1760-1783.]

ENGRAVING-STRANGE, WOOLLETT.

77

extravagance of Barry and Fuseli on the other, it is a matter rather for rejoicing than regret that our churches and public places were not adorned with such illustrations of sacred and secular history as the painters of that day must have produced.

If we were attempting more than a few illustrations of the state of art, there are many other painters who would call for record. Romney, whose life is a romance, and who for a while divided the town with Reynolds, when Thurlow, like his sovereign, declared himself "of the Romney faction;" Fuseli, who imported into England the wildest extravagances of Germany; Paul Sandby, by many regarded as the father of that essentially English art, water-colour painting; Wright of Derby, and many another might afford matter for remark: to say nothing of those who succeeded them, and reflected for the most part more or less strongly their genius or their manner-Northcote, Opie, Copley, Stothard, and those others of equal fame who handed. down the practice and the traditions of their elders to the painters of our own day.

Nor should those who by means of the art of Engraving assisted in diffusing still more widely the works of the great artists who adorned this period, be left unmentioned. Sir Robert Strange and William Woollett did for English line engraving all that Reynolds and his associates accomplished for painting. More they could not do in their own country; but beyond its limits they perhaps did more. English pictures, except in special instances, never found their way across the channel; but the engravings of Strange and Woollett were eagerly purchased all over the continent. Both were men of rare genius. Strange confined his attention to historical engraving, and delighted in translating the works of the great masters of old. Woollett chiefly engraved landscapes, and especially those of British painters. Strange learnt the art from Le Bas, one of the most distinguished French engravers of the day, and he cultivated his powers by diligent study in the great centres of Italian art. But whilst no engraver ever entered more into the spirit of the painters whose works he copied, his style was decidedly his own. Nearly all his plates were executed from drawings made by himself from the original pictures; and much as we may admire them when seen apart, it is only on examining such a collection of his engravings as that in the Print Room of the British Museum, where they fill three folio volumes, that his remarkable industry and fertility of resource, as well as his artistic feeling and the brilliancy of his technical skill, can be fairly appreciated. Woollett owed little to any instructor. His teacher was an obscure English engraver, and he never studied out of his native country. But he lived at a time when England was putting forth her strength in art, and he fully participated in the movement. Like our landscape painters, he refused to be bound by established practices. The effect he desired to produce he took what seemed the surest means of producing, without regard to its being the most regular. Etching, the graver, and the needle he freely used, as each seemed the most efficient for the purpose in view. The best of his plates consequently exhibit a union of force and delicacy scarcely to be found elsewhere in landscape engravings. His characterization of surface is nearly perfect. The landscapes of Woollett indeed gave a decided impulse to landscape engraving abroad as well as at home. He engraved the figure also

VOL. VII.-192.

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BOYDELL.-ILLUSTRATED BOOKS.

[1760-1783. with great ability, and his plate from West's "Death of Wolfe" is generally regarded as a masterpiece. But it is in his landscapes that his great originality and genius are shown, and Woollett is as justly considered the founder of the English school of landscape engraving as Strange is of that of historical engraving. Several other English line engravers, of very considerable skill, flourished during the same period, of whom it will be enough to name Major, who wrote himself engraver to the king; Basire, Byrne, Rooker, the able but unhappy Ryland, and the best of all our portrait engravers William Sharp, who together created a school of line engravers which though not always adequately patronized, has continued with unabated. powers to the present day.

In mezzotint engraving-a branch of engraving in which England has always maintained the lead-the first practitioner was James MacArdell, who did for the portraits of Reynolds, at least all that his predecessor, John Smith, performed for those of Kneller. With MacArdell, or immediately succeeding him, practised Fisher, Valentine Green, Raphael Smith, W. Dickinson, Earlom, and the Watsons, James, Thomas, and Caroline; whilst Paul Sandby showed the capabilities of the infant art of aquatinta engraving. Along with the admirable native engravers, several distinguished foreigners found ample employment. Of these the chief were Bartolozzi, best known by the "chalk" engravings after his own designs, and the drawings of the great masters; Vivares, unrivalled for the freedom of his foliage, and the graceful ease with which he rendered the landscapes of Lorraine, Poussin, and Gainsborough ; Grignon, who seems to have been equally expert in every class of subjects and in every style; and Gravelot, now recollected only by his bookplates.

English engravings had indeed become an important branch of commerce. If we may credit the statement made in the House of Lords by lord Suffolk in his speech on Boydell's 'Lottery Bill,'" the revenue coming into this country from this source at one time exceeded 200,000l. per annum." Boydell was the principal agent in promoting this traffic. Himself an engraver, though of but small talent, he was led by observing the success of Hogarth's plates to speculate on the possibility of establishing a print-selling business on an extended scale. He tried and succeeded, and with every fresh success his boldness increased, until he was able to assert that he had laid out "above 350,000l. in promoting the fine arts in this country."* On the plates issued by him he employed engravers of the highest standing; and he set the example of publishing illustrated books of a more splendid character than had previously been issued by any English publisher. By his fellow citizens he was elected alderman, and then lord-mayor, but his highest ambition was to produce an edition of Shakspere which should in its illustrations be the most perfect which the arts of the country could produce. To effect this he invited the principal painters of the day to paint finished oil pictures of incidents selected from the various plays; and to contain the pictures so produced he built a spacious suite of rooms in Pall Mall, which he desig nated the Shakspere Gallery, but which is now the Gallery of the British Institution. The engravings as published formed a magnificent work in nine

* Petition to House of Commons-"Annual Register," vol. xlvi.

1760-1783.]

SCULPTURE-BANKS, BACON, FLAXMAN.

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folio volumes. The pictures, with the gallery which contained them, Boydell intended to have bequeathed to the nation; but commercial losses arising out of the French revolution compelled him to sell them, and he obtained the sanction of parliament for disposing of them by lottery. Boydell was of course not alone in his enterprise. His success stimulated other publishers, and some of them produced works scarcely less important than his own.

In the early years of the reign of George III. there was only one English sculptor of any reputation, and his celebrity arose rather from the paucity of competition than from his own ability. Into what strange defiances of common sense the lack of imagination will lead artists who are poetic by rule, the monuments of Joseph Wilton which disfigure our metropolitan cathedrals will be sufficient to convince any one who will take the trouble to examine them. Banks (1735-1805) some thirteen years the junior of Wilton, was our first great English sculptor. He loved to work on classic themes, and Reynolds said that he had the mind of an ancient Greek. But his poetic subjects brought him only the poet's fare, and like most of his craft who find portraiture irksome he had to turn for profit to the sculpture of monuments. His real strength however lay in his poetic conception; his monumental groups are for the most part of inferior value-the exceptions being when there was something to call for simple poetic treatment, as in the exquisite monument to a child, Penelope Boothby, in Ashborne Church, a work which when in the exhibition room at Somerset House by its gentle pathos moved to tears the crowd that daily surrounded it. John Bacon (1740-1799) was a more popular, and in a pecuniary point of view far more successful sculptor than Banks but in all the higher qualities of his art greatly his inferior. To his chisel we owe a very large proportion of the public monuments erected in the latter part of the last century.

Later in date than the sculptors just noticed, came one greater than either. Had his powers of execution been equal to his conception, John Flaxman would have been one of the very greatest sculptors of modern times. As it is, in chastened affluence of imagination, purity and grace, he has hardly a superior. His was a fancy which could soar into the highest heaven of inven tion, yet stoop without discredit to the humblest task-work. Some of his

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ARCHITECTURE-TAYLOR, CHAMBERS.

[1760-1783 grander productions like the Archangel Michael and Satan (at Petworth) are the glory of the English school of sculpture; his designs from Homer (and there are others scarcely less noble or beautiful) have won the admiration of the best critics throughout Europe; yet he was ready to model a porcelain cup or plate for Wedgwood, and in doing so never failed to produce one that an ancient Greek would have beheld with delight. Along with our three famous countrymen lived and laboured a Dutchman, if not more famous than they, far more the favourite of fortune. This was Joseph Nollekens, a carver of Grecian deities, the best of which is renowned as the 'long-sided Venus.' But if he missed the ideal, he never missed sober every-day reality. He was in portrait-sculpture what Reynolds was in portrait-painting, and he prospered accordingly. He died at a ripe old age worth 200,000.-which is a fair measure of his ability.

We have traced the progress of Architecture from Wren down to Kent and Burlington. From the era of churches and mansions, we have arrived at that of public and commercial buildings. Sir Robert Taylor was the leading architect when George III. ascended the throne. He was a man of taste and industry, but not of much original power: the wings he added to the Bank, an adaptation of a design by Bramante, were much admired at the

The Bank of England, as altered by Sir Robert Taylor.

time, but were ruthlessly swept away by his successor as bank architect, sir John Soane. Contemporary with Taylor was Dance, the architect of the Mansion House and of Newgate-the latter a work of most prison-like character. The Woods (father and son), of Bath, and the brothers Adam, of Edinburgh and London, call for honorable notice for their efforts to raise the character of our street architecture. Bath, "that beautiful city which charms even eyes familiar with the masterpieces of Bramante and Palladio," † may be said to have been created by the Woods: the taste of Robert and James Adam is fairly shown in the Adelphi-though they erected a large number of other buildings. But the greatest architect of the time was sir William Chambers, whose fame-his Chinese fantasies being forgottennow rests secure, on his one grand work, Somerset House-by far the noblest English building of its time, and, with all its faults, still one of the noblest buildings in the capital. Unfortunately, it was never completed on its original plan; and the erection of King's College in an anomalous style -itself about to be rendered still more anomalous by the perversion of the

1760-1788.]

STUART AND REVETT-WYATT.

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semi-Greek chapel into semi-Gothic-will for ever prevent the completion of its eastern side, a misfortune rendered the more obvious by Mr. Pennethorne's recent admirable completion of the western portion. Somerset House was the last crowning triumph of the Italian style, introduced by Inigo Jones, and carried on with very unequal success by succeeding architects.

The

investigations of two painters, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, as made known in their "Antiquities of Athens," (1762-94), by calling the attention of professional men and the public to the architecture of ancient Greece, effected an entire change in the received notions of architectural beauty. It was of course some time before the change became apparent in our public edifices, but, from the publication of the "Antiquities," there was a constantly growing approximation to Greek forms, however much the Greek spirit might be absent, until in our own day it culminated in the works of sir Robert Smirke, and was followed by the inevitable reaction. Stuart himself, after the publication of the first volume of his great work, adopted the profession of an architect, and found considerable employment: his best known building is the Chapel of Greenwich Hospital-an elegant structure, but alone sufficient to show that he was by no means a purist in the application of Greek principles. Revett also practised as an architect, but without any marked success. It remains only to notice James Wyatt, who suddenly became famous by the erection of the Pantheon, Oxford-street (1772), and during the rest of the century secured a large share of public favour. His ambition in the first instance was to produce an Italianised Greek style; but later he unhappily turned his attention to Gothic, and to him is due the destruction of much, and the disfigurement of more, of the most precious of our medieval remains. His tasteless additions are now for