Chapter VI: Preface (6)

But it must be allowed that Cosway suited his customers, and, moreover, in the main satisfied the art-demands of his period. However stern critics might censure, or rival painters scoff, his success was assured. And in artistic facility and accuracy of drawing, when he cared to be particular in that respect, he could hardly be said to be behind his contemporaries. His copies from the antique were both graceful and correct, owing to his frequent practice in the Duke of Richmond's gallery, and his outlines received the fervent admiration of Bartolozzi and Cipriani. He tried his hand now and then at the high historic order of art of Barry and Fuseli, but his ambition was probably limited to a less pretentious range,--'the little pleasing paradise of miniature,' as Allan Cunningham phrases it; he cared rather for the caresses of the world of fashion than the applause of the cognoscenti. In society he was a power; for could he not by means of his pencil bestow, as it were, a certificate of beauty upon whom he would? Have not many of his sitters acquired, thanks to him, a reputation for good looks which has survived even to our day, and which, but for his skilful flattery, they never could have possessed at all? So, in drawing-rooms and boudoirs he was fêted, and fondly greeted, and made much of, while plenty of money was slipped into his pocket, and so, according to one of his biographers, from the gold he gained and the gaiety of the company he kept, he rose from one of the dirtiest of boys to be one of the smartest of men.

He was, indeed, coxcombical in his smartness. But then he lived in days when, among a large class, a love of fine clothes had risen to quite a passion. Patronized by the Prince of Wales, what could he do but imitate his patron--who was nothing if not 'dressy?' 'The Macaronis' were furnishing the sensation of the hour. A party of young gentlemen who had made the grand tour had formed themselves into a club, and from their always having upon their table a dish of macaroni--a comestible then but little known in England--they acquired the name of the Macaroni Club; at least their name has been generally thus accounted for. The Macaroni Club was to the last century what Crockford's was to this. 'It was composed,' says Walpole, 'of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying glasses.' In matters of fashion the Macaronis claimed absolute supremacy. They ruled the world of _ton_--especially interesting themselves in toilet matters. To wear a style of dress that had not been sanctioned by the Macaroni Club was to be scouted as an outer barbarian. For a time everything was '_à la Macaroni_.' It became the phrase of the hour--springing into existence as suddenly, possessing the town as wholly, and disappearing at last as completely as such phrases always do. Of course Cosway must be in the fashion,--must chime in with the universal humour. He dressed in the height of the Macaroni vogue. His small plain person was to be seen in all public places clothed in a mulberry silk coat profusely embroidered with scarlet strawberries, with sword and bag and a small three-cornered hat perched on the top of his powdered toupée. He assumed a mincing, affected air--a tone of excessive refinement and exquisite sensibility. He pretended to an absurd superiority over his fellows, and striving to conceal his real and more honest situation as a hard-working artist, posed himself incessantly as a creature of fashion. Of course in the end he disgusted his brother painters, while he did not really conciliate 'the quality.' The former scorned him, his fine clothes, splendid furniture, and black servants--the more satirical holding him up to ridicule in the shop windows, by laughable caricatures, such as 'The Macaroni Miniature Painter; or, Billy Dimple sitting for his picture:' the latter came to his feasts, drank his wines, won his money from him at hazard, stimulated his extravagance to the utmost, while they made mouths at him behind his back, and condemned in secret and among themselves the folly of his conduct. It must be said for the artist, however, that he toiled earnestly and successfully to make his professional earnings keep pace in some sort with his lavish private habits. Cipriani used to relate, that after whole nights had been wasted by Cosway in the most frivolous and worthless of pursuits, he was yet to be found at an early hour in his studio, sedulously toiling to redeem lost time and money, very penitent for the past, full of the best intentions for the future: all of course to be abandoned and forgotten when the evening came, the chandeliers were lighted, the cards strewed the table, and the world of society gathered round him in his drawing-room again.

A less honest source of emolument than his own pencil provided, Cosway found in helping to supply the demand then existing for specimens of the old masters. The love of the connoisseurs for ancient art, even to its most suspicious examples, had survived the satire of Hogarth and the indignation of Barry. The patrons of the day were warmer friends to the picture-dealers than to the painters. Modern works of any pretence were at an alarming discount: the productions of the past were at high premium. Cosway skilfully contrived to reap profits in the double capacity of dealer and painter. He joined the ranks of those whom Barry, in a tone of bitter complaint, describes as 'artful men both at home and abroad [who] have not failed to avail themselves of this passion for ancient art ... for vending in the name of those great masters the old copies, imitations, and studies of all the obscure artists that have been working in Italy, France, and other places, for two hundred years past.' Cosway went into the market of doubtful old masters, and purchased largely; about many of his specimens there was probably no doubt whatever. These he repaired, re-touched, re-varnished, re-framed, and sold for good prices, as 'masterpieces of ancient art,' to such noble and gentle patrons as had galleries to fill, or walls to cover, and money to part with. This method of proceeding was doubtless profitable rather than honourable. Cosway's apologists--Hazlitt among them--say for him, that he was 'Fancy's child,' the dupe of his own deceptions, that he really believed in the genuineness, the pure originality of the old masters he had with his own hand worked upon, almost past identification. But self deception which is so decidedly a source of profit to the deceiver has, to say the least of it, a suspicious element about it.

Cosway at first occupied a house in Orchard Street, Portman Square; but as his income improved, he moved to No. 4 Berkeley Street, opposite the Duke of Devonshire's wall, and at that time, according to Smith, he was attended by a negro servant remarkable for having published an octavo volume on the subject of slavery. It was in Berkeley Street that Cosway was first noticed by the Prince of Wales and his royal brothers, whose liberal patronage of the painter brought him into fashionable and general estimation. He was appointed painter in ordinary to the Prince; and in 1771 he was elected a Royal Academician.

Cosway married Maria Hatfield, the daughter of an Englishman who had made a fortune by keeping an hotel at Leghorn. There is a tinge of tragedy about the lady's story. Four elder children had been secretly murdered by a half insane maid-servant, whose crime remained undiscovered until she was overheard threatening the life of the child Maria. Upon interrogation, the murderess confessed her guilt, and was condemned to imprisonment for life. Other children were subsequently born to the Hatfields. Charlotte, who lived to become the unhappy wife of Coombe, the author of Dr. Syntax, and a son, afterwards known as an artist of some promise. Maria Hatfield was educated in a convent, where she learnt music and drawing. Subsequently she studied painting at Rome, and there made the acquaintance of Battoni, Maron, Fuseli, Wright of Derby, and other artists. Upon her father's death she had resolved to return to the cloister; but her mother brought her on a visit to London, and a friendship she then formed with the popular Angelica Kauffman induced her finally to renounce all idea of a nun's life. Soon she became the wife of Richard Cosway. The marriage took place at St. George's, Hanover Square; Charles Townley, of Townley Marble celebrity, giving away the bride.

She possessed beauty,--she was a fair Anglo-Italian with profuse golden hair--talent, and money. The year of her marriage she exhibited certain highly-admired miniatures at the Royal Academy. Her fame spread. The youth, the loveliness, the genius of Mrs. Cosway became town talk. Her husband's house was thronged with people of fashion who came to see, admire the lady artist, and purchase specimens of her art. But Cosway, probably from pride, though it might be from an acute perception of the greater advantages to be derived from reserve in such a matter, would not permit his wife to paint professionally. A favoured few might now and then become the possessors of some slight sketches by Mrs. Cosway; occasionally she might honour a lady of rank by painting her portrait; but Mrs. Cosway's ability, it was to be distinctly understood, was not placed at the service of the general public. Of course this exclusive system enhanced the market value of the lady's works considerably, and while the majority of people were lauding Mr. Cosway as a husband too fond and indulgent to permit his sweet wife to ruin her health by harassing work at her easel, a judicious minority were perhaps doing Mr. Cosway stricter justice in accounting him a very cunning practitioner indeed, in the way of making the most of Mrs. Cosway's talent.

For this, it must be said, however, that as the times went, it did not really need such careful nursing; it was strong enough, or very nearly so, to run alone: it was of a highly respectable order. The lady possessed poetic feeling, with considerable artistic facility. Her sketches of scenes from Spenser, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Homer compare not unfavourably with the designs of many of her contemporaries. And her portraits were of real merit; one of the fair Duchess of Devonshire, painted as the Cynthia of Spenser, extorted unbounded admiration from the critics and connoisseurs of the period.

From Berkeley Street Cosway removed to the south side of Pall Mall, occupying part of the large mansion originally erected by the Duke of Schomberg--that 'citizen of the world,' as Macaulay calls him, who was made a Duke, a Knight of the Garter, and Master of the Ordnance by William the Third, and falling by his master's side at the battle of the Boyne, was, according to Lord Macaulay, buried in Westminster Abbey; but, in truth, it would seem that his remains were deposited in the Cathedral of St. Patrick, Dublin, Dean Swift and the Chapter erecting there a monument to his memory, and the Dean writing _more suo_ a sarcastic epitaph[15] on the heirs who had neglected to do their duty by their great ancestor. Schomberg House--after the Duke's death divided into three separate houses, and still existing, though in a somewhat changed and mutilated form, part of it being now occupied by the War Office--has sheltered many artists of fame under its roof. Here Jervas painted--the pupil of Kneller, and the admired of Pope, whose deformity the painter in his portrait of the poet did his best to mend and conceal; here lived mad Jack Astley, who made so prosperous a marriage with the rich Lady Duckenfield; and Nathaniel Hone, the Royal Academician, retaining on the premises a negress model, famous for her exquisite symmetry of form; then Cosway--and, greatest of all, Thomas Gainsborough, dying in an upper room on the 2d of August 1778. In the spacious saloons of Schomberg House, Cosway thought he should find ample room and verge enough both for himself and his fashionable friends.

[15] This epitaph may be read in Mr. Samuel Lucas's _Secularia; or, Surveys on the Mainstream of History_, p. 293.

And room was becoming very necessary; for Mrs. Cosway's receptions were now the town rage--were crowded to inconvenience. They were marked by what was then a speciality; though it has since become a common enough characteristic of such assemblies. 'Lions' were to be met with there--literary, artistic, and otherwise. The last new poets, painters, players, were to be seen with their honours in their newest gloss; the latest discoverers, navigators, and travellers--freshly escaped from shipwreck or cannibals--the rising stars of the House of Commons--anybody and everybody of the least note, with the provision, possibly, that they should be 'elegant and ingenious,'--these thronged the charming Mrs. Cosway's drawing-rooms. The elect of society, for the first time on the same floor and under the same roof, met and shook hands, deriving a curious piquant sort of pleasure from the proceeding, with--_Bohemia_; the word must be used, though not an agreeable one, much misused and liable to be misinterpreted, and above all, though in the Cosway period it was altogether unknown and unheard of. Especially were to be noted among the guests the Whig adherents of the Prince of Wales, the politicians of the buff and blue school: little Cosway, busy in the midst of them, attempting a statesman-like attitude, sympathizing with revolution, and affecting to discover in the convulsions of the French nation the dawn of an empire of reason and taste, in which genius and virtue alone would be honoured. Possibly the painter expressed too unreservedly his views in these respects. A prince may be permitted to masquerade as a _prolétaire_; but for a bystander to talk red republicanism to a royal heir-apparent is rather doubtful taste, to say the least of it. By-and-by wild Prince Hal came to power, and shrunk from his old associates. The Regent abandoned his buff and blue friends, looked coldly upon his whilom political companions: withdrawing his favour from Cosway among the rest. The painter troubled himself little about the matter. He was too proud or too indifferent to make any effort to regain the royal patronage. If he had done little to merit its bestowal upon him in the first instance, certainly he had done nothing to deserve its withdrawal from him at last.

A frequent guest at Mrs. Cosway's during the last ten years of his life was Horace Walpole, very pleased at receiving 'little Italian notes of invitation' from the winning lady. He relates to the Countess of Ossory, in 1786, his meeting 'la Chevalière d'Eon,' after many years' interval, at Mrs. Cosway's. He found 'la Chevalière' noisy and vulgar; 'in truth,' he writes, 'I believe she had dined a little _en dragon_. The night was hot, she had no muff or gloves, and her hands and arms seem not to have participated of the change of sexes, but are fitter to carry a chair than a fan.' At another time he admits: 'Curiosity carried me to a concert at Mrs. Cosway's--not to hear Rubinelli, who sang one song at the extravagant price of ten guineas, and whom, for as many shillings, I have heard sing half-a-dozen at the Opera House; no, but I was curious to see an English Earl [Cowper] who had passed thirty years at Florence, and who is more proud of a pinchbeck principality and a paltry order from Wirtemberg than he was of being a peer of Great Britain when Great Britain was something.' Elsewhere he speaks admiringly of Mrs. Cosway, and describes her reception as a Diet at which representatives of all the princes of Europe assemble.

From Pall Mall Cosway moved to a larger mansion at the south-west corner of Stratford Place, Oxford Street. A carved stone lion stood on guard at the entrance--a fact which incited some wag to affix to the door the following lines, generally attributed to Peter Pindar:--

'When a man to a fair for a show brings a lion,
'Tis usual a monkey the sign-post to tie on.
But here the old custom reversed is seen,
For the lion's without, and the monkey's within.'

According to Smith, a certain ape-like look in Cosway's face in a measure justified the satire. Irritated by the attack, the painter moved once more--to No. 20 in the same street.

Dr. Wolcot (Peter Pindar), who had been busy throwing mud and stones at the Royal Academicians, did not of course spare either Cosway or his wife. In the lines beginning--

'Fie, Cosway! I'm ashamed to say,
Thou own'st the title of R.A.'

he recommends the painter to find some more honest calling, and bids Mrs. Cosway mend shirts and stockings, and mind her kitchen, rather than expose her daubs to the public. Then, as though repenting of his rudeness, he proceeds:--

'Muse, in this criticism I fear
Thou really hast been too severe:
Cosway paints miniatures with decent spirit,
And Mrs. Cosway boasts some trifling merit.'

The furniture and fittings of Cosway's house in Stratford Place seem to have been of a most extravagant kind. He surrounded himself with suits of armour, Genoa velvet, mother-of-pearl, ebony and ivory, carving and gilding. His rooms were crowded with mosaic cabinets set with jasper, bloodstone, and lapis-lazuli, ormolu escritoires, buhl chiffoniers, Japanese screens, massive musical clocks, damask ottomans, with Persian carpets and Pompadour rugs on the floor, and costly tapestries on the walls; enamelled caskets set with onyxes, rubies, opals, and emeralds loaded the tables; the chimney-pieces, sculptured by Banks, were decked with bronzes, cut-glass, models in wax and terra-cotta, Nankin, Dresden, and Worcester china: altogether the place must have been quite a broker's paradise. Yet the painter was immensely proud of it; never seemed to weary of adding new curiosities to his overcrowded collection.

The failing health of his wife compelled him at last to tear himself away from his splendid and beloved upholstery. He carried the ailing lady to Flanders and to Paris. During the tour his conduct was of the most lordly kind. He possessed, and highly prized, certain cartoons attributed to Julio Romano, having refused a liberal offer for them from Russia, because, as he explained, 'he would not sell works of elegance to barbarians.' Impressed with the size and emptiness of the Louvre Gallery, however, he now offered his cartoons to the French King as a gift. They were accepted, and four splendid specimens of Gobelin tapestry were bestowed upon the painter in token of royal recognition and gratitude. These tapestries Cosway, objecting to retain them, possibly lest they should seem to represent a price paid for his cartoons, forthwith presented to the Prince of Wales. It was the humour of the grand little man to oblige royalty, the while he was moved by a keen regard for his own dignity. While at Paris he painted, by desire of the Duchess of Devonshire, portraits of the Duchess of Orleans and family, and the Duchess of Polignac; yet, when applied to for portraits of the King or Queen, he declined the commission, stating that he had come abroad for the sake of his wife's health and his own amusement, and not with professional objects in view.

For a season Mrs. Cosway seemed benefited by the change, and returned home; but a second attack of illness compelled her again to leave England, this time accompanied by her brother--a young artist whose skill in design had gained him the gold medal of the Royal Academy. Walpole writes to the Miss Berrys at Florence: 'I am glad Mrs. Cosway is with you.... but surely it is odd to drop her child and husband and country all in a breath!' The lady was absent three years, constantly expecting her husband to rejoin her; but he was prevented by various causes from quitting England. During her stay abroad her daughter died, an only child. It was some relief to the grieving mother to resume her art-labours, and she painted several large pictures for foreign churches. At Lyons she was persuaded by Cardinal Fesch to attempt the founding of a college for young ladies, but the war hindered her efforts, although she succeeded subsequently in carrying out a similar design at Lodi.

To their one child the parents were tenderly attached, although Walpole, while he admits Mrs. Cosway's affliction to be genuine, goes on to say rather cruelly,--'the man Cosway does not seem to think that much of the loss belonged to him.' According to Smith, however, he was dotingly fond of his little girl; was for ever painting her picture; and in one portrait of her asleep, he introduced the figure of a guardian angel rocking the cradle. The body of the child was embalmed and preserved in a marble sarcophagus which stood in the drawing-room in Stratford Place. It was not until the return of Mrs. Cosway to England that the interment took place in Bunhill Row Burial Ground.

Of Cosway and his wife, it is stated by the biographer of Mrs. Inchbald, who numbered them among her most intimate friends, that they were both 'mystics,' and 'could say almost as much of the unintelligible world as of this.' Hazlitt describes the painter as a Swedenborgian, a believer in animal magnetism--professing to possess the faculty of second sight, crediting whatever is incredible. Had he lived in these our days, he would probably have been a spiritualist, an electro-biologist, a table-turner. He was wont to proclaim his ability to converse with the dead or the distant, 'to talk with his lady at Mantua,' says Hazlitt, 'through some fine vehicle of sense, as we speak to a servant down-stairs through a conduit pipe.' Smith tells us that he had often heard Cosway relate quite seriously, and with an air of conviction that was unimpeachable, conversations he professed to have held with King Charles the First! Sometimes he would startle sober people by asserting that he had just come from interviews with Apelles and Praxiteles. Four years after Pitt's death, Cosway, at the dinner of the Royal Academy, professed to have been that morning visited by the deceased minister, who declared himself prodigiously hurt, that during his sojourn upon earth he had not given greater encouragement to the artist's talents. Another Academician, however, rather outdid this story. 'How can you talk such trash, Cosway?' he asked. 'You know all you have uttered to be lies; I can prove it. For this very morning, after Pitt had been with you he called upon me and said, "I know Cosway will mention my visit to him at your dinner to-day, but don't believe a word he says, for he'll tell you nothing but lies."' This unlooked-for counter-statement took Cosway by surprise, and left him without a reply.

Walpole once said of him, happily, that 'he romanced with his usual veracity.' Hazlitt thought a 'mystic' character was common to artists, instancing Loutherbourg, Sharp, Varley, Blake, and others, 'who seemed to relieve the literalness of their professional studies by voluntary excursions into the regions of the preternatural, to pass their time between sleeping and waking, and whose ideas were like a stormy night with the clouds driven rapidly across, and the blue sky and stars gleaming between.'

For Cosway's wonderful collection of articles of art, antiquarianism, and _vertû_, Hazlitt has only good-natured banter. Of what a strange jumble of apocryphal treasures the painter believed himself the possessor! And he was without the doubts and anxieties of ordinary collectors. They strive to believe and to cast aside all suspicion. But Cosway believed without the slightest effort; he was troubled by no hint of suspicion. His relics and curiosities were in his eyes absolutely and unquestionably genuine. His was the crucifix that Abelard prayed to; a lock of Eloisa's hair; the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckingham; the first finished sketch of the Jocunda; Titian's colossal outline of Peter Aretine; a mummy of an Egyptian king; a feather of a Phoenix; a piece of Noah's Ark, etc. 'Were the articles authentic?' asks Hazlitt; and he answers his own question--'What matter? Cosway's faith in them was true!'

Credit is due to the painter for his indomitable good spirits and buoyancy of heart. His later years were passed in much pain. He had been twice stricken with paralysis, and the use of his right hand had gone from him. Though removed from want, his old extravagant habits had considerably impaired his fortune. He had long left Stratford Place for a humbler, cheaper house in the Edgeware Road. And he had somewhat outlived his reputation. He had to endure severe criticism upon his artistic merits: much calling in question of his position as a painter. Still he was always bright and gay and kindly. He would hold up the crippled, wasted hand that had painted lords and ladies--the kings and queens of society--for some sixty years, and smile with unabated good humour at the vanity of human wishes. So Hazlitt relates: going on to say of him--'His soul appeared to possess the life of a bird; and such was the jauntiness of his air and manner, that to see him sit to have his half boots laced on, you would fancy (by the help of a figure) that instead of a little withered old gentleman, it was Venus attired by the Graces.' His nature was generous and frank. He gave liberally and cheerfully to almost everybody who applied to him for money. The number of letters he received requesting pecuniary assistance was stated to be almost incredible. Of borrowers who never repaid what they borrowed of him, and of patrons in default, of whom he was too proud to make repeated claims for what was strictly his due, a long catalogue might have been made.

He died suddenly at last of a third attack of paralysis, on the 4th day of July 1821. The seizure occurred as he was taking a carriage drive to Edgeware, and he expired without a groan in a few minutes. He had long been in doubt as to whether he should prefer to be buried in his native Devonshire or with his favourite Rubens at Antwerp. But struck with the orderly plan of a funeral in the vaults of a London Church, he had said, 'I prefer this to Antwerp or St. Paul's: bury me here.' He was interred accordingly at Marylebone New Church (the work of young Smirke, son of his brother academician), a select number of his professional and personal friends, and a long line of the carriages of his aristocratic patrons, following the funeral.

Mrs. Cosway erected, on the north wall, under the gallery of the church, a monument by Westmacott, to her husband's memory. The following indifferent epitaph by the painter's brother-in-law, 'Syntax' Coombe, was inscribed upon the marble:--

'Art weeps, Taste mourns, and Genius drops the tear
O'er him so long they loved who slumbers here.
While colours last, and Time allows to give
The all-resembling grace, his name shall live.'

After the death of her husband Mrs. Cosway quitted England, and took up her abode at her Ladies' College at Lodi, where she was much loved and respected. How long she survived seems uncertain. Some accounts relate that she died the same year as Cosway. But Allan Cunningham, writing in 1833, described her as still living.

THE STORY OF A SCENE-PAINTER.

When, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Sir William Davenant, manager of the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, discarded the 'traverses' and tapestries which had theretofore been accepted as sufficient for the purposes of stage illusion, and substituted regular scenes 'painted in perspective,' without doubt there were to be found many conservative old playgoers who lifted up their voices against the startling innovation, and prophesied the approaching downfall of the drama. If the grandsons present marvelled how elder generations could for so long have gone without such useful and necessary appliances, assuredly the grandsires were complaining that now things had come to a pretty pass indeed, when a parcel of beardless, empty-pated boys, not content with stage fittings such as had been esteemed good and sufficient by the late Mr. William Shakespeare and his great brother-dramatists, demanded foolish paintings and idle garniture, that diverted attention from the efforts of the players and the purpose of the playwrights, and had never been dreamt of, and would never have been tolerated in the good, and simple, and palmy days gone by. Unquestionably, the first 'painting in perspective' brought upon the boards was, in the judgment of many,[16] the thin end of a wedge, which, as it thickened, was certain to drive forth and destroy all that was intellectually and vitally precious in the drama, and to lead the way to a last scene of all in the eventful history of the stage, which should be 'second childishness and mere oblivion.'

[16] 'I decidedly concur with Malone in the general conclusion that painted moveable scenery was unknown on our early stage; and it is a fortunate circumstance for the poetry of our old plays that it was so: the imagination of the auditor only was appealed to, and we owe to the absence of painted canvas many of the finest descriptive passages in Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and immediate followers. The introduction of scenery gives the date to the commencement of the decline of our dramatic poetry.'--_Annals of the Stage_, by J. Payne Collier, vol. iii. p. 366.

But the scene-painter having set foot within the theatre was not to be expelled. The intruder soon won for himself a large popularity; held his ground against criticism and opposition. He was no mere journeyman dauber. From the first he had taken distinct rank as an artist. Lustrous names adorn the muster-roll of scene-painters. Inigo Jones planned machinery and painted scenes for the masques, written by Ben Jonson, for performance before Anne of Denmark and the Court of James the First. Evelyn lauds the 'very glorious scenes and perspectives, the work of Mr. Streeter,' serjeant-painter to King Charles the Second. In February 1664, the Diarist saw Dryden's _Indian Queen_ acted 'with rich scenes as the like had never been seen here, or haply, except rarely, elsewhere on a mercenary theatre.' Mr. Pepys--most devoted of playgoers--notes occasionally of particular plays, that 'the machines are fine and the paintings very pretty.' In October 1667, he records that he sat in the boxes for the first time in his life, and discovered that from that point of view 'the scenes do appear very fine indeed, and much better than in the pit,' to which part of the house he ordinarily resorted. The names of the artists who won Mr. Pepys' applause have not come down to us. But previously to 1679, one Robert Aggas, a painter of some fame, was producing scenes for the theatre in Dorset Gardens. Nicholas Thomas Dall, a Danish landscape-painter, settled in London in 1760, was engaged as scene-painter at Covent Garden Theatre, and was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1771. For the same theatre, John Richards, a Royal Academician, appointed secretary to the Academy in 1778, painted scenes for many years. Michael Angelo Rooker, pupil of Paul Sanby, and one of the first Associates of the Academy, was scene-painter at the Haymarket. Other names of note might be mentioned before the modern reputations of Roberts and Stanfield, Beverley and Callcott, Grieve and Telbin are approached; and especially over one intermediate name are we desirous of lingering a little. The story of the scene-painter of the last century, who was well known to his contemporaries as 'the ingenious Mr. DE LOUTHERBOURG,' presents incidents of singularity and interest that will probably be found to warrant our turning to it for purposes of inquest and comment.

The biographers of Philip James de Loutherbourg are curiously disagreed as to the precise period of his birth. Five different writers have assigned five different dates to that occurrence: 1728, 1730, 1734, 1740, and 1741; and it has been suggested, by way of explanation of this diversity, that the painter's fondness for astrological studies may have induced him to vary occasionally the date of his birth, in order that he might indulge in a plurality of horoscopes, and in such way better the chance of his predictions being justified by the actual issue of events. He was born, at Strasbourg, the son of a miniature painter, who died at Paris in 1768. Intended by his father for the army, while his mother desired that he should become a minister of the Lutheran Church, he was educated at the College of Strasbourg in languages and mathematics. Subsequently he chose his own profession, studying under Tischbein the elder, then under Vanloo and Francesco Casanova; the latter, a painter of battle pieces after the style of Bourgognone. By his landscapes exhibited at the Louvre, De Loutherbourg acquired fame in Paris, and in 1763 was elected a member of the French Academy of Painting, being then eight years below the prescribed age for admission to that distinction, say the biographers who date his birth from 1740. Quitting France, he travelled in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, and in 1771 came to England, moved hitherward probably by the opinion then prevalent both at home and abroad, that (as Edwards puts it in his Anecdotes of Painting) 'some natural causes prevented the English from becoming masters either in painting or sculpture.' Shortly after his arrival in England he was engaged by Garrick to design and paint scenes and decorations for Drury Lane Theatre, at a salary of £500; a sum considerably larger than had been thitherto paid to any artist for such services.

Of gorgeous scenery and gay dresses Garrick was as fond as any manager of our own day; he knew that these were never-failing allurements to the general public. Yet as a rule he confined his spectacle to the after-pieces; did not, after the modern fashion, illustrate and decorate what he regarded as the legitimate entertainments of the theatre. For new as for old plays, the stock scenery of the house generally sufficed, and some of the scenes employed were endowed with a remarkable longevity. Tate Wilkinson, writing in 1790, mentions a scene as then in use which he remembered so far back as the year 1747. 'It has wings and flat of Spanish figures at full length, and two folding doors in the middle. I never see those wings slide on but I feel as if seeing my old acquaintance unexpectedly.' Of the particular plays assisted by De Loutherbourg's brush, small account has come down to us. They were, no doubt, chiefly of a pantomimic and ephemeral kind. For the 'Christmas Tale,' produced at Drury Lane in 1773--the composition of which has been generally assigned to Garrick, though probably due to Charles Dibdin--De Loutherbourg certainly painted scenes, and the play enjoyed a considerable run, thanks rather to his merits than the author's. Some years later, in 1785, for the scenery of O'Keeffe's _Omai_, produced at Covent Garden Theatre, the painter furnished the designs, for which he was paid by the manager one thousand pounds, says Mr. J.T. Smith; one hundred pounds, says Mr. O'Keeffe; so stories differ! The scenery of _Omai_ was appropriate to the then newly discovered islands in the South Pacific, and the play concluded with a kind of apotheosis of Captain Cook. In the course of _Omai_, Wewitzer, the actor who played a chief warrior of the Sandwich Islands, delivered a grand harangue in _gibberish_, which of course, for all the audience knew to the contrary, was the proper language of the natives; a sham English translation of the speech being printed with the book of the songs. The harangue was received with enormous applause!

As a scene-painter, De Loutherbourg was decidedly an innovator and reformer. He was the first to use set-scenes, and what are technically known as 'raking pieces.' Before his time the back scene was invariably one large 'flat' of strained canvas extending the whole breadth and height of the stage. He also invented transparent scenes, introducing representations of moonlight, sunshine, fire, volcanoes, etc., and effects of colour by means of silk screens of various hues, placed before the foot and side lights. He was the first to represent mists, by suspending gauzes between the scene and the audience. He made something of a mystery of the artifices he had recourse to, was careful to leave behind him at the theatre no paper or designs likely to reveal his plans, and declined to inform any one beforehand as to the nature of the illusions he desired to produce. He secretly held small cards in his hand which he now and then consulted to refresh his recollection, as his assistants carried out his instructions.

After Garrick had quitted the stage (in 1776) and sold his share in the management of Drury Lane to Sheridan and his partners, it was proposed to De Loutherbourg to continue in his office of chief scene-painter, his salary being reduced one half. This illiberal scale of remuneration the artist indignantly declined, and forthwith left the theatre. He is said, however, by Parke in his _Musical Memoirs_, to have painted the scenes for the successful burletta of _The Camp_, produced by Sheridan, at Drury Lane, in 1778.[17] But he now devoted himself more exclusively to the production of easel-pictures. He had, in 1773, become a contributor to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. In 1780 he was elected an Associate; in the following year he arrived at the full honours of academicianship. Peter Pindar, in his 'Lyrical Odes to the Royal Academicians for 1782,' finds a place for De Loutherbourg. Having denounced the unlikeness of Mason Chamberlin's portraits, he satirizes the style of art of the landscape painter:--

'And Loutherbourg, when Heaven so wills,
To make brass skies and golden hills,
With marble bullocks in glass pastures grazing:
Thy reputation too will rise,
And people gaping with surprise,
Cry "Monsieur Loutherbourg is most amazing!"'

[17] Mr. Puff in the _Critic_, giving a specimen of 'the puff direct' in regard to a new play, says: 'As to the scenery, the miraculous powers of Mr. De Loutherbourg are universally acknowledged. In short, we are at a loss which to admire most, the unrivalled genius of the author, the great attention and liberality of the managers, the wonderful abilities of the painter, or the incredible exertions of all the performers.'

And in another ode he derides the artist's pictures as 'tea-boards,' 'varnished waiters,' and avows that his rocks are 'paste-board,' while his trees resemble 'brass wigs,' and his fleecy flocks 'mops.'

Probably the quiet of his studio oppressed our painter somewhat. The simple effects attainable in an easel-picture did not satisfy him. He missed the appliances of the stage: the coloured lights, the transparent scenes, the descending gauzes, and cleverly combined set-pieces. He would not go back to Drury Lane, however; as to that he was fully determined. He would not toil for ungrateful managers, or paint backgrounds merely to supplement and enrich the exertions of the actors. He decided upon providing London with a new entertainment; upon opening an exhibition that should be _all_ scene painting.

Charles Dibdin, the famous sea song writer, who was also a dramatist, a composer of music, an actor, a scene painter, and a manager, had constructed in Exeter Change what he whimsically called 'The Patagonian Theatre:' in truth, a simple puppet-show, upon the plan of that contrived years before by Mr. Powell, under the Piazza, Covent Garden, and concerning which Steele had written humorously in the _Spectator_. Dibdin, assisted by one Hubert Stoppelaer, humorist and caricaturist, wrote miniature plays for the doll performers, recited their parts, composed the music, played the accompaniments upon a smooth-toned organ, and painted the scenes. The stage was about six feet wide and eight feet deep; the puppets some ten inches high; the little theatre was divided into pit, boxes, and gallery, and held altogether about two hundred persons. For half a century no exhibition of the kind had appeared in London. The puppet show was old enough to be a complete novelty to the audience of the day. For a time it thrived wonderfully; then managers and public seem both, by degrees, to have grown weary. Dibdin and his friend departed; the exhibition fell into the hands of incompetent persons; then closed its doors. The dolls, properties, scenery, and dresses were brought to the hammer by merciless creditors; and there was an end of the puppet-show. In 1782 De Loutherbourg took the theatre for the exhibition of his EIDOPHUSIKON.

De Loutherbourg had professedly two objects in view: to display his skill as a scene-painter well versed in dioramic effects, and to demonstrate to the English people the beauties of their own country. He averred 'that no English landscape-painter needed foreign travel to collect grand prototypes for his study.' The lakes of Cumberland, the rugged scenery of North Wales, and the mountainous grandeur of Scotland, furnished, he said, inexhaustible occupation for the pencil. He opposed the prejudice then rife among artists and amateurs alike, that England afforded no subjects for the higher display of the painter's art. He confined the Eidophusikon for the most part to the exhibition of English landscapes under different conditions of light and shadow.

A chief view exhibited was from the summit of One Tree Hill, Greenwich. There was cleverness evinced in the selection of this landscape. A large public are always prepared to be pleased when they are shown something with which they are well acquainted. Each spectator found himself, as it were, individually appealed to. Each had seen One Tree Hill, and could bring to bear upon the subject his own personal knowledge and observation, and so test and certify to the painter's skill. The view was a set-scene with a moveable sky at the back: a large canvas twenty times the surface of the stage, stretched on frames, and rising diagonally by means of a winding machine. De Loutherbourg excelled in his treatment of clouds; he secured in this way ample room and verge enough to display his knowledge and ingenuity. By regulating the action of his windlass he could control the movements of his clouds, allow them to rise slowly from the horizon and sail obliquely across the heavens, or drive them swiftly along, according to their supposed density and the power to be attributed to the wind. An arrangement of set-pieces cut in pasteboard represented the objects in the middle distance: the cupolas of Greenwich Hospital, the groups of trees in the park, the towns of Greenwich and Deptford, and the shipping in the Pool; due regard being had to size and colour, so that the laws of perspective in distance and atmosphere might not be outraged; the immediate foreground being constructed of cork broken into rugged and picturesque forms, and covered with minute mosses and lichens, 'producing,' says a critic of the period, 'a captivating effect amounting indeed to reality.'

In his method of illuminating his handiworks, De Loutherbourg was especially adroit. He abandoned the unnatural system (introduced by Garrick on his return from the Continent in 1765) of lighting the stage by means of a flaming line of footlights, and ranged his lamps above the proscenium, out of sight of the audience. Before his lamps he placed slips of stained glass--yellow, red, green, blue, and purple; and by shifting these, or happily combining them, was enabled to tint his scenes so as to represent various hours of the day and different actions of light. His 'Storm at Sea with the loss of the _Halsewell_, East-Indiaman,' was regarded as the height of artistic mechanism. The ship was a perfect model, correctly rigged, and carrying only such sail as the situation demanded. The lightning quivered through the transparent canvas of the sky. The waves, carved in soft wood from models made in clay, coloured with great skill and highly varnished to reflect the lightning, rose and fell with irregular action, flinging the foam now here, now there, diminishing in size and fading in colour as they receded from the spectator. Then we read--'De Loutherbourg's genius was as prolific in imitations of nature to astonish the ear as to charm the sight. He introduced a new art: _the picturesque of sound_.' That is to say, he simulated thunder by shaking one of the lower corners of a large thin sheet of copper suspended by a chain; the distant firing of signals of distress he imitated by striking, suddenly, a large tambourine with a sponge affixed to a whalebone spring--- the reverberations of the sponge producing a curious echo, as from cloud to cloud, dying away in the distance. The rushing sound of the waves was effected by turning round and round an octagonal pasteboard box, fitted with shelves, and containing small shells, peas, and shot; while two discs of strained silk, suddenly pressed together, emitted a hollow, whistling sound, in imitation of loud gusts of wind. Cylinders loosely charged with seed and small shot, lifted now at one end, now at the other, so as to allow the contents to fall in a pattering stream, represented the noise of hail and rain. The moon was formed by a circular aperture cut in a tin box containing a powerful Argand lamp, which was placed at the back of the scene, and brought near or carried far from the canvas as the luminary was supposed to be shining brightly or to be veiled by clouds. These contrivances, from a modern point of view, may strike the reader as constituting quite the A B C of theatrical illusion. But then it must be remembered that they were, for the most part, distinctly the inventions of De Loutherbourg, and, upon their first introduction, were calculated to impress the public of his day very remarkably.

For two seasons De Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon, exhibited at the Patagonian Theatre in Exeter Change, and afterwards at a house in Panton Square, was attended with singular success. Crowds flocked to the new entertainment; the artist world especially delighting in it. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was a frequent visitor, loudly extolled Mr. De. Loutherbourg's ingenuity; recommending him to the patronage of the most eminent men of the time, and counselling all art-students to attend the exhibition as a school of the wonderful effects of nature. Gainsborough's ready sympathies were completely enlisted. For a time, after his manner, he could talk of nothing else, think of nothing else; and he passed evening after evening at the exhibition. He even constructed a miniature Eidophusikon of his own--moved thereto by De Loutherbourg's success and the beauty of a collection of stained glass, the property of one Mr. Jarvis--and painted various landscapes upon glass and transparent surfaces, to be lighted by candles at the back, and viewed through a magnifying lens upon the peep-show principle. But at last the fickle public wearied of the Eidophusikon, as it had been wearied of Mr. Dibdin's puppets. The providers of amusement had, in those days, to be ever stirring in the production of novelties. The sight-seeing public was but a limited and exhaustible body then, little recruited by visitors from the provinces or travellers from the Continent. Long runs of plays or other entertainments--the rule with us--were then almost unknown. The Eidophusikon ceased to attract. The amount received at the doors was at last insufficient to defray the expenses of lighting the building. It became necessary to close the exhibition and provide a new entertainment. Soon the room in Exeter Change was crowded with visitors. Wild beasts were on view, and all London was gaping at them.

Meanwhile De Loutherbourg prospered as an artist. His reputation grew; his pictures were in request; he was honoured with the steady patronage of King George III., and was personally an acknowledged favourite at court: a thoroughly successful man indeed. Then we come down to the year 1789, and find the artist of the Eidophusikon assuming a new character. He has become a physician--a seer--a fanatic--and, it must be said, a quack; a disciple of Mesmer, a friend of Cagliostro; practising animal magnetism, professing to cure all diseases, and indulging in vaticination and second sight.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, credulity and imposition shook hands heartily and held a great festival. Throughout civilized Europe a sort of carnival of empiricism prevailed. Quack was king. A spurious leaven of charlatanism was traceable in politics, in science, in religion--pervaded all things indeed. The world was mad to cheat or to be cheated. The mountebank enjoyed his saturnalia. Never had he exhibited his exploits before an audience so numerous and so sympathetic--so eager to be swindled, so liberal in rewarding the swindler. Gravely does Miss Hannah More address Mr. Horace Walpole, concerning what she terms the 'demoniacal mummery'--'the operation of fraud upon folly' which then occupied the country. 'In vain do we boast of the enlightened eighteenth century, and conceitedly talk as if human reason had not a manacle left about her, but that philosophy had broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition; and yet, at this very time, Mesmer has got a hundred thousand pounds by animal magnetism in Paris, and Mainaduc is getting as much in London. There is a fortune-teller in Westminster who is making little less. Lavater's physiognomy books sell at fifteen guineas a set. The diving [divining?] rod is still considered as oracular in many places. Devils are cast out by seven ministers; and, to complete the disgraceful catalogue, slavery is vindicated in print and defended in the House of Peers! Poor human nature, when wilt thou come to years of discretion?' Mr. Walpole writes back (he has always a _proper_ tone for Miss More, reserving his levity and license for less staid correspondents):--'Alas! while Folly has a shilling left, there will be enthusiasts and quack doctors;' and he adds, airing his pet affectation--a hatred of royalty, a love for republicanism--'and there will be slaves while there are kings or sugar-planters.'

Joseph Balsamo--more generally known by his pseudonym of Count Alexander De Cagliostro, expelled from France, after nine months' durance in the Bastille, on account of his complicity in the diamond necklace fraud and scandal--had taken refuge in England, bringing with him a long list of quackeries and impostures; among them, his art of making old women young again; his system of 'Egyptian freemasonry,' as he termed it, by virtue of which the ghosts of the departed could be beheld by their surviving friends; and the secrets and discoveries of the great Dr. Mesmer in the so-called science of animal magnetism. Walpole at once proclaims the man a rascal, and proposes to have him locked up for his mummeries and impositions. Miss More laments that people will talk of nothing else. 'Cagliostro and the cardinal's necklace,' she writes, 'spoil all conversation, and destroyed a very good evening at Mr. Pepys's last night' A discussion of such subjects was by no means compatible with Miss More's notion of a good evening.

What could have induced simple-minded Mr. De Loutherbourg to put trust in this arch-juggler? Can it have been that from the painter's native Strasbourg had come to him unimpeachable accounts of Cagliostro's feats during his stay there, which had preceded his nefarious expedition to Paris? But the artist is ever excitable, receptive, impressible--the ready prey of the dealer in illusion and trickery. De Loutherbourg is soon at the feet of the quack Gamaliel; soon he is proclaiming himself an inspired physician, practising mesmerism. Cosway and his wife declared themselves clairvoyants. Other painters of the period were dreaming dreams and seeing visions. Nor was it only the artist world that took up with, and made much of, Count Cagliostro and his strange doings. Wiser people than Mr. De Loutherbourg were led astray by the mountebank, though they did not wander so far from the paths of reason and right, nor publish so glaringly the fact of their betrayal into error. Cagliostro was the rage of the hour. The disciples of Dr. Mesmer were without number. It was in ridicule of general rather than class credulity that Mrs. Inchbald wrote (or adapted) her comedy of _Animal Magnetism_, produced on the stage of Covent Garden in 1788.