The Candle is England, Anon., Oil on Canvas, c.1700

Protestantism was absolutely central to the way in which eighteenth-century Englishmen thought about themselves and the world around them. The popular perception of history since the reformation was dominated by the narrative that England was an embattled bastion of the true faith, assailed by Catholic enemies from without and at constant risk of being undermined by the agents of anti-Christ who were thought to lurk within. This powerful sense of Protestant exceptionalism was propelled by a virulent print culture which emerged in the early seventeenth-century and was fanned by the experiences of civil war, restoration and revolution. By the turn of the century, the streets of London and other English cities were awash with cheap publications that revelled in the nation’s status as the new Jerusalem and the home of God’s elect. A calendar of historical events published in London in 1700 listed the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 alongside the creation of the world and the birth of Christ in its canon of red letter days in human history (Colley, Britons… p.21.) God, the people of England were repeatedly told, took a particular interest in the fate of Englishmen.

Similar views were expressed in the engraved images of the period. These ranged from cheap woodcuts depicting lurid images of the massacre of Protestant settlers in Ireland to high-end copperplate engravings celebrating the anniversary of England’s delivery from the Gunpowder Plot. One such print shows the theological leaders of the Protestant faith gathered around a table on which a lone candle burns. Opposite them sit the representatives of Catholicism – usually, the Pope, a friar, a cardinal and Satan – who together attempt to blow out the flame and plunge the world into darkness and damnation. The image is thought to have originated with the Dutch engraver Cornelis Danckertsz the Younger (1561-1634) and may have appeared in Amsterdam before being taken up by various London publishers around 1640. The earliest attributable English version was published by Thomas Jenner (fl.1618 – d.1673). In this version the text next to the candle reads is a direct translation of the Dutch original and reads: “The candle is lighted, we cannot blow out.” Interestingly, by the time this image was painted around 70 years later, the inscription had been changed to the more explicitly nationalistic, “The Candle is England”, suggesting that the fate of the English nation and the Protestant faith were now regarded as being inextricably intertwined.

The painting itself is oil on canvas, measuring 60.9 x 77.3cm and it has been tentatively dated to c.1700. My guess would be that it probably dates closer to 1710 and that its creation coincided with the upsurge in aggressive High Church sentiment that accompanied the Sacheverell riots of that year. The identity of the artist is unknown but it seems reasonable to assume they were an amateur who copied the image from an engraving (a similar contemporary example of such paintings can be found HERE), although I’ve been unable to identify which print they may have been working from. The painting was previously the property of the Scottish preacher and philanthropist Rev. Thomas Guthrie (1803 – 1873) and from there descended through three successive generation of the Verney family before being sold by Sir Edmund Verney in November 2019. The painting popped back up at auction a few weeks ago and fetched a respectable hammer price of £3,000.

Rare Rowlandson self-portrait goes on sale

A rare self-portrait by the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson will be going under the hammer at Bonham’s UK auction house in a few weeks time. The pencil, ink and watercolour sketch shows Rowlandson (on the left) and his friend and fellow artist Henry Wigstead checking their luggage at the office of a coaching company shortly before departing a journey. Rowlandson and Wigstead undertook several excursions together during the course of the 1780s and 90s, visiting France, Wales and various places on the south coast of England. These tours provided an opportunity for the pair to sketch and paint landscapes and topography but inevitably also resulted in the production of humorous sketches reflecting on the experience of travel itself. Many of these ideas would later resurface in the illustrations which Rowlandson produced for the Dr Syntax series from 1809 onward.

The drawing comes from the collection of Major Leonard Dent, DSO, “whose group of 39 works by Rowlandson is still regarded as one of the great collections” of the artist’s work. A set of drawings from the same collection achieved record breaking prices when they were sold in 1984 and that presumably explains why this sketch carries an estimate of £10,000 – £15,000.

The catalogue entry reads as follows:

Thomas Rowlandson (London 1756-1827)
The coach booking office, the artist and Henry Wigstead paying their fares
pencil, pen, ink and watercolour on paper
17.7 x 28.6cm (6 15/16 x 11 1/4in).
Footnotes:
Provenance
The Earl of Mayo
Captain Desmond Coke
His sale, Christie’s, London, 22 November 1929, lot 28 (bt. Sabin, 46 gns)
With Frank T. Sabin, 1936 where acquired by
Major Leonard Dent, in 1939
His sale, Christie’s, London, 10 July 1984, lot 2 (£16,200), where purchased by
With Leger Galleries, London, 1987, where purchased by the present owner

Exhibited
London, Frank T.Sabin, Watercolour Drawings by Thomas Rowlandson, 1933, no. 93, ill.
Reading, Museum and Art Gallery, Thomas Rowlandson: Drawings from Town and Country, 1962, no. 64
London, Richard Green and Frank T.Sabin, Thomas Rowlandson, 1980, no. 2, ill. (loaned by Major Dent)
London, Leger Galleries, English Watercolours, 1984, no. 37
New York, The Frick Collection; Pittsburgh, The Frick Art Museum & Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art, The Art of Thomas Rowlandson, 1990, no. 16
London, Lowell Libson Ltd, Beauty and the Beast: a loan exhibition of Rowlandson’s works from British private collections, 2007, no. 31

Literature
H. Faust, ‘A Note on Rowlandson’, Apollo, June 1936, ill.
The Illustrated London News, 12 Sept, 1936, ill. p. 452
F. Gordon Roe, Rowlandson: the Life and Art of a British Genius, 1947, ill, pl. XI
R.R. Wark, Rowlandson’s Drawings for a Tour in a Post Chaise, 1963, p.13 note
L.M.E. Dent, Hillfields: Notes on the Contents, 1972, p. 19
J. Hayes, The Art of Thomas Rowlandson, 1990, pp.58-9
L. Libson, H. Belsey, J. Basket et al, Beauty and the Beast: A loan exhibition of Rowlandson’s works from British private collections, London, 2007, pp. 74-5, ill

Henry Wigstead (c. 1745-1800) was, over a 20 year period, one of Rowlandson’s closest friends as well as being a neighbour in Soho. He had been an executor to the estate of Rowlandson’s aunt whose support had been fundamental to the artist’s development as she financed his attendance of the R.A. schools. Wigstead and Rowlandson made three trips together, the first a 12 day sortie to Hampshire and the Isle of Wight in 1784 which produced around 70 sketches entitled A tour in a post chaise, the majority of which were acquired in the 1920s by Henry E. Huntington. Their format is somewhat smaller than the present drawing. Several of the prints emanating from the trip are said to be ‘after Wigstead’ but they are clearly by a more skilful hand and it is likely that it was Rowlandson who brought to life compositions suggested by his companion. Drawings from the subsequent trips made by the pair to Brighton in 1789 and Wales in 1797 were published in books with text by Wigstead and illustrations by Rowlandson. As the present work is not reproduced in print it has not so far been possible to identify the expedition to which it relates.

Very little is recorded of Rowlandson’s life through documentary evidence so what we do know of him is largely through his artistic output, making the present drawing of particular interest. He is known to have spent time in Paris in his early years and the influence of French artists is particularly evident in this work. He has turned his assured and fluent penmanship to describing a moment during one of the tours when he and Wigstead find themselves in a coach booking office with a yawning postillion and a porter lugging a trunk and an armful of game. He achieves a sense of depth not just with the use of dark foreground washes but by varying the ink used for the outlines, darker in the foreground and paler as the composition recedes. It is first and foremost an anecdotal record of their journey but Rowlandson was nothing if not an acute observer of his fellow men and he adeptly captured the foibles of those he encountered en route. The drawing was once in the collection of Major Leonard Dent, DSO, whose group of 39 works by Rowlandson is still regarded as one of the great collections; it was sold as a single-owner sale in 1984 achieving the highest price for a drawing by Rowlandson ever to be sold at auction (a work now in the Getty Museum, California), a record that still stands today.

Original works by Robert Dighton (1751 – 1814) – The David Padbury Collection goes on sale

 

A large collection of original works by the caricaturist Robert Dighton came up at auction in London earlier this week. All of the items were formerly part of a collection of prints, paintings and drawings by various members of the Dighton family that belonged to a collector named David Padbury. In 2007, Padbury produced a short catalogue raisonné of Dighton’s work to accompany an exhibition at London’s Cartoon Museum. The book, entitled A View of Dighton’s The Dighton Family, Their Times, Caricatures and Portraits is still in print and remains the only detailed study of the artist’s life and work. Most of the items which were being offered up at the sale appeared in Padbury’s book and will therefore be familiar to anyone who’s read it. Nevertheless, I thought it worthy of re-posting the images from the sale catalogue here so that they remain freely accessible online for the foreseeable future.

Dighton occupies a marginal place in the history of eighteenth-century caricature. Most modern print-collectors probably associate him with the mezzotint drolls that were characteristic of Carington Bowles printshop during the 1780s, or else the decidedly less interesting caricature portrait studies that formed the bulk of his output from around 1800 onward. However, he was also a prolific watercolourist and in this medium he undoubtedly excelled. His frenetic paintings of life in the streets around Covent Garden are arguably superior to similar works produced by Thomas Rowlandson (an assertion made by Kenneth Barker in the foreword to Padbury’s book) and the sale of paintings such as these may have accounted for a larger proportion of his income than that which he derived from his prints. The catalogue of known works that appears at the back of Padbury’s book certainly suggests that his output of paintings far exceeded his output of published works during the mid-1790s. He was also a well-known stage actor and singer, performing in such noted venues as Sadler’s Wells Theatre and Vauxhall Gardens and may therefore have regarded the production of caricature engravings as a secondary form of employment.

Robert Dighton was born in London in late 1751. His father was a “paper-hanging-manufacturer” who may also have briefly dabbled in printselling and publishing (Padbury, p. 28). Dighton entered the Royal Academy School in 1770 and came to specialise in portraiture and conversation pieces, his style being heavily indebted to that of Hogarth, Laroon and Hamilton. His first published work appeared in 1776 and by 1781 he was regularly producing images for the printseller Carington Bowles. The connection with the Bowles family lasted until ‘droll’ mezzotints finally fell out of fashion in the late 1790s, by which time Dighton was also regularly self-publishing his own satirical etchings on copper. His work was dominated by social satire of one kind or another, although he briefly strayed into political subjects during the tumultuous years of the early-to-middle 1790s. Most of these prints appear to have been self-published, perhaps indicating that Dighton was making enough money from his theatrical endeavours to cover his own production costs and could therefore dispense with the interference of a publisher. If Dighton’s finances were in rude health in the 1790s then the situation changed rapidly during the first decade of the nineteenth-century. In 1806 he was caught selling drawings by Rembrandt and other Old Masters that he had stolen from the reading rooms of the British Museum. He fled London in disgrace, washing up in Oxford where he scratched out a living engraving caricatures of provincial society figures and noted members of the university faculty. He eventually returned to London in 1810, publishing a small number of prints before apparently becoming increasingly reliant on the work of his sons – Robert Junior and Denis – to support the family. He died at Spring Gardens and was buried at St Martin in the Fields on 13^th June 1814.

Dighton’s background in portraiture means that it is not surprising that that Padbury’s collection contained a large number of caricature portrait studies. Many of these appear to be preparatory works for mezzotints that were published by Carington Bowles during the 1780s and copies of the engraved versions can be easily located using the British Museum’s recently revamped online catalogue.

 

Perhaps the most interesting of the portrait pieces is this signed pencil drawing of a family group done on laid paper with a 1797 watermark (which appears at the top of this article). Padbury notes that the likeness of the man at the centre of the group is similar to that of Dighton’s self-portrait of 1779 and that the lady on the lower right also bears a resemblance to a study of Dighton’s first wife Letitia (d.1778). By 1797, Dighton had been married three times and had at least six children who had lived beyond infancy. It’s therefore possible that this drawing was conceived as an extended family portrait, showing the current members of Dighton’s family alongside the likenesses of his dead wives and children. A second family group – a signed watercolour of parents and a child in a garden which is dated 1811 (right) – was also sold. However, the likelihood is that this is a straight-forwardly commercial piece that Dighton was presumably commissioned to produce for the sitters.

 

Padbury’s collection contained preparatory studies for several of Dighton’s mezzotint ‘drolls’ which are illustrated in order below. The most recognisable of these is the original watercolour version of the Scottish plate from the triptych Geography Bewitched! (1797) but there were also original versions of the prints Intelligence on the Change of Ministry (c.1783), A Master Parson with a Good Living (c.1782-83), Youthful Sport (c.1783 – 84), Quarrelsome Taylors, or Two of a Trade seldom agree (c.1794 – 95) and The Harmony of Courtship / The Dischord of Matrimony (c.1796). There were also a number of watercolours that were either conceived as works in their own right or as preparatory drawings for prints that either weren’t published or for which no surviving copies can be found. These were the two small ovals entitled The Peep Show and A Lady Marketing (c.1780s) and the lively Term Time or the Lawyers Alive in Westminster Hall (c.1795). The latter was the single most expensive item of Padbury’s to appear in the sale and it achieved a final hammer price of £4,500. Finally, at the other end of the income scale, was an early rural landscape entitled The Village Well (c.1780) that fetched just £180. Which I guess goes to show that there’s more money in law than you’re likely to find at the bottom of a wishing well…

 

Thomas Rowlandson after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Count Ugolino… c. 1773

If one were to imagine the sort of painting likely to capture the imagination of the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson then it’s unlikely that Sir Joshua Reynold’s Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon would be the first image to spring to mind. Rowlandson’s obvious love of bawdy humour and scenes of convivial sociability seems at odds with this rather austere meditation on suffering and death. However, it is precisely that fact which marks out this pencil and watercolour painting as something a little bit special. For it is likely that when Thomas Rowlandson sat down to sketch out this picture, all of that – the caricatures, the teeming street scenes, the raunchy erotica – still lay ahead of him. Because in all probability he drew this image when he was still a 15 or 16 year old boy studying at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Given the arc of Rowlandson’s subsequent career as an engraver of humour prints (not to mention illegal pornography), it’s sometimes easy to forget that he also pursued a very successful career as a serious artist. His watercolour landscapes found their way into some of the finest collections in the land and were a direct influence on the early work of J.M.W. Turner. He also possessed impeccable artistic credentials – not only being one of the few caricaturists to have studied art at the prestigious Royal Academy School but to also succeed in winning a place there at the unusually young age of 15. The Academy had been founded by King George III four years earlier in 1768 in an effort to raise the status of British art to a level that was commensurate with the nation’s economic, maritime and colonial power. This was to be achieved both by the education of young artist and the staging of an annual exhibition of works by great Academicians – including Reynolds who was appointed to act as its first president.

The Academy School was based in Old Somerset House on the Strand. The academic programme began with the study of portraiture and Rowlandson and his fellow pupils would have spent their days drawing objects from the  extensive collection of plaster copies of antique statuary that was housed in the building. When not engaged in formal study under the supervision of a master, pupil’s were encouraged to busy themselves by copying works which hung in the Academy’s exhibition rooms in Pall Mall. It is almost certainly here that Rowlandson would have first set eyes on Reynolds painting of Count Ugolino. Rowlandson arrived at the Academy on 6th November 1772 and Reynolds unveiled the painting at the opening of the annual exhibition five month later. If Rowlandson took his sketch from direct observation of the original then it must have been completed before 1775, when it was sold to the Duke of Dorset for the princely sum of 400 guineas (apparently it was a shrewd investment – Dorset would later claim he had been offered £1,000 for it). [1.]

The painting depicts an obscure episode in the bloody history of medieval Italy. Count Ugolino was a Pisan nobleman who was ousted from power following a coup orchestrated by his arch-rival Archbishop Ruggieri. Ugolino and his sons were confined to a locked room at the top of a high tower in the city and there they were left to starve to death on Ruggieri’s orders. The incident would probably have vanished into the footnotes of history were not for the fact that it was recorded for posterity by the poet Dante in The Divine Comedy. Dante places Ugolino and Ruggieri in the Circle of Hell reserved for traitors, with the Archbishop being judged to be the worst of the pair and therefore forced to endure the pain of having his rival gnaw hungrily at his head for all eternity.

Reynolds painting shows Ugolino staring out at the viewer in helpless anguish as the first of his children succumbs to hunger. It’s a striking image and a radical departure from the society portraits that he was more commonly known for. As a consequence, the cognoscenti’s reaction was decidedly mixed. While The Public Advertiser acknowledged that it was “a good picture” it also felt it necessary to add that “if the same Excellence had been employed on a pleasing Subject, it would have inchanted [sic], as it may now terrify, the Public.” The Morning Chronicle on the other hand regarded it as a work which was utterly without merit and described Reynolds efforts as “the rude disorderly abortions of an unstudied mind, of a portrait painter, who quitting the confined track where he was calculated to move in safety, had ridiculously bewildered himself in unknown regions.” [2.]

Nevertheless, Reynolds and his fellow Academicians regarded history painting as the highest form of art and it’s entirely possible that Rowlandson and his fellow pupils were instructed to make careful copies of Count Ugolino… when it was put on display. The choice of subject matter certainly strengthens the case for this being an early work, as by the 1780s Rowlandson was already beginning to drift away from the classical and Italianate ideals of the Reynolds and his fellow Academicians. In 1783 he pointedly declined to submit any paintings for the Academy’s annual exhibition and instead put forward four drawings for inclusion in a display by the rival Society of Artists, a body which promoted a more vernacular style of British art in keeping with the manner of William Hogarth and Joseph Wright of Derby. It therefore seems hard to imagine Rowlandson devoting time and effort to copying Reynolds’ picture after this date. It therefore stands as an exceptionally early example of Rowlandson’s work and one which is most definitely worthy of note.

The painting is signed in the lower left-hand corner and measures 27.7 x 37.5cm. It was sold at auction in the UK on 4th March 2020 for a hammer price of £2,200.

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References

1. John Chu, “High Art and High Stakes: The 3rd Duke of Dorset’s Gamble on Reynolds”, British Art Studies, Issue 2, http://dx.doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058 5462/issue-02/jchu.
2. Public Advertiser, 28th April 1773 & Morning Chronicle, 30th April 1773.

Wapping Old Stairs, After Thomas Rowlandson, 1814.

[UPDATE – JUNE 2019: A reader has contacted me to suggest that this drawing is a later imitation of Rowlandson’s work. Aside from the differences in line and colouring, the title (which is written in the same hand as the signature) indicates that this is a view of Wapping Old Stairs. However, both Rowlandson and his contemporaries would have known that the Salutation Inn stood on the banks of the Thames at Greenwich not Wapping.]

 

 

I spotted this nice watercolour scene by Rowlandson in an auction catalogue this morning.

It shows a group of pedestrians descending Wapping Old Stairs towards a small wherry which is being loaded with passengers wishing to cross the River Thames. A young girl and her elderly father stand closest to the viewer. The old man is a former soldier, dressed in a pensioners uniform, who hobbles along on a wooden leg with the help of his daughter and his walking stick. Ahead of them strides a young soldier, perhaps heading off to join his regiment, who carries a large drum on his back and a sheathed sword in his hand. He is being greeted with great enthusiasm by an oarsman who is no doubt attempting to lure him into another nearby boat with the promise of a reduced fair or a quicker crossing. Behind them, beneath the windows of the inn, a woman, presumably a prostitute, canoodles with a bearded man. In the distance, oarsmen can be seen helping other passengers onto a rowing boat next to the indistinct form of the bow of a collier ship. The scene plays out beneath the open windows of The Salutation public house, whose proprietor, according to the sign which hangs above is a Mr Ben Block. A group of carousers can be seen inside, drinking smoking and consorting with the working girls who evidently frequent the place.

Rowlandson had engraved a similar caricature for Thomas Tegg’s Miseries of London series in 1812. This watercolour version is set further back from the waterline and has a slightly smuttier subtext, placing a greater, albeit still subtle, emphasis on the more debauched aspects of London’s docksides. Some elements of the drawing are based on real life, Wapping Old Stairs and the eighteenth-century public house which stands next to them are still there today. However, the pub in question was (and still is) named The Town of Ramsgate. Rowlandson presumably changed it to The Salutation as a punning reference to the various forms of greeting which are taking place in the street outside. Ben Block was a contemporary placeholder name, similar to ‘Joe Bloggs’ or ‘John Doe’ today, and is probably also fictitious. The watercolour may have been a preparatory sketch for the 1812 engraving that Rowlandson kept and subsequently sold, or he may simply have regurgitated the idea two years later in order to turn out an original piece for a collector.