The butcher, the Frenchman and John Collet (1726 – 1780)

 

I spotted this oil painting by John Collet in the catalogue of a London saleroom recently and wanted to find out a bit more about the man who created it. I must admit that although I was dimly aware of Collet through his association with Carington Bowles, I knew very little about his work and nothing about the man himself. In turns out that this was quite an oversight on my part, as Collet was arguably one of the most popular satirical artists operating in London between 1765 and 1780 and deserves much greater recognition for his contribution to the genre. Engravings and mezzotints after his paintings dominated the windows of London’s high-end printshops during the 1770s, including those of the aforementioned Bowles and his rivals such as John Smith and Robert Sayer. Collet’s prints dealt almost exclusively in social satire and were often preoccupied with the reversal and overlapping of cultural stereotypes. In Miss Wicket 

and Miss Trigger… (1778) for example, he subverts the masculine genre of the sporting portrait by replacing the traditional male sitters with two young women who are said to be experts with the cricket bat and hunting rifle. What follows is a short biography of Collet which is largely derived from the work of Patricia Crown, David Alexander and the Dictionary of National Biography, although I have managed to make a few additions to Collet’s story of my own.
John Collet was born in the London parish of St Martin’s in the Fields on 22nd February 1726 [1]. The Dictionary of National Biography describes his father Henry as a “gentleman holding a public office” and it’s possible that he was the same Henry Collet that was responsible for managing financial transactions between the Bank of England and the Treasury during the 1730s [2]. In addition to this lucrative sinecure, the family had acquired substantial real estate holdings across London from which they derived a handsome annual income [3]. Their wealth was sufficient enough to ensure that young John would never have to work for a living and could be raised as a gentleman of leisure, with an education which was heavily concerned with the appreciation of art, literature and music, as well as the display of social grace and deportment.
Collet evidently demonstrated some aptitude as an artist from an early age, as he was enrolled in the St Martin’s Lane Academy (a forerunner to the Royal Academy) and later studied under the landscape painter George Lambert (1700 – 1765) [4]. Under Lambert’s influence, Collet started out as landscape artist and submitted three of his paintings to an exhibition of the Free Society of Artists in 1761. He exhibited with the same society again in 1762, although this time included a mixture of landscapes, portraits and a genre painting entitled A Gipsy telling some Country Girls their Fortune [5]. This seems to have signalled a shift away from landscape towards humorous and moralising genre scenes that were heavily influenced by the works of William Hogarth (1697 – 1764). In May 1765, the print and picture dealer Thomas Bradford acquired a set of four paintings by Collet entitled Modern Love; a Hogarthian-style progress telling the story of a young couple’s transition from the armorial bliss of courtship to the more mundane realities of married life. Bradford launched a subscription for engraved copies of the paintings which evidently proved popular enough to generate further demand for published editions of Collet’s work [6].
Collet appears to have maintained a fairly exclusive arrangement with his publishers and as such the catalogue of engravings after his paintings can be divided into three distinct groupings:
1. 1765 – 1768. Line engravings by John Goldar pulished by Thomas Bradford.

2. 1768 – 1776. Line engravings produced by John Goldar, James Caldwell, Robert Laurie and others, published by Robert Sayer from 1768 to 1773 and Sayer & Bennett from 1774 to 1776.

3. 1777 – 1780. Mezzotints published by Carington Bowles. The Bowles family would continue to reissue Collet’s work until well into the nineteenth-century and eventually appear to have erased the publication line from the plates, presumably to avoid drawing attention to the age of the design.

The engravings published between 1765 and 1775 are heavily influenced by Hogarth and demonstrate an abiding preoccupation with the themes of romance, social satire and the comedy of contrast. The oil painting above is a good example of the latter and may have originally been paired with a companion piece depicting an Englishman in France. Engravings after both pictures were published by Robert Sayer in 1770 under the tiles The Frenchman in London and the Englishman in Paris. The former depicts a dandified French fop who accidentally runs into an argumentative butcher in the streets of London. The lean, overdressed, Frenchman recoils in horror as the Englishman rolls up his sleeves and prepares to give him a good pasting. Two working class women, who are not present in the original oil painting, sneer and tug derisively at the long braided ponytail hanging from the back of the Frenchman’s wig. A dog also takes advantage of the confusion to leap up and grab a falling chop from the butcher’s discarded delivery tray. The companion plate shows an Englishman grimacing as his wig is blasted with copious amounts of powder by a mincing French valet. The images play on well-worn themes of English masculinity versus French effeminacy that were common in both political and social satires of the 1760s and 1770s.

Gender and the blurring of traditional stereotypes becomes and increasingly prominent theme in Collet’s satires from 1775 onwards. This was part of a wider trend in British satirical art of the late at that time, prompted by claims that the growing feminisation of society was to blame for Britain’s apparent inability to defeat the rebellious American colonists. Numerous prints depicting women in masculine dress and engaged in typically male pursuits flooded the windows of London’s printshops. While John Collet was not the only artist working in this field, he was probably the most prolific and produced paintings (later copied in print) of women engaged in field sports, cricket, skittles and rowing amongst other things. An Actress at her Toilet, or Miss Brazen just Breecht, published by Carington Bowles in 1779, is typical of a print of this kind. It shows a young woman pulling on a pair of breeches and striking a confidently masculine pose as she admires herself in the mirror. On the table next to her rests a breastplate and a sword, which a playbill on the floor nearby suggests will be worn by her in the part of Captain Macheath from the Beggars Opera. The implication seems to be that Britain’s women had begun to cut a more convincing martial figure than that of her discredited menfolk.
We know little of Collet’s personal life beyond a few snippets of surviving information from sources published after his death. A brief note published in the Repository of Arts Magazine in 1812 states that

He was a man of genius, generosity and benevolence. He possessed an estate that made him independent of the world; and his tenants, knowing his disposition, often kept from paying much of their rents [7].

Patricia Crown concludes that Collet’s wealth and social standing bred a sense of confident affability in him that was largely absent from the moralising humour of the self-made Hogarth [8].
John Collet died at his home on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea on 6th August 1780 and was buried in the local churchyard five days later [9]. He is not known to have married but the considerable sum he left in his will to “my dear friend Sarah Augol, spinster” for the maintenance of herself and the education of her son Matthew, suggests the existence of a longstanding mistress and illegitimate offspring [9]. His prints would remain in circulation for years after his death and would be copied, either in whole or in part, by some of the most prominent artist of the so-called ‘golden age’ of British caricature, including James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and William Heath.

 

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References
1. Collet was baptised at St Martin’s in the Fields two days later. The record of his baptism gives his father’s name as Henry Collet.
2. Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 4, 1921, p. 790. The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 8, 1738, p. 491, contains a brief obituary for Henry Collet and states that he was worth £20,000 at the time of his death. It is not clear whether this Henry Collet was the artist’s father. Crown, p.124 states that Collet inherited two London properties after his father’s death in 1771.
3. Patricia Crown, ‘Sporting with Clothes: John Collet’s Prints in the 1770s’, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 26 No. 1 (2002), p. 126.
4. Dictionary of National Biography. p. 790
5. The painting was later purchased by the publisher John Smith of Cheapside who issued an engraved copy by James Caldwell in November 1770 under the title The Gipsies, see BM 4597.
6. David Alexander, ‘Prints after John Collet: Their Publishing History and a Chronological Checklist’, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 26 No. 1 (2002), p. 136.
7. The Repository of Arts (8), London, 1812, p. 131.
8. Crown, p. 123.
9. Dictionary of National Biography. p. 791. Collet kept houses in Covent Garden, Holborn and Chelsea. The house in Covent Garden is where he is thought to have spent the majority of his time and kept his studio. The property at Chelsea was located just around the corner from the much smaller house where James Gillray lived with his parents.

Is she really going out with him? A George Cruikshank original

This original watercolour caricature by George Cruikshank sold at auction in London last week for a respectable £1,600. The picture is signed in the lower left hand corner but carries no title or date. Judging by the style of the clothing and uniforms, it is most likely to have been produced sometime during the 1820s.

The painting depicts a farcically mismatched couple walking together through the park. The young solider gazes down with inexplicable adoration on the smiling visage of a toothless, cross-eyed, old crone. The phallic presence of the solider’s sword and the sagging purse carried by the old woman provide a sly hint of sexual innuendo and more earthy humour. Additional comic effect is also added by the presence of several bemused bystanders, whose reactions to the pair range from amusement, to shock and disgust.

Cruikshank was regularly turning out paintings and sketches such as this by the middle of the 1820s. Permanently cash-strapped and aware that his rising reputation had created a demand for original works, he exploited the collecting market by producing countless comic pot-boilers which served to tide him over while he waited for his next big commission from one of London’s publishers. Many of these paintings played on well-worn themes of Georgian humour that would have required little effort on the part of the artist and guaranteed him a quick sale.

In this instance, Cruikshank’s humour is a little to obvious for my taste and his handling of the old woman also seems needlessly cruel to modern eyes, but the painting is well-executed nonetheless and will no doubt make a welcome addition to someone’s collection.

Bonaparte Dethron’d April 1st 1814

It’s been a while since we looked at any transfer-printed pottery on the Printshop Window and so I thought I’d share these images of a creamware jug which came up at auction recently.

The jug was manufactured by the Cambrian Pottery Company of Swansea and is dated 1st April 1814. The design is somewhat unusual in that it is an original composition rather than a copy of an existing caricature print. It was drawn and engraved by James Brindley, an English engraver working in Swansea for a period of about five years between 1813 and 1818. Brindley produced this image and another satirical design, entitled Peace and Plenty, specifically for use in the potteries. We know Brindley was responsible for creating these two designs because his signature appears on both, although David Drakard points out that it was obliterated from later transfers, possibly because “confirmation that both the design and the engraving was not their own work was too much for the Cambrian Pottery” (Drakard, p.248).

The image is a complex one in which several figures gather around to comment on the central figure of Napoleon Bonaparte as he is being dragged down to hell. Alexander Meyrick Broadley, the great Victorian historian of British caricature in this period, had one of these jugs in his collection and describes the design in detail in the second volume of his book:

Bonaparte. “Oh, cursed ambition, what hast thou
brought me to now ? ”

The Evil One (from amidst the flames). “Why, to
me. Come, come! Thou hast been a most dutiful
child.”

An itinerant fiddler. “Oh, destitute Boney, where art
thou now?”

A street ballad-seller. “Down with Boney! Wolloping
Boney ! Where are you now?”

A street urchin. “Where is he going?”

A second street urchin. “To Elba.”

A dandy of the Regency (bowing low). ” Your most
obedient servant.”

A British citizen (seated at table, and replenishing his
glass, ” Peace,” from the decanter of ” Plenty “). ” Be-
gone dull care.”

John Bull (addressing one of the returned prisoners
from France). “Where (sic) you one of those confin’d
under the gripes of Old Boney?”

The Prisoner. “Yes. About two years ago I weighed
20 stone. You see what I am reduc’d to!” (Broadly, p. 260).

Around the spout of the jug is the title Bonaparte Dethron’d and the date 1st April 1814. Napoleon was actually dethroned by the French Senate on 3rd April 1814, but it seems reasonable to assume that Brindley deliberately fudged the facts in order to link l’empereur’s downfall with April Fools Day. Drakard records that this decoration was issued with and without colour and also printed in red on yellow-glaze (see example here). It was also sufficiently popular for at least one of the Cambrian Pottery’s rivals to issue a copy. The design on the copies is slightly more compact, with the title being moved onto the body of the jug and replaced by a floral banding that runs around the spout. The British Museum currently has one of these copies in its collection which it erroneously attributes to the caricaturist William Elmes.

Infant Liberty Nursed by Mother Mob

When to our joy, on yester morn, a full pound twelve-pounder – LIBERTY was born… Whilst mother MOB, that steady wet-nurse, press’d the sturdy infant to her milky breast. – Richard Alsop, ‘Infant Liberty Nursed by Mother Mob’, The Echo, with other Poems, N.Y., (1807), pp. 7-8.

A rare and highly unusual example of American political satire from the first decade of the nineteenth-century. The print was engraved by William Satchwell Leney (1769 – 1831), an Englishman who had emigrated to America in 1805, after a drawing by the American artist-engraver Elkanah Tisdale (1768-1835). It was published in New York in 1807 and appears to have been issued in two separate states, initially as a bookplate within The Echo, a Federalist satirical journal edited by Richard Alsop, and latterly as a separate print in its own right. It was then republished the following year in Hugginiana, a political magazine named after the outspoken New York Federalist John Huggins. This copy carries the attribution markings for The Echo and came from the initial 1807 edition.

The print’s origins lie in the split that occurred in the Federalist movement following successive defeats in the presidential elections of 1800 and 1805. Disillusioned with the democratic process and locked in an increasingly bitter struggle with their Jeffersonian rivals, an outspoken group of Federalists began to call for moves to a more restrictive model of republican government. Their vision was one which was very much derived from the British model of constitutional monarchy, in which a strong executive ruled with the consent of a limited franchise drawn from the ranks of the wealthy and the educated. One of the most outspoken of their number was John Huggins, a New York barber and satirical author who put himself at the forefront of the battle with the city’s Republican fraternity. In 1808 he published a collected volume of poems, articles and caricatures (which included a copy of this print) that so enraged his enemies that it moved one Republican activist to storm into Huggin’s shop on Broadway and beat him with a heavy length of rope.

The imagery deployed will be familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of English political caricature in this period. The infant Liberty is being nursed on a diet of whisky and rum by the slow-witted and down-at-heel figure of Mother Mob, a prostitute whose latest customer appears to be dozing in the bed behind her. Two mean-looking republican devils in the guise of children stand next to her burning the statutes and copies of the US constitution. In the background we can see a mob tearing down a state building representing government. The print is arguably one of the most starkly conservative political satires produced in the United States during this period.

This print is currently available for sale along with a few other items of American interest. Please click HERE for more information.

Figurative Representation of the Late Catastrophe!

Detail from John Doyle’s ‘Figurative Representation of the Late Catastrophy!”

Surveying the listless occupants of the near-empty chamber of the House of Commons on summer evening in 1837, Benjamin Disraeli idly scribbled a note informing his wife that: “There is no news today: everything is rather flat and the room is thin as the world have [sic] gone to see the monster balloon rise from Vauxhall.” The monster balloon in question was the Great Nassau, a huge hot air balloon which undertook flights from Vauxhall Gardens every evening during the summer season. The Vauxhall balloon was the biggest aircraft in existence at the time and had recently smashed the world record for the longest ever flight, travelling almost 500 miles from London to the German Duchy of Nassau in a time of 18 hours. The balloon itself was spectacle even when it was not airborne, standing 80 feet tall with a circumferance of 150 feet when inflated, it towered over the crowds of awed spectators that thronged to the gardens to see it ascend silently into the heavens each evening.

The Nassau was the brainchild of the pioneering British balloonist Charles Green (1785 – 1870). Green completed his balloon ascent in July 1821 and would undertake hundreds more during the course of a 30 year career in aviation. By the time Green retired in 1850, he had designed and built dozens of balloons of various sizes and was credited with the introduction of several innovative new features that made ballooning a safer and more efficient mode of transport. The Nassau differed from his previous creations in that it was purpose-built to undertake long range flights a greater altitudes than its predecessors.

The Ascent of the Nassau Balloon with the Parachute attached, 24th July 1837

While Green was undoubtedly a serious pilot and aeronautical engineer, he also possessed a flair for the theatrical and recognised that the public’s fascination with flight provided a means of funding his experiments. By 1826 he had entered into an agreement with the proprietors of Vauxhall Gardens which resulted in him being offered a nightly slot in their programme of entertainment. His stunts included using his balloon as a floating platform from which to launch firework displays and completing an ascent while mounted on the back of a horse. He also began offering pleasure flights for groups of paying guests, with customers queuing up to pay £21 each (the equivalent of around £2,000 today) to take a short flight across London. This element of the business proved to be so lucrative that Green was able to fund the construction of the Great Nassau using the proceeds.

In July 1837, the proprietors of Vauxhall Gardens announced a Grand Fete that would climax with another of Green’s unusual aerial spectacles. The inventor Robert Cocking would test his design for a homemade parachute by leaping out of the Great Nassau from several thousand feet above London and returning safely to Earth. Cocking was a professional watercolourist by trade but was also a keen amateur scientist and had spent decades working on a new parachute design. His fascination with the parachute had begun in 1802, when he had watched the French balloonist Andre-Jacques Garnerin successfully complete a descent of several hundred feet using a silk canopy parachute. Cocking had noted that although Garnerin had landed safely, his descent had been erratic and he had touched down several miles away from where his jump had started. Cocking believed that he could do better and argued that a parachute based on an inverted cone design would allow for a smooth and accurate descent. After constructing several test models Cocking eventually put his plan into action in 1837, constructing a huge cone-shaped parachute constructed of canvas stretched over a wooden frame. A small basket was then suspended beneath the cone to carry the parachutist. The whole contraption was much larger and heavier than Cocking originally anticipated and he turned to Charles Green for help as the Green Nassau was the only

‘The Tragic Descent of the Parachute…’ This print presumably provided the inspiration for Doyle’s caricature design

balloon in London large enough to be capable of lifting it off the ground. This was a fact which should have set alarm bells ringing its inventor’s head.

Thousands gathered at Vauxhall Garden’s to watch Cocking test his parachute on the evening of 24th July 1837. The parachute was hung below the basket of the Great Nassau and at 7.40pm, to the sound of thunderous applause and a chorus of ‘God Save the Queen’ from the Vauxhall Gardens band, the balloon and its cargo slowly began their ascent. Ten minutes later they were lost in the clouds above. Cocking had initially hoped to reach an altitude of 8,000 feet before releasing himself from the balloon to begin his descent. However the weight of his parachute was such that the balloon had only reached 5,000 feet by the time the sun began to set. With the light fading fast, Green leaned over the edge of his basket to yell down to Cocking and inform him that they would be unable to go any higher if the jump was to be made in daylight:

I asked him if he felt quite comfortable, and if the practical trial bore out his calculation. Mr Cocking replied “Yes. I never felt more comfortable or more delighted in my life.” Shortly afterwards Mr Cocking said “Well, now I think I shall leave you.” I answered “I wish you a very Good Night and a safe descent if you are determined to make it and not use the tackle” [a rope ladder which would have allowed Cocking to climb out of his parachute and up into the car of Green’s balloon]. Mr Cocking to this question made no reply other than, “Good-night Spencer, Good-night Green.

John Doyle, Figurative Representation of the Late Catastrophe!

With that he pulled the release mechanism and cast himself off into oblivion. Green had no time to consider what happened next as the balloon, suddenly freed from its heavy cargo, shot upwards like a rocket, eventually reaching a height of 15,000 feet before Green and his co-pilot Mr Spencer could bring it under control and make a safe descent. Robert Cocking and his parachute traveled in the opposite direction with even greater rapidity, dropping towards the Earth like a stone. The massive canvas and wooden superstructure of the parachute was far too heavy and simply disintegrated above Cocking’s head. The basket in which the terrified inventor sat detached itself from the mangled remains of the canopy shortly before it smashed into a field in the village of Lee, eight miles south-east of Vauxhall. Although the farm labourers who rushed to Cocking’s aid reported that he was still breathing when they found him, he had sustained massive head injuries and died within minutes of being pulled from the wreckage.

Despite the apparent lunacy of Robert Cocking’s actions, his bravery and the public manner of his death caused an outcry of sympathy amongst fashionable Londoners. The young Queen Victoria even headed a public subscription fund to provide for the eccentric inventor’s widow and children. On 31st August 1837 the episode also provided the Irish caricaturist John Doyle with the inspiration for a new plate in his long-running Political Sketches of HB series. In Figurative Representation of the Late Catastrophe!, Doyle depicts the radical MP Joseph Hume in the guise of the unfortunate Cocking. His parachute has been detached from the balloon Middlesex and as he plummets uncontrollably towards the town of Kilkenny, he cries “Now unless some friendly dunghill receives me, I am lost forever”. Hume was a committed radical whose outspoken advocacy of trade unionism, democratic constitutional reform and Irish Home Rule had made thoroughly unpopular with many in the conservative upper and middle classes. When he was ousted from the constituency of Middlesex in 1837 his friend and political ally Daniel O’Connell was able to have him stand for and win the Irish constituency of Kilkenny. Doyle’s print reflects the prejudices of conservative English audiences who typically viewed MPs holding Irish seats, particularly those with large numbers of Catholic voters, with disdain.