Chapter III

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

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

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

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

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

And now the charming little art has, at its old-time best, found enthusiastic lovers again, while the noble beauty of line-engraving is to-day appreciated by only the limited few. “If Strange could but re-visit the glimpses of Christie’s, it would more than astonish him to see there none of his own superb line-engravings after the great Italian masters, but to hear the keen bidding for his old rival Bartolozzi’s best colour-prints after Reynolds, or the Downman _Duchess of Devonshire_ and _Lady Duncannon_, the Cipriani infants, _Contentment_, _Friendship_, the Hamilton _Months_, or Miss Benwell’s _St. James’s_ and _St. Giles’s Beauties_, or the _Orange Girl_.

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

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

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

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.

Naturally Bartolozzi’s European reputation, and rumours of the rapidity with which money could be made by the stipple method, attracted to his studio a number of pupils from the Continent, where, till the war began in 1793, there was a very large and constant trade in English prints. Several fine collections, by the way, were made at the time, and some of these are still intact, notably one in Weimar. Among the foreign pupils were, of course, several Italians, of whom the most important were Luigi Schiavonetti and Giovanni Vendramini, whose names are familiar chiefly through their charming plates in the _Cries of London_ series. Schiavonetti, however, was brilliant also in etching and line-work, and not less artistic than his stipples were his engravings of Blake’s beautiful illustrations to Blair’s poem, _The Grave_. Vendramini was personally so popular that he was induced to take over Bartolozzi’s business and his house at North End, Fulham, when the old man in 1802, seeing the waning of the public taste for his prints, accepted a royal invitation to Portugal, where they gave him a knighthood and a pension, and where he went on engraving and teaching till, close on ninety years of age and in straitened circumstances, he died in 1815. James Minasi, an engraver of taste, I have already mentioned as one of Bartolozzi’s favourite pupils, devoted to the end. His cousin, Mariano Bovi was another, and a very artistic touch he had, as may be seen in his many engravings of Lady Diana Beauclerc’s fantastic infantile groups, and the charming decorative frieze after Cipriani, reproduced here. Other notable Italian disciples were Pietro Bettelini and Michel Benedetti. Russia, which was always ready at that time to encourage the prolonged visits of English artists, sent Bartolozzi an assimilative pupil in Gabriel Scorodoomoff, who did several pretty colour-prints. Of the French pupils, John Peter Simon had perhaps the most artistic sense of the medium, and he will always be esteemed for his brilliant engraving of Reynolds’s _Heads of Angels_--a beautiful print in colours. Jean Marie Delattre, when once he had learnt stipple, became the master’s right-hand man, “forwarding” many of his plates to a considerable extent, touching up and correcting the work of less competent pupils, and turning out a number of good prints of his own. Other Frenchmen there were, too, among the stipple-engravers who, though not actually pupils of Bartolozzi, could not help reflecting his influence. Chief among these were Thomas Gaugain, F. D. Soiron, and B. Duterreau, all of whom are represented among our illustrations by charming prints after Morland. Gaugain began his artistic life as a student of painting with Richard Houston, the eminent mezzotint-engraver, and this training seems to have lent a valuable quality of tone to his engraving. The last and rarest plate of the _Cries of London--Turnips and Carrots_--was his.

John Condé was an ideal engraver of Cosway’s miniatures, which he rendered with a touch of the utmost refinement and taste, and an exquisite sense of their adaptabilities to the copper. Scarcely less successful in this field was Schiavonetti’s gifted Flemish pupil, Anthony Cardon, and it was doubtless through his master’s influence that he, too, was engaged upon the _Cries of London_.

But the Bartolozzi influence was not quite supreme. No engraver, for instance, used the stipple method with more originality or more truly pictorial effect than John Jones, who was, of course, one of the glories of the great English school of mezzotint. At his best only to be compared for beauty with Burke, his was a broader conception of the delicate medium; and, gauging its artistic capacity to a nicety, he understood exactly how to balance breadth and depth of tone with the fine shades, while avoiding that tendency to monotony of smoothness which characterised even the best of the Bartolozzi school. His manner was quite his own, strong in its refined simplicity, artistic in its reticence, and among the most beautiful and individual colour-prints in stipple, few are comparable with those that Jones did after Romney, Reynolds and Downman. His exquisite _Serena_ was one of the prints we had hoped to have included among our illustrations. Scarcely less distinctive in stipple than Jones, J. R. Smith and William Ward, was that other great artist in mezzotint, Thomas Watson, whose stippling had the large pictorial feeling. Naturally he was happy with Reynolds, as in the lovely _Una_, while in the _Mrs. Crewe_ and _Mrs. Wilbraham_, he made the very best of Daniel Gardner, who appears to have learnt all he could from Sir Joshua.

Of the stipple-engravers who made pretty and attractive colour-prints their name is legion, while these pages are necessarily limited. So I must regretfully leave but barely named such notable stipplers as Joseph Collyer, with his vigorous touch; Francis Hayward, whose _Mrs. Siddons as the “Tragic Muse”_ is so well known; William Bond; the versatile Robert Pollard; R. M. Meadows; the dainty John S. Agar; those three fine mezzotinters, Charles Turner, Richard Earlom, and William Dickinson, whose _Duchess of Devonshire and Viscountess Duncannon_ has often the high distinction of pairing with Burke’s _Lady Rushout and Daughter_; the brothers Facius; Caroline Watson, with her exquisite finish whether in pure stipple or in “mixed” methods; Joseph Grozer; Christian Josi, to whom we are indebted for more than his engraving, in his valuable publication of Ploos Van Amstel’s interesting second pioneering series of aquatints printed in colour, _Collection d’Imitations des Dessins_, twenty-three years after Van Amstel’s death; John Eginton; Charles White, a favourite engraver of the lady artists; James Hogg, whose _Handmaid_ after Walton is as charming as its companion, _The Tobacco Box_; Robert Thew; R. M. Paye; and William Blake, whose sure immortality is quite independent of such artistic stippling as his _Mrs. Q._ after Huet Villiers, and his two Morland prints.

The war with France, closing important markets for English engravings, had a depressing influence on the production of prints, and the early years of the nineteenth century saw fresh vagaries in the popular taste. Even the Morlands were neglected. The coarse political and social caricatures of James Gillray--once Bartolozzi’s pupil--and of Thomas Rowlandson were intriguing and titillating the town with their robustious humours and audacious licence. Yet Adam Buck was strangely in favour; his inadequate drawings of babies and slender women in Empire gowns, which a contemporary writer describes as “happily combining the taste of the antique with that of the modern,” suited the spurious classic fashion of the time. These were engraved, some partly stippled, partly aquatinted, by Freeman, J. C. Stadler, Roberts and even Cheesman. Artistically negligible, the excellence of their colour-printing alone can excuse any demand at the present day for such pretty-pretty trifles as _The Darling Asleep_, _The Darling Awake_, _The Darling Dancing_, and so on. In their own day, notwithstanding their passing vogue, they sounded the knell of the stippled colour-print.

Coloured aquatints were now becoming the rage. That this charming and delicate process, producing various gradations of tone by successive “bitings” with acid through a porous, resinous ground, might long before have competed with stipple, may be judged by the delightful pair of colour-printed aquatints, _Courtship_ and _Matrimony_, by Francis Jukes after W. Williams, published in 1787 by J. R. Smith. But, invented in France about 1750 by Jean Baptiste Prince, practised a little later with colour by Ploos Van Amstel, and introduced to England in 1775 by Paul Sandby for the treatment of landscape, it was a long while before the pictorial capacities of aquatint were adequately understood and extended. In the artistic hands of the Daniells, the Havells, J. C. Stadler, J. Bluck, J. Sutherland and F. C. Lewis, it became, particularly under the ægis of Ackermann, a most popular medium for colour, especially in the sporting and coaching prints which the Regency spirit brought so extensively into demand. Then in turn came lithography, with its ease of method and its sweet, soft graces, bringing colour too; and R. J. Lane was the new hero of the printsellers, while for long years Bartolozzi and his brother stipplers on the copper-plate were shelved, neglected, forgotten, and Morland prints were scarcely saleable. To-day they have come into their own again--their own, and perhaps a little bit over.

NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS.

COUNTESS OF HARRINGTON AND HER CHILDREN (Plate I.). Sir Joshua painted her twice also as Miss Fleming.--ROBINETTA (Plate II.). 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 (Plate III.). 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 (Plate IV.). 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 (Plate V.). 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.

BACCHANTE (Emma, Lady Hamilton) (Plate VI.). Painted in 1784 for Sir William Hamilton, when, of course, there was no thought of the marriage. The price was 50 guineas, just about a fifth of what a brilliant impression of the print in colours would fetch to-day. The Hon. Charles Greville, Sir William’s nephew and Emma’s lover at the time, seems to have negotiated the business, for he wrote, in October 1784 to his uncle, who was then in Naples: “Let me know how the _Bacchante_ is to be paid. The dog was ugly, and I made him paint it again.” Later Greville wrote: “Emma’s picture shall be sent by the first ship. I wish Romney yet to mend the dog.” The picture is said to have been lost at sea, on its way back from Naples, but at Greville’s sale in 1810, the _Bacchante_--in that case a replica of the lost canvas--was catalogued as “Diana, original of the well-known engraved picture,” and bought by Mr. Chamberlayne for 130 guineas.--MRS. JORDAN IN THE CHARACTER OF “THE COUNTRY GIRL” (Plate VII.). It was as Peggy in Garrick’s comedy “The Country Girl,” adapted from Wycherly’s “Country Wife,” that Dorothy Jordan first appeared at Drury Lane in 1785, and immediately bewitched the public with the natural, irresistible joyousness of her acting and the lovable charm of her personality. In the following year she gave Romney thirteen sittings for this picture. At the first he could not satisfy himself as to the best pose for her. After many tries she pretended to be tired of the business, and, jumping up from her chair, in the hoydenish manner and tone of Peggy, she said, “Well, I’m a-going.” “Stay!” cried Romney; “that’s just what I want.” And at once he began to sketch her for this picture. It was bought in 1791 for 70 guineas by the Duke of Clarence, afterwards King William IV., and thereby, of course, hangs the well-known tale of a twenty years’ love, ten children, and unhappy separation. The print, first published as _The Romp_ at 5s., may now fetch, if fine in colour, like Major Coates’s copy, as much as £200.--HOBBINOL AND GANDERETTA (Plate VIII.). William Somerville’s “Hobbinol” was a mock-heroic poem on rural games, which Mr. Gosse describes as “ridiculous.”--COUNTESS OF OXFORD (Plate IX.). This is in the National Gallery; but Hoppner exhibited an earlier portrait in 1797. Jane Scott, daughter of a Hampshire vicar, married, in her twentieth year, the fifth Earl of Oxford, whom Byron described as “equally contemptible in mind and body”; but then, she and the poet were lovers when she was forty and he about twenty-five. “The autumn of a beauty like hers is preferable to the spring in others,” he said in after years. “I never felt a stronger passion, which,” he did not forget to add, “she returned with equal ardour.” It was on Lady Oxford’s notepaper that Byron wrote his final letter to Lady Caroline Lamb, and this in the very year in which, it now appears, he revived his boyish passion for Mary Chaworth.--VISCOUNTESS ANDOVER (Plate X.). Eldest daughter of William Coke, of Holkham, the famous agriculturist, so long M.P. for Norfolk, and later Earl of Leicester.

ST. JAMES’S PARK (Plate XIV.). 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 (Plate XV.). 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 (Plate XVI.). 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 (Plate XIX.). One of the beautiful daughters of Sir John and Lady Rushout, whose miniatures are, perhaps, Plimer’s masterpieces.--LADY DUNCANNON (Plate XX.). 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 (Plate XXII.). The enchantment of Rinaldo, the Christian Knight, by Armida, the beautiful Oriental sorceress, in Tasso’s “Gerusalemme Liberata.” LOVE AND BEAUTY: MARCHIONESS OF TOWNSHEND (Plate XXIV.). 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.

TWO BUNCHES A PENNY, PRIMROSES (Plate XXV.). KNIVES, SCISSORS AND RAZORS TO GRIND (Plate XXVI.). Numbers 1 and 6 of the CRIES OF LONDON. The other plates are: 2, _Milk below, Maids_. 3, _Sweet China Oranges_. 4, _Do you want any Matches?_ 5, _New Mackerel_. 7, _Fresh Gathered Peas_. 8, _Duke Cherries_. 9, _Strawberries_. 10, _Old Chairs to Mend_. 11, _A new Love-song_. 12, _Hotspice Gingerbread_, two plates. 13, _Turnips and Carrots_. There are still in existence two or three paintings of similar character by Wheatley--one depicting a man selling copper kettles--which would suggest, besides the belated publication of the thirteenth plate, that it was originally intended to issue a larger number of the “Cries” than those we know, had the public encouragement warranted it. The colour-printing of the earliest impressions was superlatively fine, and in the original pink board-wrappers these are, of course, extremely rare, and would realize to-day as much as a thousand pounds.

MRS. CREWE (Plate XXVII.). 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 (Plate XXVIII.). 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 (Plate XXIX.). 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 (Plate XXXVII.). 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 à l’Evêque,” published in 1798 to ridicule the Bishop of Durham’s protest against the scanty attire of the ballet-dancers.--MARIA (Plate XXXVIII.). Maria of Moulines, in Sterne’s “Sentimental Journey.”

MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.

PLATE I.

“_Jane, Countess of Harrington,_ _Lord Viscount Petersham and the_ _Hon. Lincoln Stanhope._”

_Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after_ _Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A._

(_Published 1789. Size 8¾″ × 11⅛″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE II.

“_Robinetta._”

_Stipple-Engraving by John Jones, after Sir Joshua_ _Reynolds, P.R.A._

(_Published 1787. Size 8⅞″ × 10½″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE III.

“_Master Henry Hoare._”

_Stipple-Engraving by C. Wilkin, after Sir Joshua_ _Reynolds, P.R.A._

(_Published 1789. Size 7⅝″ × 9⅝″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE IV.

“_The Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Georgiana Cavendish._”

_Mezzotint-Engraving by Geo. Keating, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A._

(_Published 1787. Size 15⅞″ × 12¼″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE V.

“_The Mask._”

_Stipple-Engraving by L. Schiavonetti, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A._

(_Published 1790. Size 9¼″ × 7⅜″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE VI.

_“Bacchante” (Lady Hamilton)._

_Stipple-Engraving by C. Knight, after George Romney._

(_Published 1797. Size 10½″ × 12⅝″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE VII.

“_Mrs. Jordan in the character of_ _‘The Country Girl’_” (“_The Romp_”).

_Stipple-Engraving by John Ogborne, after George Romney._

(_Published 1788. Size 9⅝″ × 12⅛″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE VIII.

“_Hobbinol and Ganderetta._”

_Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after_ _Thos. Gainsborough, R.A._

(_Published 1790. Size 14⅛″ × 18¼″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE IX.

“_Countess of Oxford._”

_Mezzotint-Engraving by S. W. Reynolds, after_ _J. Hoppner, R.A._

(_Published 1799. Size 8-1/″ × 10⅛″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE X.

“_Viscountess Andover._”

_Stipple-Engraving by C. Wilkin, after J. Hoppner, R.A._

(_Published 1797. Size 6⅝″ × 8⅛″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE XI.

“_The Squire’s Door._”

_Stipple-Engraving by B. Duterreau, after George Morland._

(_Published 1790. Size 12-/4″ × 15⅛″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XII.

“_The Farmer’s Door._”

_Stipple-Engraving by B. Duterreau, after George Morland._

(_Published 1790. Size 12¾″ × 15⅛″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XIII.

“_A Visit to the Boarding School._”

_Mezzotint-Engraving by W. Ward, A.R.A., after George Morland._

(_Published 1789. Size 21¾″ × 17⅜″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XIV.

“_St. James’s Park._”

_Stipple-Engraving by F. D. Soiron, after George Morland._

(_Published 1790. Size 19¾″ × 16″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XV.

“_A Tea Garden._”

_Stipple-Engraving by F. D. Soiron, after George Morland._

(_Published 1790. Size 19¾″ × 16″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XVI.

“_The Lass of Livingstone._”

_Stipple-Engraving by T. Gaugain, after George Morland._

(_Published 1785. Size 11¾″ × 9¾″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE XVII.

“_Rustic Employment._”

_Stipple-Engraving by J. R. Smith, after George Morland._

(_Published 1788. Size 9¾″ × 12¼″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE XVIII.

“_The Soliloquy._”

_Stipple-Engraving by and after William Ward, A.R.A._

(_Published 1787. Size 7½″ × 11″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE XIX.

“_Harriet, Lady Cockerell as a Gipsy Woman._”

_Stipple-Engraving by J. S. Agar, after Richard Cosway, R.A._

(_Published 1810. Size 8⅛″ × 11⅜″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE XX.

“_Lady Duncannon._”

_Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after John_ _Downman, A.R.A._

(_Published 1797. Size 6⅜″ × 7¾″._)

_From the collection of Rt. Hon. Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, G.C.B._]

PLATE XXI.

“_Cupid bound by Nymphs._”

_Stipple-Engraving by W. W. Ryland, after_ _Angelica Kauffman, R.A._

(_Published 1777. Size 11½″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE XXII.

“_Rinaldo and Armida._”

_Stipple-Engraving by Thomas Burke, after_ _Angelica Kauffman, R.A._

(_Published 1795. Size 10¼″ × 13″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE XXIII.

“_Angelica Kauffman in the_ _character of Design listening to the_ _Inspiration of Poetry._”

_Stipple-Engraving by Thomas Burke, after_ _Angelica Kauffman, R.A._

(_Published 1787. Size 12⅜″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE XXIV.

_“Love and Beauty”_ _(Marchioness of Townshend)._

_Stipple-Engraving by Thomas Cheesman,_ _after Angelica Kauffman, R.A._

(_Published 1792 and 1795. Size 10⅜″ × 12⅝″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XXV.

_“Two Bunches a Penny, Primroses”_ _(“Cries of London”)._

_Stipple-Engraving by L. Schiavonetti,_ _after F. Wheatley, R.A._

(_Published 1793. Size 10¾″ × 14″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XXVI.

_“Knives, Scissors and Razors to Grind”_ _(“Cries of London”)._

_Stipple-Engraving by G. Vendramini,_ _after F. Wheatley, R.A._

(_Published 1795. Size 11″ × 14″._)

_From the collection of Mrs. Julia Frankau._]

PLATE XXVII.

“_Mrs. Crewe._”

_Stipple-Engraving by Thos. Watson, after Daniel Gardner._

(_Published 1780. Size 6⅜″ × 8-1/″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE XXVIII.

“_The Dance._”

_Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after_ _H. W. Bunbury._

(_Published 1782. Size 11⅞″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]

PLATE XXIX.

“_Morning Employments._”

_Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after H. W. Bunbury._

(_Published 1789. Size 14¼″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XXX.

“_The Farm-Yard._”

_Stipple-Engraving by William Nutter, after_ _Henry Singleton._

(_Published 1790. Size 9¾″ × 11⅞″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XXXI.

“_The Vicar of the Parish receiving his Tithes._”

_Stipple-Engraving by Thomas Burke, after Henry Singleton._

(_Published 1793. Size 12″ × 14⅛″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XXXII.

“_The English Dressing-Room._”

_Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after Chas. Ansell._

(_Published 1789. Size 7½″ × 9½″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE XXXIII.

“_The French Dressing-Room._”

_Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after Chas. Ansell._

(_Published 1789. Size 7½″ × 9½″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE XXXIV.

_“January” (“The Months”)._

_Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after_ _Wm. Hamilton, R.A._

(_Published 1788. Size 10″ × 12″._)

_From the collection of J. H. Edwards, Esq._]

PLATE XXXV.

_“Virtuous Love” (from Thomson’s “Seasons”)._

_Stipple-Engraving by F. Bartolozzi, R.A., after_ _Wm. Hamilton, R.A._

(_Published 1793. Size 6¼″ × 5″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE XXXVI.

“_The Chanters._”

_Stipple-Engraving by J. R. Smith, after_ _Rev. Matthew W. Peters, R.A._

(_Published 1787. Size 7⅝″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE XXXVII.

“_Mdlle. Parisot._”

_Stipple-Engraving by C. Turner, A.R.A.,_ _after J. J. Masquerier._

(_Published 1799. Size 6⅝″ × 8⅜″._)

_From the collection of Mrs. Julia Frankau,_ _to whom it was presented by the late Sir Henry Irving._]

PLATE XXXVIII.

“_Maria._”

_Stipple-Engraving by P. W. Tomkins, after J. Russell, R.A._

(_Published 1791. Size 4¾″ × 6¼″._)

_From the collection of Frederick Behrens, Esq._]

PLATE XXXIX.

“_Commerce._”

_Stipple-Engraving by M. Bovi, after J. B. Cipriani, R.A._ _and F. Bartolozzi, R.A._

(_Published 1795. Size 18⅜″ × 7⅝″._)

_From the collection of Basil Dighton, Esq._]

PLATE XL.

“_The Love-Letter._”

_A very rare Stipple-Engraving, probably by Thos. Cheesman._ _and F. Bartolozzi, R.A._

(_Size 8¾″ × 6¾″._)

_From the collection of Major E. F. Coates, M.P._]