops for equitable sums that would now be regarded as "mere songs," can to-day look round their walls at the rare and brilliant impressions of prints which first charmed them twenty or thirty years ago, and smile contentedly at the inflated prices clamorous from Christie's. For nowadays the decorative legacy of the eighteenth century--a legacy of dignity, elegance, beauty, charm--seems to involve ever-increasing legacy duties, which must be paid ungrudgingly.

Well, we have only to pass a little while in his rooms, looking at his prints in their appropriate environment of beautiful old furniture, giving ourselves up to the pervading old-time atmosphere, and we shall begin to understand him and sympathise with his consistency. And, as the spell works, we shall find ourselves growing convinced that even a Venice set of Whistler etchings would seem decoratively incongruous amid those particular surroundings. For it is the spell, not of intrinsic artistic beauty, but of the eighteenth century that is upon us. It is the spell of a graceful period, compact of charm, elegance and sensibility, that these pretty old colour-prints, so typically English in subject and design, cast over us as we look at them. Thus they present themselves to us, not as so many mere engravings printed in varied hues, but rather as so many pictorial messages--whispered smilingly, some of them--from those years of ever-fascinating memory, when the newly-born Royal Academy was focussing the artistic taste and accomplishment of the English people, and Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, were translating the typical transient beauty in terms of enduring art, while the great engravers were extending the painters' fame, and the furniture-makers and all the craftsmen were supporting them with a new and a classic grace; when Johnson was talking stately, inspiring common-sense, Goldsmith was "writing like an angel," and Sheridan was "catching the manners living as they rose"; when Fanny Burney was keeping her vivid diaries, and Walpole and Mrs. Delany were--we thank Providence--writing letters; when the doings of the players at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, or the fashionable revellers at Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and the Pantheon, were as momentous to "the town" as the debates at Westminster, and a lovely duchess could immortalise a parliamentary election with a democratic kiss. These prints, hinting of Fielding and Richardson, Goldsmith and Sterne, tell us that sentiment, romantic, rustic and domestic, had become as fashionable as wit and elegance, and far more popular; while a spreading feeling for nature, awakened by the poetry of Thomson, Gray and Collins, and nurtured later by Cowper, Crabbe and Burns, was forming a popular taste quite out of sympathy with the cold academic formalism and trammelled feeling of the age of Pope.

These literary influences are important to consider for any true appreciation of these old colour-prints, which, being a reflex in every respect of the popular spirit and character of the period in which they were produced, no other period could have bequeathed to us exactly as they are. And it is especially interesting to remember this, for, from the widespread popularity of these very prints, we may trace, in the pictures their great vogue called for, the origin of that abiding despot of popular English art which Whistler has, in his whimsical way, defined as the "British Subject."

Now, although during the seventeenth century we had in England a number of admirable and industrious engravers, we hear of no attempts among them to print engravings in anything but monochrome; so that, if they heard of the colour-experiments of Hercules Seghers, the Dutch etcher, whom Rembrandt admired, as doubtless they did hear, considering how constant and friendly was their intercourse with the Dutch and Flemish painters and engravers, none apparently thought it worth while to pursue the idea. But, after all, Seghers merely printed his etchings in one colour on a tinted paper, which can hardly be described as real colour-printing; and, if there had been any artistic value in the notion, would not the enterprising Hollar have attempted some use of it? Nor were our English line-engravers moved by any rumours they may have heard, or specimens they may have seen, of the experiments in colour-printing, made somewhere about 1680, by Johannes Teyler, of Nymegen in Holland, a painter, engraver, mathematical professor and military engineer. His were unquestionably the first true colour-prints, being impressions taken from one plate, the engraved lines of which were carefully painted with inks of different hues; and these prints may be seen in the British Museum, collected in all their numerous variety in the interesting and absolutely unique volume which Teyler evidently, to judge from the ornately engraved title-page, designed to publish as "Opus Typochromaticum."

This invention was in effect a process of taking separate impressions, one over the other, from three plates of a desired picture, engraved in mezzotint, strengthened with line and etching, and severally inked each with the proportion of red, yellow, or blue, which, theorising according to Newton, Le Blon considered would go to make, when blended, the true colour-tones of any picture required. In fact, Le Blon practically anticipated the three-colour process of the present day; but in 1719 all the circumstances were against his success, bravely and indefatigably as he fought for it, influentially as he was supported.

Jacob Christopher Le Blon was a remarkable man, whose ingenious mind and restless, enthusiastic temperament led him through an artistic career of much adventure and many vicissitudes. Born in Frankfort in 1667--when Chinese artists were producing those marvels of colour-printing lately discovered by Mr. Lawrence Binyon in the British Museum--he studied painting and engraving for a while with Conrad Meyer, of Zurich, and subsequently in the studio of the famous Carlo Maratti at Rome, whither he had gone in 1696, in the suite of Count Martinetz, the French Ambassador. His studies seem to have been as desultory as his way of living. His friend Overbeck, however, recognising that Le Blon had talents which might develop with concentrated purpose, induced him in 1702 to settle down in Amsterdam and commence miniature-painter. The pictures in little which he did for snuff-boxes, bracelets, and rings, won him reputation and profit; but the minute work affected his eyesight, and instead he turned to portrait-painting in oils. Then the idea came to him of imitating oil-paintings by the colour-printing process, based on Newton's theory of the three-colour composition of light, as I have described. Experimenting with promising results on paintings of his own, he next attempted to reproduce the pictures of the Italian masters, from which, under Maratti's influence, he had learnt the secrets of colour. Without revealing his process, he showed his first "printed paintings" to several puzzled admirers, among them Prince Eug?ne of Savoy and, it is said, the famous Earl of Halifax, Newton's friend, who invented the National Debt and the Bank of England. But, sanguine as Le Blon was that there was a fortune in his invention, he could obtain for it neither a patent nor financial support, though he tried for these at Amsterdam, the Hague, and Paris.

Discouragement soon fell upon the Picture Office. In March 1722 Lord Percival wrote:--"The picture project has suffered under a great deal of mismanagement, but yet improves much." In spite of that improvement, however, a meeting of shareholders was held under the chairmanship of Colonel Guise, and Le Blon's management was severely questioned. The shareholders appear to have heckled him quite in the modern manner, and he replied excitedly to every hostile statement that it was false. But there was no getting away from figures. At a cost of ?5,000 Le Blon had produced 4,000 copies of his prints--these were from twenty-five plates--which, if all had been sold at the prices fixed, would have produced a net loss of ?2,000. Even Colonel Guise could hardly consider these as satisfactory business methods, and the company had already been reorganised, with a new manager named Guine, who had introduced a cheaper and more profitable way of producing the prints. It was all to no purpose. Prints to the value of only ?600 were sold at an expenditure of ?9,000, while the tapestry-weaving branch of the business--also Le Blon's scheme--showed an even more disproportionate result. Bankruptcy followed as a matter of course, and Le Blon narrowly escaped imprisonment.

The colour-printing of engravings, though artistically promising, while still experimental, had certainly proved a financial failure, but Le Blon, nothing daunted, sought to explain and justify his principles and his practice in a little book, called "Coloritto, or the Harmony of Colouring in Painting, reduced to mechanical practice, under easy precepts, and infallible rules." This he dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole, hoping, perhaps, that the First Lord of the Treasury, who had just restored the nation's credit, might do something for an inventive artist's. Next he was privileged to submit his inventions to the august notice of the Royal Society. Le Blon had always his opportunities, an well a his rebuff from fortune, but his faith in himself and his ideas was unswerving; moreover, he had the gift of transmitting this faith to others. At last a scheme for imitating Raphael's cartoons in tapestry, carried on at works in Chelsea, led to further financial disaster and discredit, and Le Blon was obliged to fly from England.

In Paris he resumed his colour-printing, inspiring and influencing many disciples and imitators, among them Jacques Fabian Gautier D'Agoty, who afterwards claimed to have invented Le Blon's process, and transmitted it to his sons. In Paris, in 1741, Le Blon died, very, very poor, but still working upon his copper-plates. It was doubtless during Le Blon's last years in Paris that Horace Walpole met him. "He was a Fleming , and very far from young when I knew him, but of surprising vivacity and volubility, and with a head admirably mechanic; but an universal projector, and with, at least, one of the qualities that attend that vocation, either a dupe or a cheat: I think the former, though, as most of his projects ended in the air, the sufferers believed the latter. As he was much an enthusiast, perhaps like most enthusiasts he was both one and t'other." As a matter of fact, Le Blon was neither a dupe nor a cheat; he was simply a pioneer with all the courage of his imagination and invention; and no less an authority than Herr Hans W. Singer, of Vienna, has considered him, with all his failures and shortcomings, of sufficient artistic importance to be worthy of a monograph.

With only such painters as these to interpret, what chance had even such admirable engravers as John Smith, George White, John Simon, Faber, Peter Pelham, whose mezzotints even were beginning to wane in favour for lack of pictorial interest? It is no great wonder then that, seeing Le Blon's failure, in spite of all his influence and achievement, the engravers in mezzotint were not eager to try the principles of his "Coloritto" in their own practice, and so colour-printing suffered a set-back in this country. But Le Blon's prints are of great value to-day. What, then, has become of those 9,000 copies printed by the Picture Office? The ?600 worth sold before the bankruptcy must have represented about a thousand, yet these impressions from Le Blon's fifty-plates are of extreme rarity even in the museums of the world, and it has been suggested by Herr Singer, and also by Mr. A. M. Hind, in his valuable "History of Engraving and Etching," that many copies of the large prints, varnished over, may be hanging in old houses under the guise of oil paintings, thus fulfilling their original purpose. It is an interesting conjecture, and how plausible one may judge from the varnished copies in the British Museum.

Though the call for the colour-print had not yet arrived, the way was preparing for it. With this widening public interest in pictorial art, a dainty sense of tone was awakened by the porcelain now efflorescing all aver the country. Then, when Reynolds was bringing all the graces to his easel, the urbane influence for beauty spread from the master's painting-room at 47, Leicester Fields--as the Square was then called--to all the print-shops in town. And the year--1764--that saw the death of Hogarth was the year in which Francesco Bartolozzi came to England, bringing with him into the engraving-world fresh influences of grace and delicacy which gradually ripened for colour.

The sentimental mood for the storied picture was now being fostered by the universal reading of the novel, which in its mid-eighteenth-century form gave its readers new experiences in the presentation of actual contemporary life, with analysis of their feelings and cultivation of there sensibilities. Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, Sophia Western and Amelia, Olivia, Maria, were as living in interest as any of the beautiful high-born ladies whose portraits in mezzotint, translated from the canvasses of the great painters, appealed from the printsellers' windows in all the monochrome beauty of their medium. The public, steeped now in sentiment, wanted to see their imaginary heroines in picture: nor had they long to wait. The Royal Academy had become a vital factor in forming public taste, and the printsellers' shops were its mirrors. But not all its members and exhibitors were Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses. There were, for instance, Angelica Kauffman and Cipriani, with their seductive Italian graces of design; there was Bartolozzi, with his beautiful draughtsmanship, and his brilliant facile craft on the copper-plate, but the medium that should bring these into familiar touch with popular taste was still to seek. However, it was at hand, and the man who found this medium, and brought it to the service of popular art, was William Wynne Ryland, "engraver to the King."

Whether the so-called crayon method of engraving, in imitation of soft chalk drawings, was invented by Jean Charles Fran?ois, or Gilles Demarteau, or Louis Bonnet--all three claimed the credit of it--it was, at all events, from Fran?ois, whose claim had obtained official recognition, that Ryland, the pupil of Ravenet and Le Bas, and, in a measure, of Boucher, learned the method while he was still a student in Paris. Only later in his career, however, long after he had left behind him his student days in Paris and Rome, and achieved prosperity in London as a line-engraver and printseller, with royal patronage, and with social success as a man of fashion and pleasure, did he remember the process that Fran?ois had imparted to him. Then, in his necessity, when his extravagances had brought him to bankruptcy, he called the dotted crayon manner to memory, and saw in stipple-engraving, if suitably employed, a possible asset of importance. Compared with line and even with mezzotint it was a very easy and rapid way of engraving, and though, of course, it could not compare with either in nobility, richness and brilliance of effect, Ryland realised that its soft rendering of tones by artistically balanced masses of dots might be adapted to dainty and delicate drawings. The most fortunate opportunity for proving this was at hand. He had some personal acquaintance with Angelica Kauffman, whom Lady Wentworth had brought to London some ten years before, and whose beauty, talents and personal charm had meanwhile made her a fashionable artistic idol, with Society and its beauties flocking to her studio to be painted or to buy her pictures. Having first tested his stippling with his own designs, gracefully French in manner, which he published soon afterwards as "Domestic Employments," Ryland suggested the idea of stipple-engraving to the sympathetic young painter. When he had experimented with one or two of her drawings, she gladly recognised that stipple was the very medium for the interpretation of her work to the public. The first prints sold "like wildfire," and so satisfied was Ryland of the profitable prospect, that, on the strength of it, he promptly re-established himself in a printselling business at 159, Strand. His confidence was amply justified, the public being quick to show their appreciation of the new method, introduced as it was with all the persuasion of the fair Angelica's graceful, fanciful designs of classic story and allegory. This was in 1775, and within a very short time Ryland found that, rapidly as she designed and he engraved, he could scarcely keep pace with the demand for these prints, which, the more readily to crave the popular fancy, he printed in red ink, to imitate red chalk, later to be known as the "Bartolozzi red."

Ryland had called Bartolozzi into consultation, and the gifted Italian engraver, with his greater mastery of technique, his delicate sense of beauty, and his finer artistic perceptions, had seen all that might be done with the new way of stipple; he saw also its limitations. With enthusiasm Bartolozzi and Ryland had worked together till they had evolved from the crayon manner of Fran?ois a process of engraving which proved so happily suited to the classes of fanciful and sentimental prints now fast becoming the vogue, that it simply jumped into a popularity which no other medium of the engraver's art had ever attained.

The stipple method may be thus described. The copper-plate was covered with an etching-ground, on to which the outlined picture was transferred from paper. Then the contours of the design were lightly etched in a series of dots, all the dark and middle shadows being rendered by larger or more closely etched dots, the later engravers using even minute groups of dots. This accomplished, the acid was next applied with very great care, and all the etched dots bitten in. The waxen ground was then removed from the plate, and the work with the dry-point and the curved stipple-graver was commenced. With these tools the lighter shadows were accomplished, and the bitten portions of the picture were deepened and strengthened wherever required, to attain greater fulness or brilliance of effect.

Under the aegis of Ryland and Bartolozzi, however, and with the inspiration of Angelica Kauffman's "harmonious but shackled fancy," as a contemporary critic put it, for its initial impetus, stipple was developed as a separate and distinctive branch of the engraver's art. Its popularity was now to be further enhanced by the gentle and persuasive aid of colour. Ryland had seen many specimens of colour-printing in Paris, when he was with Fran?ois and with Boucher; he now bethought him that, just as the public fancy had been captured by red-chalk imitations, so might it be enchanted by engraved representations of water-colour drawings actually printed in colours. Angelica Kauffman and Bartolozzi eagerly encouraged the idea, and the two engravers, after many experiments, determined the best process of colouring and printing from the plates. Apparently they rejected the multi-plate method tried six years previously by that interesting artist Captain William Baillie; and Ryland's earliest colour-prints were partially tinted only with red and blue. Mrs. Frankau tells us, on the authority of a tradition handed down in his old age from James Minasi, one of Bartolozzi's most trusted pupils, that an Alsatian named Seigneuer was responsible for all the earlier colour-printed impressions of Ryland's and Bartolozzi's stipples after Angelica Kauffman and Cipriani, that then he set up on his own account as a colour-printer, much recommended by Bartolozzi, and largely employed by the publishers, and that his printing may be traced, though unsigned, by a transparency of tone due to the use of a certain vitreous white which he imported in a dry state from Paris. Minasi must, of course, have been a perfect mine of Bartolozzi traditions, but when my father in his boyhood knew him and his musical son, the distinguished engraver would talk of nothing but music, for in 1829, with steel plates superseding the copper, and lithography triumphant, there seemed no prospect that the coloured stipples, already some time out of fashion, would eighty years later be inspiring curiosity as to how they were done. One sees, of course, many feeble colour-prints of the period, which of old the undiscriminating public accepted as readily as to-day they buy, for "old prints," modern cheap foreign reproductions which would disgrace a sixpenny "summer number." On the other hand, the really fine examples of the old-time colour-printing, combined with brilliant engraving--and, of course, only fine things are the true collector's desiderata, irrespective of margins and "state" letterings, and other foolish fads--are certainly works of art, though a very delicate art of limited compass.

It must not be supposed, however, that colour had ousted from public favour the print in monochrome. As a matter of fact, it was usually only after the proofs and earlier brilliant impressions in monochrome had been worked off, and the plate was beginning to look a little worn, that the aid of colour was called in to give the print a fresh lease of popularity. Indeed, with mezzotint a slightly worn plate generally took the colours most effectively. This is why one sees so very seldom an engraver's proof in colours, the extreme rarity of its appearance making always a red-letter moment at Christie's. Therefore, in spite of the ever-widening vogue of the colour-print, it was always the artist and engraver that counted, while the printer in colours was scarcely ever named. And the new industry of stipple-engraving may be said to have been, in its first days of popularity, monopolised almost by Ryland and Bartolozzi, in association with Angelica Kauffman and John Baptist Cipriani.

Cipriani had, by his elegant and tasteful designs, won immediate favour on his arrival in England, and even the Lord Mayor's coach was decorated with panels of his painting. His style prepared the way for Angelica Kauffman, and together they soon brought a new pictorial element to the service of home-decoration. Their graceful rhythmic treatment of classic fables was just what the brothers Adam wanted for their decorative schemes, and the two Italian artists were extensively employed to paint panels for walls and ceilings. In time the fair Angelica outdistanced Cipriani in popularity, and, painting panels for cabinets, commodes, pier-table tops, and other pieces of decorative furniture, her taste was soon dominating that of the fashionable world. No wonder then that, when Ryland and Bartolozzi, through the medium of their facile and adaptable engravings, made her charming, if not flawlessly drawn, compositions readily accessible, the public eagerly bought them, and, framing them, generally without any margin, according to their own oval and circular forms, found them the very mural adornments that the prevailing Adam taste seemed to suggest. In monochrome or in colours, the prints, with their refined and fluent fancies, pictured from Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Homer, and Angelica's beautiful face and figure vivid in several, had an extraordinarily wide appeal. They flattered the fashionable culture of the day, when to quote Horace familiarly in ordinary conversation was almost a patent of gentility. On the continent they were even copied for the decoration of porcelain.

For Ryland this meant another spell of prosperity: it also meant disaster. His constant thirst for pleasure, and his ambition to shine as a fine gentleman, stimulated by such easy and seemingly inexhaustible means of money-making, led him into fatal extravagances. Accused of forging a bill, instead of facing the charge, of which he protested his innocence, he stupidly hid himself and tried ineffectually to cut his own throat. After that, some flimsy evidence procured his condemnation, and, as William Blake, looking in Ryland's face, had predicted years before, he was hanged at Tyburn in 1783.

Most of the engravers were now wooing the facile and profitable popularity of the stipple method and the colour-print and all the favourite painters of the day, from the President of the Royal Academy to the lady amateur, were taking advantage of the fashion. The constancy and infinitude of the demand were so alluring, and the popular taste, never artistically very exacting, had been flattered and coaxed into a mood which seemed very easy to please. It asked only for the pretty thing.

"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; 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.

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.

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."

John Ogborne and William Nutter learnt line-engraving from that interesting engraver and valuable antiquarian, Joseph Strutt, a pupil himself of Ryland; then they went to Bartolozzi to acquire the stipple method, through which they both achieved distinction, Nutter adding to Bartolozzi's teaching the broader influence of J. R. Smith's. John Keyse Sherwin's natural gifts were influenced to an easy grace in Bartolozzi's studio, and we owe to him a few charming stipples in colour; but his brief and brilliant career, ruined by vanity, dandyism, and fashionable favour, belongs to the story of line-engraving, in which it fills a lively and interesting page. Another talented individuality among the group of Bartolozzi's disciples was Edmund Scott, who did some very engaging stipples in colour, of which a few have been named. His work was much favoured by the popular painters.

COUNTESS OF HARRINGTON AND HER CHILDREN . Sir Joshua painted her twice also as Miss Fleming.--ROBINETTA . The Hon. Anna Tollemache was the original of this picture, of which Reynolds painted three versions: that in the National Gallery, Lord Lonsdale's, and Lord Tollemache's, from which Jones made his engraving, dedicating it to the picture's then owner the Hon. William Tollemache.--MASTER HENRY HOARE . The only son of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bart., F.R.S., the well-known antiquarian and historian of Wiltshire.--DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE AND CHILD . One of Sir Joshua Reynolds's thirteen exhibits in the Royal Academy of 1786, when Walpole depreciated it. Here is the famous duchess in that tender mother-mood in which Coleridge apostrophised her so exquisitely. The chubby baby, when she grew up, very properly married the son and heir of that Earl of Carlisle who in graceful verse had championed her mother's introduction of the fashion of feathers.--THE MASK . Part of the "Duke of Marlborough and family," which Sir Joshua painted in 1777. The little Ladies Charlotte and Anne Spencer, being taken into the room at Blenheim where Sir Joshua sat at his easel, the youngest drew back, clutching at her nurse's gown, crying "I won't be painted!" a natural action which appealed irresistibly to Reynolds. And little Lady Anne, as Countess of Shaftesbury, lived until 1865, the last survivor of all Sir Joshua Reynolds's countless sitters.

ST. JAMES'S PARK . M. Grosley, a Frenchman, describes this scene in his "Tour of London," 1772: "Agreeably to this rural simplicity, most of these cows are driven about noon and evening to the gate which leads from the park to the quarter of Whitehall. Tied to posts at the extremity of the grass plots, they swill passengers with their milk, which, being drawn from their udders upon the spot, is served, with all the cleanliness peculiar to the English, in little mugs at the rate of a penny a mug."--A TEA GARDEN . Bagnigge House had been the country residence of Nell Gwyn, and in 1757 the then tenant accidentally discovered a chalybeate spring in his grounds, which two years later he turned to profit. Bagnigge Wells then developed a tea garden, with arbours, ponds with fountains and gold-fish, a bun-house, music, and a reputation for the amorous rendezvous. The place was very popular, and much favoured, especially on Sundays, by the would-be fashionable wives of well-to-do city-folk. In the character of "Madam Fussock" Colman took this off in his prologue to Garrick's Drury Lane farce, "Bon Ton; or High Life above Stairs," 1776.--THE LASS OF LIVINGSTONE . A popular old Scotch song, words by Allan Ramsay. There is also an older version, "The Bonnie Lass o' Liviston," associated with an actual person who kept a public-house in the parish of Livingstone.

LADY COCKERELL AS A GIPSY WOMAN . One of the beautiful daughters of Sir John and Lady Rushout, whose miniatures are, perhaps, Plimer's masterpieces.--LADY DUNCANNON . One of the "Portraits of Four Ladies of Quality," exhibited by Downman at the Royal Academy in 1788. There are also colour-prints of Viscountess Duncannon after Lavinia, Countess Spencer and Cosway, and, with her more famous sister, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, after Angelica Kauffman; while they both figure, with other fashionable beauties, in J. K. Sherwin's picture "The Finding of Moses," also in Rowlandson's "Vauxhall," and two prints in which the same artist celebrated their triumphant share in the Westminster election of 1784, when it was said that "two such lovely portraits had never before appeared on a canvass." The Countess of Bessborough, as she became, was the mother of Lady Caroline Lamb. Her distinguished grandson, Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, kindly lent the print reproduced here.

RINALDO AND ARMIDA . The enchantment of Rinaldo, the Christian Knight, by Armida, the beautiful Oriental sorceress, in Tasso's "Gerusalemme Liberata." LOVE AND BEAUTY: MARCHIONESS OF TOWNSHEND . One of the three beautiful daughters of Sir William Montgomery immortalised by Reynolds on the large canvas now in the National Gallery, called "The Graces decorating a terminal figure of Hymen." She married the distinguished general who finished the battle of Quebec when Wolfe had fallen.

MRS. CREWE . The famous beauty, Fulke Greville's daughter. It was to her house in Lower Grosvenor Street that the triumphant "true blues"--the Prince of Wales among them--crowded in the evening to toast Fox's victory at Westminster. Reynolds has perpetuated Mrs. Crewe's rare beauty on three canvasses, and Sheridan in dedicating to her "The School for Scandal" did reverence to her mind as well as her features. Fox poetised in her praise, and Fanny Burney said "She is certainly the most completely a beauty of any woman I ever saw! She uglifies everything near her."--THE DANCE . The tradition, lately repeated in book and periodical, which gives the figures in this print as those of the Gunning sisters, is obviously absurd. When Bunbury was an infant in arms the beauty of the Gunnings first took the town by storm; next year Maria became a countess, Elizabeth a duchess, and, when this print was done the one had been dead twenty-two years, the other already widowed and "double duchessed," as Horace Walpole put it.--MORNING EMPLOYMENTS . The name on the harpsichord should obviously be Jacobus Kirkman; there was no Thomas. The instrument with the double keyboard is exactly like that in my own possession, which Dr. Burney selected from Jacob Kirkman's shop in 1768. When a fashionable craze for the guitar was sending the makers of harpsichords and spinets very near to bankruptcy, Kirkman bought up all his own fine instruments, which the ladies were practically "giving away" for guitars; then he purchased a lot of cheap guitars and presented them to milliner's girls and street-singers, so that they were twanged everywhere and became vulgar, the ladies bought harpsichords again, and he made a large fortune.

MADEMOISELLE PARISOT . A noted dancer in the opera ballets at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket. There is a beautiful mezzotint of her, dated 1797, by J. R. Smith after A. W. Devis. This is very rare, and in colours extremely so. Mdlle. Parisot also figures as one of the three dancers in Gillray's caricature "Operatical Reform, or La Danse ? l'Ev?que," published in 1798 to ridicule the Bishop of Durham's protest against the scanty attire of the ballet-dancers.--MARIA . Maria of Moulines, in Sterne's "Sentimental Journey."

MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.

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