Art in England

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To their one child the parents were tenderly attached, although Walpole,
while he admits Mrs. Cosway's affliction to be genuine, goes on to say
rather cruelly,--'the man Cosway does not seem to think that much of the
loss belonged to him.' According to Smith, however, he was dotingly fond
of his little girl; was for ever painting her picture; and in one
portrait of her asleep, he introduced the figure of a guardian angel
rocking the cradle. The body of the child was embalmed and preserved in
a marble sarcophagus which stood in the drawing-room in Stratford Place.
It was not until the return of Mrs. Cosway to England that the interment
took place in Bunhill Row Burial Ground.

Of Cosway and his wife, it is stated by the biographer of Mrs. Inchbald,
who numbered them among her most intimate friends, that they were both
'mystics,' and 'could say almost as much of the unintelligible world as
of this.' Hazlitt describes the painter as a Swedenborgian, a believer
in animal magnetism--professing to possess the faculty of second sight,
crediting whatever is incredible. Had he lived in these our days, he
would probably have been a spiritualist, an electro-biologist, a
table-turner. He was wont to proclaim his ability to converse with the
dead or the distant, 'to talk with his lady at Mantua,' says Hazlitt,
'through some fine vehicle of sense, as we speak to a servant
down-stairs through a conduit pipe.' Smith tells us that he had often
heard Cosway relate quite seriously, and with an air of conviction that
was unimpeachable, conversations he professed to have held with King
Charles the First! Sometimes he would startle sober people by asserting
that he had just come from interviews with Apelles and Praxiteles. Four
years after Pitt's death, Cosway, at the dinner of the Royal Academy,
professed to have been that morning visited by the deceased minister,
who declared himself prodigiously hurt, that during his sojourn upon
earth he had not given greater encouragement to the artist's talents.
Another Academician, however, rather outdid this story. 'How can you
talk such trash, Cosway?' he asked. 'You know all you have uttered to be
lies; I can prove it. For this very morning, after Pitt had been with
you he called upon me and said, "I know Cosway will mention my visit to
him at your dinner to-day, but don't believe a word he says, for he'll
tell you nothing but lies."' This unlooked-for counter-statement took
Cosway by surprise, and left him without a reply.

Walpole once said of him, happily, that 'he romanced with his usual
veracity.' Hazlitt thought a 'mystic' character was common to artists,
instancing Loutherbourg, Sharp, Varley, Blake, and others, 'who seemed
to relieve the literalness of their professional studies by voluntary
excursions into the regions of the preternatural, to pass their time
between sleeping and waking, and whose ideas were like a stormy night
with the clouds driven rapidly across, and the blue sky and stars
gleaming between.'

For Cosway's wonderful collection of articles of art, antiquarianism,
and _vertu_, Hazlitt has only good-natured banter. Of what a strange
jumble of apocryphal treasures the painter believed himself the
possessor! And he was without the doubts and anxieties of ordinary
collectors. They strive to believe and to cast aside all suspicion. But
Cosway believed without the slightest effort; he was troubled by no hint
of suspicion. His relics and curiosities were in his eyes absolutely and
unquestionably genuine. His was the crucifix that Abelard prayed to; a
lock of Eloisa's hair; the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of
Buckingham; the first finished sketch of the Jocunda; Titian's colossal
outline of Peter Aretine; a mummy of an Egyptian king; a feather of a
Phoenix; a piece of Noah's Ark, etc. 'Were the articles authentic?' asks
Hazlitt; and he answers his own question--'What matter? Cosway's faith
in them was true!'

Credit is due to the painter for his indomitable good spirits and
buoyancy of heart. His later years were passed in much pain. He had been
twice stricken with paralysis, and the use of his right hand had gone
from him. Though removed from want, his old extravagant habits had
considerably impaired his fortune. He had long left Stratford Place for
a humbler, cheaper house in the Edgeware Road. And he had somewhat
outlived his reputation. He had to endure severe criticism upon his
artistic merits: much calling in question of his position as a painter.
Still he was always bright and gay and kindly. He would hold up the
crippled, wasted hand that had painted lords and ladies--the kings and
queens of society--for some sixty years, and smile with unabated good
humour at the vanity of human wishes. So Hazlitt relates: going on to
say of him--'His soul appeared to possess the life of a bird; and such
was the jauntiness of his air and manner, that to see him sit to have
his half boots laced on, you would fancy (by the help of a figure) that
instead of a little withered old gentleman, it was Venus attired by the
Graces.' His nature was generous and frank. He gave liberally and
cheerfully to almost everybody who applied to him for money. The number
of letters he received requesting pecuniary assistance was stated to be
almost incredible. Of borrowers who never repaid what they borrowed of
him, and of patrons in default, of whom he was too proud to make
repeated claims for what was strictly his due, a long catalogue might
have been made.

He died suddenly at last of a third attack of paralysis, on the 4th day
of July 1821. The seizure occurred as he was taking a carriage drive to
Edgeware, and he expired without a groan in a few minutes. He had long
been in doubt as to whether he should prefer to be buried in his native
Devonshire or with his favourite Rubens at Antwerp. But struck with the
orderly plan of a funeral in the vaults of a London Church, he had said,
'I prefer this to Antwerp or St. Paul's: bury me here.' He was interred
accordingly at Marylebone New Church (the work of young Smirke, son of
his brother academician), a select number of his professional and
personal friends, and a long line of the carriages of his aristocratic
patrons, following the funeral.

Mrs. Cosway erected, on the north wall, under the gallery of the church,
a monument by Westmacott, to her husband's memory. The following
indifferent epitaph by the painter's brother-in-law, 'Syntax' Coombe,
was inscribed upon the marble:--

'Art weeps, Taste mourns, and Genius drops the tear
O'er him so long they loved who slumbers here.
While colours last, and Time allows to give
The all-resembling grace, his name shall live.'

After the death of her husband Mrs. Cosway quitted England, and took up
her abode at her Ladies' College at Lodi, where she was much loved and
respected. How long she survived seems uncertain. Some accounts relate
that she died the same year as Cosway. But Allan Cunningham, writing in
1833, described her as still living.

THE STORY OF A SCENE-PAINTER.

When, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Sir William Davenant,
manager of the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, discarded the
'traverses' and tapestries which had theretofore been accepted as
sufficient for the purposes of stage illusion, and substituted regular
scenes 'painted in perspective,' without doubt there were to be found
many conservative old playgoers who lifted up their voices against the
startling innovation, and prophesied the approaching downfall of the
drama. If the grandsons present marvelled how elder generations could
for so long have gone without such useful and necessary appliances,
assuredly the grandsires were complaining that now things had come to a
pretty pass indeed, when a parcel of beardless, empty-pated boys, not
content with stage fittings such as had been esteemed good and
sufficient by the late Mr. William Shakespeare and his great
brother-dramatists, demanded foolish paintings and idle garniture, that
diverted attention from the efforts of the players and the purpose of
the playwrights, and had never been dreamt of, and would never have been
tolerated in the good, and simple, and palmy days gone by.
Unquestionably, the first 'painting in perspective' brought upon the
boards was, in the judgment of many,[16] the thin end of a wedge, which,
as it thickened, was certain to drive forth and destroy all that was
intellectually and vitally precious in the drama, and to lead the way to
a last scene of all in the eventful history of the stage, which should
be 'second childishness and mere oblivion.'

[16] 'I decidedly concur with Malone in the general conclusion that
painted moveable scenery was unknown on our early stage; and it is a
fortunate circumstance for the poetry of our old plays that it was so:
the imagination of the auditor only was appealed to, and we owe to the
absence of painted canvas many of the finest descriptive passages in
Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and immediate followers. The
introduction of scenery gives the date to the commencement of the
decline of our dramatic poetry.'--_Annals of the Stage_, by J. Payne
Collier, vol. iii. p. 366.

But the scene-painter having set foot within the theatre was not to be
expelled. The intruder soon won for himself a large popularity; held his
ground against criticism and opposition. He was no mere journeyman
dauber. From the first he had taken distinct rank as an artist. Lustrous
names adorn the muster-roll of scene-painters. Inigo Jones planned
machinery and painted scenes for the masques, written by Ben Jonson,
for performance before Anne of Denmark and the Court of James the First.
Evelyn lauds the 'very glorious scenes and perspectives, the work of Mr.
Streeter,' serjeant-painter to King Charles the Second. In February
1664, the Diarist saw Dryden's _Indian Queen_ acted 'with rich scenes as
the like had never been seen here, or haply, except rarely, elsewhere on
a mercenary theatre.' Mr. Pepys--most devoted of playgoers--notes
occasionally of particular plays, that 'the machines are fine and the
paintings very pretty.' In October 1667, he records that he sat in the
boxes for the first time in his life, and discovered that from that
point of view 'the scenes do appear very fine indeed, and much better
than in the pit,' to which part of the house he ordinarily resorted. The
names of the artists who won Mr. Pepys' applause have not come down to
us. But previously to 1679, one Robert Aggas, a painter of some fame,
was producing scenes for the theatre in Dorset Gardens. Nicholas Thomas
Dall, a Danish landscape-painter, settled in London in 1760, was engaged
as scene-painter at Covent Garden Theatre, and was elected an Associate
of the Royal Academy in 1771. For the same theatre, John Richards, a
Royal Academician, appointed secretary to the Academy in 1778, painted
scenes for many years. Michael Angelo Rooker, pupil of Paul Sanby, and
one of the first Associates of the Academy, was scene-painter at the
Haymarket. Other names of note might be mentioned before the modern
reputations of Roberts and Stanfield, Beverley and Callcott, Grieve and
Telbin are approached; and especially over one intermediate name are we
desirous of lingering a little. The story of the scene-painter of the
last century, who was well known to his contemporaries as 'the ingenious
Mr. DE LOUTHERBOURG,' presents incidents of singularity and interest
that will probably be found to warrant our turning to it for purposes of
inquest and comment.

The biographers of Philip James de Loutherbourg are curiously disagreed
as to the precise period of his birth. Five different writers have
assigned five different dates to that occurrence: 1728, 1730, 1734,
1740, and 1741; and it has been suggested, by way of explanation of this
diversity, that the painter's fondness for astrological studies may have
induced him to vary occasionally the date of his birth, in order that he
might indulge in a plurality of horoscopes, and in such way better the
chance of his predictions being justified by the actual issue of events.
He was born, at Strasbourg, the son of a miniature painter, who died at
Paris in 1768. Intended by his father for the army, while his mother
desired that he should become a minister of the Lutheran Church, he was
educated at the College of Strasbourg in languages and mathematics.
Subsequently he chose his own profession, studying under Tischbein the
elder, then under Vanloo and Francesco Casanova; the latter, a painter
of battle pieces after the style of Bourgognone. By his landscapes
exhibited at the Louvre, De Loutherbourg acquired fame in Paris, and in
1763 was elected a member of the French Academy of Painting, being then
eight years below the prescribed age for admission to that distinction,
say the biographers who date his birth from 1740. Quitting France, he
travelled in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, and in 1771 came to
England, moved hitherward probably by the opinion then prevalent both at
home and abroad, that (as Edwards puts it in his Anecdotes of Painting)
'some natural causes prevented the English from becoming masters either
in painting or sculpture.' Shortly after his arrival in England he was
engaged by Garrick to design and paint scenes and decorations for Drury
Lane Theatre, at a salary of L500; a sum considerably larger than had
been thitherto paid to any artist for such services.

Of gorgeous scenery and gay dresses Garrick was as fond as any manager
of our own day; he knew that these were never-failing allurements to the
general public. Yet as a rule he confined his spectacle to the
after-pieces; did not, after the modern fashion, illustrate and decorate
what he regarded as the legitimate entertainments of the theatre. For
new as for old plays, the stock scenery of the house generally sufficed,
and some of the scenes employed were endowed with a remarkable
longevity. Tate Wilkinson, writing in 1790, mentions a scene as then in
use which he remembered so far back as the year 1747. 'It has wings and
flat of Spanish figures at full length, and two folding doors in the
middle. I never see those wings slide on but I feel as if seeing my old
acquaintance unexpectedly.' Of the particular plays assisted by De
Loutherbourg's brush, small account has come down to us. They were, no
doubt, chiefly of a pantomimic and ephemeral kind. For the 'Christmas
Tale,' produced at Drury Lane in 1773--the composition of which has been
generally assigned to Garrick, though probably due to Charles Dibdin--De
Loutherbourg certainly painted scenes, and the play enjoyed a
considerable run, thanks rather to his merits than the author's. Some
years later, in 1785, for the scenery of O'Keeffe's _Omai_, produced at
Covent Garden Theatre, the painter furnished the designs, for which he
was paid by the manager one thousand pounds, says Mr. J.T. Smith; one
hundred pounds, says Mr. O'Keeffe; so stories differ! The scenery of
_Omai_ was appropriate to the then newly discovered islands in the South
Pacific, and the play concluded with a kind of apotheosis of Captain
Cook. In the course of _Omai_, Wewitzer, the actor who played a chief
warrior of the Sandwich Islands, delivered a grand harangue in
_gibberish_, which of course, for all the audience knew to the contrary,
was the proper language of the natives; a sham English translation of
the speech being printed with the book of the songs. The harangue was
received with enormous applause!

As a scene-painter, De Loutherbourg was decidedly an innovator and
reformer. He was the first to use set-scenes, and what are technically
known as 'raking pieces.' Before his time the back scene was invariably
one large 'flat' of strained canvas extending the whole breadth and
height of the stage. He also invented transparent scenes, introducing
representations of moonlight, sunshine, fire, volcanoes, etc., and
effects of colour by means of silk screens of various hues, placed
before the foot and side lights. He was the first to represent mists, by
suspending gauzes between the scene and the audience. He made something
of a mystery of the artifices he had recourse to, was careful to leave
behind him at the theatre no paper or designs likely to reveal his
plans, and declined to inform any one beforehand as to the nature of the
illusions he desired to produce. He secretly held small cards in his
hand which he now and then consulted to refresh his recollection, as his
assistants carried out his instructions.

After Garrick had quitted the stage (in 1776) and sold his share in the
management of Drury Lane to Sheridan and his partners, it was proposed
to De Loutherbourg to continue in his office of chief scene-painter, his
salary being reduced one half. This illiberal scale of remuneration the
artist indignantly declined, and forthwith left the theatre. He is said,
however, by Parke in his _Musical Memoirs_, to have painted the scenes
for the successful burletta of _The Camp_, produced by Sheridan, at
Drury Lane, in 1778.[17] But he now devoted himself more exclusively to
the production of easel-pictures. He had, in 1773, become a contributor
to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. In 1780 he was elected an
Associate; in the following year he arrived at the full honours of
academicianship. Peter Pindar, in his 'Lyrical Odes to the Royal
Academicians for 1782,' finds a place for De Loutherbourg. Having
denounced the unlikeness of Mason Chamberlin's portraits, he satirizes
the style of art of the landscape painter:--

'And Loutherbourg, when Heaven so wills,
To make brass skies and golden hills,
With marble bullocks in glass pastures grazing:
Thy reputation too will rise,
And people gaping with surprise,
Cry "Monsieur Loutherbourg is most amazing!"'

[17] Mr. Puff in the _Critic_, giving a specimen of 'the puff direct' in
regard to a new play, says: 'As to the scenery, the miraculous powers of
Mr. De Loutherbourg are universally acknowledged. In short, we are at a
loss which to admire most, the unrivalled genius of the author, the
great attention and liberality of the managers, the wonderful abilities
of the painter, or the incredible exertions of all the performers.'

And in another ode he derides the artist's pictures as 'tea-boards,'
'varnished waiters,' and avows that his rocks are 'paste-board,' while
his trees resemble 'brass wigs,' and his fleecy flocks 'mops.'

Probably the quiet of his studio oppressed our painter somewhat. The
simple effects attainable in an easel-picture did not satisfy him. He
missed the appliances of the stage: the coloured lights, the
transparent scenes, the descending gauzes, and cleverly combined
set-pieces. He would not go back to Drury Lane, however; as to that he
was fully determined. He would not toil for ungrateful managers, or
paint backgrounds merely to supplement and enrich the exertions of the
actors. He decided upon providing London with a new entertainment; upon
opening an exhibition that should be _all_ scene painting.

Charles Dibdin, the famous sea song writer, who was also a dramatist, a
composer of music, an actor, a scene painter, and a manager, had
constructed in Exeter Change what he whimsically called 'The Patagonian
Theatre:' in truth, a simple puppet-show, upon the plan of that
contrived years before by Mr. Powell, under the Piazza, Covent Garden,
and concerning which Steele had written humorously in the _Spectator_.
Dibdin, assisted by one Hubert Stoppelaer, humorist and caricaturist,
wrote miniature plays for the doll performers, recited their parts,
composed the music, played the accompaniments upon a smooth-toned organ,
and painted the scenes. The stage was about six feet wide and eight feet
deep; the puppets some ten inches high; the little theatre was divided
into pit, boxes, and gallery, and held altogether about two hundred
persons. For half a century no exhibition of the kind had appeared in
London. The puppet show was old enough to be a complete novelty to the
audience of the day. For a time it thrived wonderfully; then managers
and public seem both, by degrees, to have grown weary. Dibdin and his
friend departed; the exhibition fell into the hands of incompetent
persons; then closed its doors. The dolls, properties, scenery, and
dresses were brought to the hammer by merciless creditors; and there was
an end of the puppet-show. In 1782 De Loutherbourg took the theatre for
the exhibition of his EIDOPHUSIKON.

De Loutherbourg had professedly two objects in view: to display his
skill as a scene-painter well versed in dioramic effects, and to
demonstrate to the English people the beauties of their own country. He
averred 'that no English landscape-painter needed foreign travel to
collect grand prototypes for his study.' The lakes of Cumberland, the
rugged scenery of North Wales, and the mountainous grandeur of Scotland,
furnished, he said, inexhaustible occupation for the pencil. He opposed
the prejudice then rife among artists and amateurs alike, that England
afforded no subjects for the higher display of the painter's art. He
confined the Eidophusikon for the most part to the exhibition of English
landscapes under different conditions of light and shadow.

A chief view exhibited was from the summit of One Tree Hill, Greenwich.
There was cleverness evinced in the selection of this landscape. A large
public are always prepared to be pleased when they are shown something
with which they are well acquainted. Each spectator found himself, as
it were, individually appealed to. Each had seen One Tree Hill, and
could bring to bear upon the subject his own personal knowledge and
observation, and so test and certify to the painter's skill. The view
was a set-scene with a moveable sky at the back: a large canvas twenty
times the surface of the stage, stretched on frames, and rising
diagonally by means of a winding machine. De Loutherbourg excelled in
his treatment of clouds; he secured in this way ample room and verge
enough to display his knowledge and ingenuity. By regulating the action
of his windlass he could control the movements of his clouds, allow them
to rise slowly from the horizon and sail obliquely across the heavens,
or drive them swiftly along, according to their supposed density and the
power to be attributed to the wind. An arrangement of set-pieces cut in
pasteboard represented the objects in the middle distance: the cupolas
of Greenwich Hospital, the groups of trees in the park, the towns of
Greenwich and Deptford, and the shipping in the Pool; due regard being
had to size and colour, so that the laws of perspective in distance and
atmosphere might not be outraged; the immediate foreground being
constructed of cork broken into rugged and picturesque forms, and
covered with minute mosses and lichens, 'producing,' says a critic of
the period, 'a captivating effect amounting indeed to reality.'

In his method of illuminating his handiworks, De Loutherbourg was
especially adroit. He abandoned the unnatural system (introduced by
Garrick on his return from the Continent in 1765) of lighting the stage
by means of a flaming line of footlights, and ranged his lamps above the
proscenium, out of sight of the audience. Before his lamps he placed
slips of stained glass--yellow, red, green, blue, and purple; and by
shifting these, or happily combining them, was enabled to tint his
scenes so as to represent various hours of the day and different actions
of light. His 'Storm at Sea with the loss of the _Halsewell_,
East-Indiaman,' was regarded as the height of artistic mechanism. The
ship was a perfect model, correctly rigged, and carrying only such sail
as the situation demanded. The lightning quivered through the
transparent canvas of the sky. The waves, carved in soft wood from
models made in clay, coloured with great skill and highly varnished to
reflect the lightning, rose and fell with irregular action, flinging the
foam now here, now there, diminishing in size and fading in colour as
they receded from the spectator. Then we read--'De Loutherbourg's genius
was as prolific in imitations of nature to astonish the ear as to charm
the sight. He introduced a new art: _the picturesque of sound_.' That is
to say, he simulated thunder by shaking one of the lower corners of a
large thin sheet of copper suspended by a chain; the distant firing of
signals of distress he imitated by striking, suddenly, a large
tambourine with a sponge affixed to a whalebone spring--- the
reverberations of the sponge producing a curious echo, as from cloud to
cloud, dying away in the distance. The rushing sound of the waves was
effected by turning round and round an octagonal pasteboard box, fitted
with shelves, and containing small shells, peas, and shot; while two
discs of strained silk, suddenly pressed together, emitted a hollow,
whistling sound, in imitation of loud gusts of wind. Cylinders loosely
charged with seed and small shot, lifted now at one end, now at the
other, so as to allow the contents to fall in a pattering stream,
represented the noise of hail and rain. The moon was formed by a
circular aperture cut in a tin box containing a powerful Argand lamp,
which was placed at the back of the scene, and brought near or carried
far from the canvas as the luminary was supposed to be shining brightly
or to be veiled by clouds. These contrivances, from a modern point of
view, may strike the reader as constituting quite the A B C of
theatrical illusion. But then it must be remembered that they were, for
the most part, distinctly the inventions of De Loutherbourg, and, upon
their first introduction, were calculated to impress the public of his
day very remarkably.

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