The Brother to the Moon’s Visit to the Court of Queen Vic, 1842

Here’s another item that falls outside of the period with which this blog normally concerns itself but is nevertheless interesting enough to warrant a closer look. The Brother to the Moon’s Visit to the Court of Queen Vic is a set of 24 lithographic etchings by Richard Doyle which tell the story of an official Chinese delegation to London. It was published in March 1843 by H.P. & G.T. Fores of Piccadilly (the sons of the famous Georgian printseller S.W. Fores) and printed by William Kohler of Denmark Street.

The plates depict an elaborate procession of Chinese diplomats, courtiers, soldiers and entertainers, wending their way towards an audience with Queen Victoria. Turning the pages we come across members of the ‘Celestial Guard’ and the Imperial Band as well as a troupe of performing acrobats, all skillfully engraved and finished with delicate hand-colouring. It almost goes without saying that these images are not informed by modern standards of political correctness and they play on stereotypes of Asian culture which were already well-established in British visual satire by the 1790s. In this case however the idea that the Chinese pose any real threat to Britain has been utterly overthrown and the members of the delegation are depicted a diminutive grotesques surrounded by laughably antiquated accouterments. This is hardly surprising as, six months before the prints were published, Britain had used modern weaponry to flatten the Chinese army and impose a humiliating peace treaty which ended the First Opium War.

Unusually we may know exactly when the idea for this caricature first occurred to the artist. Doyle was writing to his father, the famous caricaturist John Doyle (HB), on Christmas Day 1842 and concluded by mentioning several items of news that he thought may be of interest:

…The names of the Pantomimes are announced. The Chinese Ambassador is coming (may his shadow never be less), a great fall in the price of bread, numerous families are roaring out Christmas hymns in the streets, and the latest mail conveys the intelligence that the plum pudding is in a forward state [1]. 

He then added a quick drawing of a fat mandarin his gaggle of servants to the margins of the letter along with several other doodles.

The first advertisement for the prints appeared in the Literary Gazette of 11th March 1843. It states that the folder of prints was available from the Fores’ shop at a cost of 5s plain or 10s coloured. You’ll notice that the cover of this copy has the abbreviation “Col[oure]d written on the top, presumably for ease of reference when the folios were stacked together on the shop’s shelves. There is also an interesting flyleaf stuck to the inside of the front-cover, advertising other prints which were being sold by the Fores’ brothers at this time. Whilst many of the titles would not have looked out of place in their father’s day, there is a notable move towards the serial publication of sets or collections of caricatures, as well as the encroachment of French prints onto the English market.

1. G.F. Scott (ed.) The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842 – 1843, Athens OH, 2016.

An early 19th century caricature album

Whilst we tend to view satirical prints a valuable items which are to be individually collected, displayed, and considered in their own right, that’s not necessarily the way in which contemporary consumers would have approached them. The numerous references to caricatures being placed into albums, scrapbooks and folders, which we find in newspaper advertisement, diaries and publication lines of the period, suggests that satirical prints were typically acquired and viewed in multiples, with each print receiving perhaps only a moment’s consideration from the owner.

The loss of this collective view of satirical prints is in part due to the poor survival rate of contemporary caricature albums. As the scarcity and value of eighteenth-century prints has increased over time, albums have been broken up by successive generations of antiques dealers so that individual prints could be sold onto collectors at a higher price. It’s therefore always pleasing to come across a surviving album of caricatures which has survived completely intact.

These images are of an album which has recently surfaced on the market and will appear at auction in the UK in the next few weeks. The binding carries the armorial crest of the Marquess of Londonderry and contains 130 coloured prints by the likes of John Doyle and other prominent West End caricaturists of the 1830s. 

The album carries an auctioneer’s estimate of £700 – £1,000, which is perhaps rather optimistic given the relative lack enthusiasm for Doyle’s works amongst many collectors. Whatever the outcome, let’s hope that this lovely item remains in one piece for a few more years to come.

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.

Other sketches by HB

Every so often I post about items which I find interesting but which probably wouldn’t normally feature on a blog dedicated to satirical prints of the long eighteenth-century. I do this partly to stress the links that existed between the trade in caricature prints and the wider contemporary markets for art, books, ceramics and other manufactured goods, and partly to add a bit of variety to my posts. I’m also particularly keen on documenting images of items which are being sold on the private market, giving fellow enthusiasts the opportunity to view auction items before they disappear into an anonymous dining room or study for years to come.

This is why I felt it was worth writing out a quick post to accompany these images of an oil painting by John Doyle, which will be going under the hammer on the Continent in a few weeks time. Readers of this blog will of course know Doyle by his pseudonym ‘HB’, a moniker he adopted while pursuing a highly successful career as a political caricaturist during the 1820s, 30s and 40s. Sadly Doyle’s work tends to be overlooked by historians, who often compare him unfavourably to more unconventional contemporaries such as William Heath, Robert Seymour and C.J. Grant. While it may be tempting to dismiss Doyle’s preference for realism and refinement as being symptomatic of the transition (some would say decline) which occurred in British satirical print-making during the second quarter of the nineteenth-century, it is an unarguable fact that his works were far more highly valued by contemporaries than those of any of the artists mentioned above. Indeed, in his commercial success may well have rivaled (or possibly even exceeded) that of George Cruikshank by the end of the 1830s, when Doyle acquired a large house near Hyde Park and began hobnobbing with Dickens, Scott, Thackeray and the rest of early-Victorian London’s literati.

John Doyle was one of the many caricaturists who had drifted into satirical print-making while pursuing a career as a serious artist. He had a reasonably good pedigree, having served as a pupil of the landscape painter Gaspare Gabrielli and studied under John Comer Field at the Royal Dublin Society, but failed to establish himself as a major figure on the metropolitan art scene after relocating to London in 1822. By 1827 Doyle was engraving satirical plates for the printseller Thomas McLean’s shop in the Haymarket and it was to be in this field that he would achieve his greatest critical and commercial success. His Political Sketches of HB series was to remain in continuous publication from 1829 until 1849 and is possibly the only significant body of satirical work to have survived the transition from the Georgian to the Victorian era.

While he may never broken through to foremost ranks of the late-Hanoverian art world, Doyle was still an artist of considerable talent and would continue to produce and sell paintings for the remainder of his life. He painted this nocturnal landscape scene in 1828, a year which perhaps marks the point at which the focus of his career transferred from the world of high art to that of commercial publishing. The Italianate style of the picture hints at Gabrielli’s influence on Doyle’s development as an artist and it is also heavily indebted to the works of Sebastian Pether and the young J.M.W. Turner. The painting is signed and dated lower right ‘J. Doyle 1828′ and is expected to fetch somewhere in the region of £4,000 – £5,000.