“The Horrid and Inhuman Murderer” Thomas Simmons by Angelo & Rowlandson, 1807

It was half-past eight on the evening of 20^th October 1807 and Sarah Harris, a maid in the employment of George Boreham of Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, was attending to her duties in the kitchen of Boreham’s farmhouse.  Sarah was busier than usual that evening as her master and his wife were entertaining. Mr and Mrs Boreham had been joined at dinner by their four adult daughters, Esther, Anne, Elizabeth and Sarah and Mrs Hummerstone, a family friend who ran the Black Lion Inn in the town.

George and Anne Boreham were upstairs while Mrs Boreham, Mrs Hummerstone, Esther, Elizabeth and Sarah retired to the parlour. The distant hum of the ladies conversation may have been perceptible to Sarah Harris as she set about her work at the rear of the building. Gradually though, another noise began to filter into the room from outside. It was the sound of a man’s voice, raised in anger, cursing and swearing, as he made his way into the small courtyard that backed onto the farmhouse. Sarah Harris knew the owner of that voice well and her heart may have sunk to hear it. It belonged to Thomas Simmons, her former lover and an employee of the Borehams who had recently been fired for violent misconduct.

Simmons was twenty years old with aquiline features, a sallow complexion and a curly thatch of dark brown hair. He had worked for the Borehams for the past three years but proved himself to be a thoroughly indolent and untrustworthy a servant who possessed a violent temper. When not arguing with his fellow servants, he spent a good deal of his time idling about the farmhouse in an effort to woo Sarah Harris, with whom he had become infatuated. Harris was described as being many years older than her would-be suitor and was perhaps initially flattered by the attention. There was even talk of marriage but the relationship quickly broke down as it became clear that Simmons could not control his temper. Several weeks earlier, Simmons had severely beat Harris after an argument, threatening that he would kill her. The incident prompted the Borehams to dismiss the troublesome young man from their service and Sarah used the sacking as an excuse to break off the relationship, informing him that Mrs Boreham had told her that she could not expect to keep her own station if she chose to marry so disreputable a man.  Simmons had sworn revenge on both Sarah Harris and the Boreham family. It was a threat which he now appeared to be about to carry out.

As Harris looked though the kitchen window into the darkness of the yard beyond, Simmons pallid features gladly became discernible through the gloom. On seeing her, he swore loudly, pointed to the nearby kitchen door and demand to be admitted. Sarah opened the window and advised him to leave quietly, warning that there was company in the house. Simmons snarled back that he did not give a damn about the company and that he would “do them all” if necessary and with that he lunged through the window and struck the maid. Terrified, Harris fled, calling for help as she ran to hide in the adjoining wash-house. Meanwhile Simmons began banging at the kitchen door in an effort to gain access to the farm. Hearing the noise, Mrs Hummerstone sallied forth from the parlour, perhaps reasoning that her experience of dealing with drunken disputes in the town’s pub meant that she was best equipped to confront the Borehams’ quarrelsome former employee. She flung open the doorway and demanded that Simmons leave immediately. He made no response but reached into his pocket, drew out a knife and drove into Mrs Hummerstone’s neck with such force that her bonnet was knocked from her head. Simmons then drew the blade across her throat, opening up a huge gash that left him drenched in blood. With the way ahead now clear, he ran into the house, leaving the unfortunately Mrs Hummerstone to stagger a short distance into the yard, vainly searching for help before she expired in a heap on the ground.

Simmons charged into the parlour with a roar and launched himself upon Esther, stabbing her repeatedly in the chest and neck and killing her instantly. As Elizabeth and Sarah ran screaming from the room, the attacker turned his knife on their elderly mother, wounding her in the neck before flinging her on top of her daughter’s body.  Returning once more to the kitchen, Simmons resumed his search for Sarah Harris. On discovering the maid he chased her back into the hallway, knocking down Mr Boreham who, despite his infirmity, had managed to hobble downstairs with the intention of confronting the intruder with a poker. Simmons wrestled Harris to the ground and the pair fought for a several moments. Sarah managed to fend off numerous blows aimed at her neck and face and suffered deep cuts to her hands and arms in the process. Eventually she broke free and ran out into the street crying “murder!” as loudly as she could. Simmons took to his heels and fled.

Several of the townspeople ran towards the cries. They later recalled passing Mrs Hummerstone’s body lying in the yard, discovering the unconscious form of Mr Boreham in the hallway and the scene of carnage that awaited them in the parlour. Thankfully one of those in attendance was the local surgeon, who quickly realised that Mrs Boreham’s wound was not fatal and was able to provide medical assistance to the surviving members of the family. With the alarm now raised, the men of Hoddesdon began to search for Simmons in earnest. He was eventually discovered hiding under some hay in a nearby cow shed and dragged to the Bell public-house. It was here that the constable found him the next morning. He had been badly beaten by his captors and was tied to a post with such force that it was feared that he might succeeded in cheating the hangman of his prize.

The trial took place at the Hertford Assizes the following spring. Simmons admitted his guilt, stating that although he never intended to harm Mrs Hummerstone, he had entered the farm with the intention of killing Sarah Harris and members of the Boreham family. The defendant was asked if he had anything to say before the verdict was delivered but he simply “answered, in a careless tone – No!” He was found guilty and sentenced to be hung and his body anatomised.

And there the story ends; save for an odd supernatural footnote in what is an otherwise all too human tale of murder and misery. Shortly after his arrest, Simmons told a constable that he had been startled by a flapping sound while he was fighting with Sarah Harris. While in jail the prisoner, who claimed to be in a great deal of distress, called for a priest and explained that “he heard a kind of fluttering noise behind him, and on looking back, saw a brown figure, with wings extended, which frightened him so much, that he let the maid take knife out of his hand, and crawled out of the back door on his hands and knees, and the figure followed him to the garden gate.” Perhaps the story was conceived in effort to excuse his cowardly flight from the scene of the crime? Or perhaps it indicated that Simmons had suffered a complete mental breakdown? In either case, it cut little ice with the authorities and did not prevent him being sent to his death a few months later.

News of the murders spread rapidly throughout the country and a number of engraved likenesses of Simmons were produced in London. Some of these were bound into sixpenny pamphlets recounting the facts of the case, while others appear to have been sold in their own right. The fencing master and amateur artist Henry Angelo, whose memoirs suggest a partiality for lurid tales of murder, travelled up Hertford Goal to sketch Simmons in the exercise yard. Angelo’s drawing was engraved and published by his friend Thomas Rowlandson, whose publication line appears at the foot of the print along with two lines of text providing some information about the sitter. Although the likeness strays close to caricature, it captures the thoroughly mundane aspect of Simmons appearance. This in itself was problematic for some contemporary commentators, who simply refused to believe that so horrible crime could be committed by someone of so unassuming a disposition. It was this adherence to the principles of physiognomy that moved one pamphleteer to complain that many of the engravings of Simmons that had so far been published in London had failed to capture “his long hatchet face, and cadaverous aspect” with sufficient vigour.

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Quotes & References

Anon. Horrid Murder. The trial of Thomas Simmons… (London, 1807)

Anon. Inhuman murder, at Hoddeson. The trial of Thomas Simmons (London, 1808)

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.

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.

‘Old Q’ Snuff Box c.1800

This snuff box was the latest caricature-related item to catch my eye whilst browsing through sales catalogues. It’s decorated with an engraved copy of Thomas Rowlandson’s caricature of the Duke of Queensburry (1725 – 1810). Queensbury was the archetypal dirty old man and his sexual exploits became the stuff of legend in late eighteenth-century London. By the 1790s he had become the subject of mocking caricatures, most notably Robert Dighton’s 1796 effort Old q-uiz the old goat of Piccadilly, which shows the elderly Duke, laden down with rejuvenating tonics (the contemporary alternative to Viagra), sidling up to a young prostitute on the street.

Interestingly, Rowlandson’s image of Old Q is only known to exist as a original work entitled A Worn Out Debauchee which now resides in the Paul Mellon Collection. The artist is thought to have produced his original version sometime during the first half of the 1790s. Given that Rowlandson sold his original works to the great and the good of late-Hanoverian London, and that it’s highly unlikely that a humble brassware manufacturer would have had access to the drawing room of A Worn Out Debauchee‘s first owner, there surely must have been a printed version from which this image was copied? If that was the case then it appears as though this printed edition is now lost, as I’ve been unable to locate any reference to it.

Thomas Rowlandson, Grog on Board, ink and watercolour

This seems like a fitting image to take us into the weekend. An original ink and watercolour wash by Thomas Rowlandson, whose signature appears at the bottom left-hand corner of the paper. It measures approximately 11.5 x 15 inches.

The image was originally engraved for the publisher S.W. Fores, who issued it under the title Grog on Board in January 1789. It was originally accompanied by a companion piece titled Tea on Shore, in which the raucous debauchery of the sailors is compared with a polite society gathering.

I suspect that this is a later version, drawn after the engraving was issued and possibly dating to the 1800s – 1810s, when the publisher Rudolph Ackermann began selling traced copies of the artist’s original works. It looks a bit too similar to the engraving to have been an original sketch that was produced off the cuff. The tone and application of the colouring also appears different (at least to my eye) than the thin washes of delicate colour that Rowlandson usually applied to his watercolours.

This picture is due to come up at auction in a couple of weeks. It carries an estimate of £600 – £800. Personally, I can’t quite make up my mind about it. It may be a genuine original, or a ‘licensed copy’ of the kind Ackermann is known to have produced. Alternatively, it could simply be a contemporary amateur copy which has subsequently been passed off as an original?

Perhaps something to mull over as I prepare to sail off into the weekend with a healthy cargo of grog on board.