Hand-Colored Prints (late 18th and 19th centuries)

Anonymous French printmaker
The Two are but One (Les deux ne font qu'un)
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as double-headed beast
ca. 1791
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
Tis Not Antiques Alone Can Please the Eye, or, Tastes Differ
(Sir William and Lady Hamilton)
1786
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
Admiral Nelson recreating with his Brave Tars after the glorious Battle of the Nile
1798
hand-colored etching and aquatint
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

from Dirge for a Dead Admiral

If, on this winter night,
O thou great admiral
That in thy sombre pall
Liest upon the land,
Thy soul should take his flight
And leave the frozen sand,
And yearn above the surge,
Think'st thou that any dirge,
Grief inarticulate
From thy bereaved mate,
Would answer to thy soul
Where the waste waters roll?

– Samuel McCoy (1913)

Thomas Rowlandson
A Couple of Antiques, or, My Aunt and My Uncle
1807
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Anonymous printmaker
The Flying Philosopher
ca. 1800
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

James Gillray
A Phantasmagoria (political cartoon)
Scene Conjuring up an Armed Skeleton 
1803
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Robert Laurie
View of the Temple of Concord erected in the Green-Park, London
celebrating the Glorious Peace of 1814 with fireworks
1814
hand-colored etching and engraving
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Hieronymus Hess
Prison du Château de Chillon
ca. 1820-40
hand-colored aquatint
British Museum

William Blake
Songs of Innocence (frontispiece)
ca. 1825
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Adam Friedel after Correggio
Leda bathing with Swan
before 1837
hand-colored lithograph
British Museum

Anonymous printmaker
Night View of the Colosseum, Rome
ca. 1840-50
hand-colored lithograph (transparency)
British Museum

Karl Friedrich Schinkel
Stage Design for Mozart's Magic Flute
Hall of Stars in the Palace of the Queen of the Night
1847-49
hand-colored aquatint
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

from Giving a Manicure

The woman across from me looks so familiar,
but when I turn, her look glances off. At the last
subway stop we rise. I know her, she gives manicures
at Vogue Nails. She has held my hands between hers
several times. She bows and smiles. There the women
wear white smocks like technicians, and plastic tags
with their Christian names. Susan. No, not Susan,
whose hair is cropped short, who is short and stocky.
This older lady does my hands while classical music,
often Mozart, plays. People passing by outside are
doubled in the wall mirror. Two of everyone walk
forward, backward, vanish at the edge of the shop.

– Minnie Bruce Pratt (2003)

Anonymous Russian printmaker
Cabin interior with family
1882
hand-colored lithograph
British Museum

Paul Gauguin
Auti te Pape (Women at the river)
1893-94
hand-colored woodcut
British Museum

– poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)

London Art Worlds (1780-1820) by Thomas Rowlandson

Thomas Rowlandson
The Connoisseurs
1799
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
The Connoisseurs
ca. 1790
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

"Like many of his fellow artists, Rowlandson continually mocked the foibles of connoisseurs in a variety of ways over the course of his career.  Around the time he made this drawing, the eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship had received a major boost, as art flowed more freely than ever in the wake of the French Revolution.  As Archibald Alison put it, echoing earlier authors, the "fine arts are . . . addressed to the imagination, and the pleasures they afford are described . . . as the Pleasures of the Imagination."  In this instance three connoisseurs pay a visit to an artist's studio to judge his latest offering: a historical painting of Susanna and the Elders.  While the artist gazes at the ceiling in a pose of studied nonchalance, they study his unfinished canvas.  But rather than enjoy the pleasures of the imagination, these connoisseurs are content to stop at the pleasures of the flesh.  Like latter-day Elders, they lust over the nude Susanna, just as their forebears had in the apocryphal addition to the Book of Daniel." 

Thomas Rowlandson
Mr Michell's Picture Gallery, Grove House, Enfield
1817
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

Thomas Rowlandson
British Institution, Pall Mall
1808
hand-colored etching and aquatint
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
Exhibition of the Society of Painters in Watercolour, in Old Bond Street
1808
hand-colored etching and aquatint
British Museum

Thomas Rowlandson
Viewing at the Royal Academy, Somerset House
ca. 1815
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

Thomas Rowlandson
Exhibition Stare-Case, Somerset House
ca. 1800
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

"Dr. Johnson thought the acid test of fitness was climbing to the top of the exhibition staircase at Somerset House without stopping.  This stairway was designed by Sir William Chambers and led the way to the Great Room, where the Royal Academy held its annual exhibitions.  Although the Academy promoted them as "easy and convenient," the stairs became notorious.  Owing to their cramped site, Chambers squeezed three continuous flights of stairs into a semicircular space.  The unhappy result was a vertiginous staircase, the final flight of which was the steepest and narrowest.  While Chambers hoped to make climbing the staircase a metaphor for the ascent to Parnassus, Rowlandson depicts an angry altercation at the top of the stairs and a rampant dog wreaking havoc lower down.  To the horror of some onlookers and the delight of others, the ladies trip and tumble headlong down the stairs their skirts flying.  The right-hand niche is occupied by a smiling Callipygian Venus, the goddess who admires her own beautiful posterior.  By joking about the kind of beauties the exhibition visitors really want to see, Rowlandson also mocks the elevated pretensions of the Academy itself.  In this satire, Rowlandson demonstrates the superior appeal of real bodies as opposed to the idealized works of art on view upstairs.  Not only does this allude to Hogarth's famous dictum, "who but a bigot, even to the antiques, will say that he has not seen faces and necks, hands and arms in living women that even the Grecian Venus doth but coarsely imitate," but the composition also embodies Hogarth's famously anti-academic "Line of Beauty."  Unsurprisingly, some have detected Rowlandson's borrowing from Last Judgment imagery in these chaotic, tumbling figures.  Rather than a dignified ascent of Parnassus, as Chambers intended, Rowlandson suggests a comic equivalent of the descent into hell."

Thomas Rowlandson
Drawing from Life at the Royal Academy, Somerset House
1808
hand-colored etching and aquatint
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
Christie's Auction Rooms
1808
hand-colored etching and aquatint
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
The Historian Animating the Mind of a Young Painter
1784
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
The Chamber of Genius
1806
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
The Opera Singers
ca. 1790-95
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

Thomas Rowlandson
Audience watching a play at Drury Lane Theatre
ca. 1785
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

"Rowlandson's portrayal of an audience at the theater captures the culture of display and spectatorship that lay at the heart of eighteenth-century social life.  Few of these spectators have actually come to watch the play.  Instead they are busy studying one another and being scrutinized by figures in the surrounding boxes.  Because light levels in auditoriums were not dimmed during performances, London's crowded theaters provided an ideal venue for this sport of seeing and being seen.  Rowlandson was himself a regular habitué of the playhouse; his friend Jack Bannister was a leading comic actor who regularly performed at Drury Lane.  Although this scene has been identified as the remodeled Drury Lane that opened in 1775, the architecture does not quite tally, making this a more generic scene of London theater life.  These theatergoers occupy the first gallery level of the auditorium, a zone reserved for the polite middling orders of society.  Here young gallants try their luck with the seated ladies.  . . .  By dispensing with a clear narrative, Rowlandson allows for an endless range of possible plots for this human drama in the theater, something he may have learned from studying French painting on trips to France.  Such open-endedness infuses the scene with an erotic charge and invites the viewer to become a fellow gallery lounger, flirting with the surrounding company in a playful exchange of glances." 

Thomas Rowlandson
Actresses' Dressing-room at Drury Lane Theatre
ca. 1800-1810
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

– quoted texts are from curator's notes at the Yale Center for British Art

Vanished Fashions (Witnessed by Printmakers)

Matthew Darly
Tight-Lacing, or, Hold Fast Behind
1777
hand-colored etching and engraving
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
Beauties 
1792
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
Courtship in High Life
(George, Prince of Wales and Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire)
1785
hand-colored etching and aquatint
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Rowlandson
Maids and Mistresses
1791
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

George Cruikshank
An Evening Party
1826
hand-colored etching and engraving
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Roundel

A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere,
        With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought,
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear
        A roundel is wrought.

Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught –
        Love, laughter, or mourning – remembrance of rapture or fear –
That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.

As a bird's quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear
        Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught,
So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear,
        A roundel is wrought.

– Algernon Charles Swinburne (1883)

Anonymous printmaker
Miss Angelina Melius the celebrated giantess
attended by her page Señor Don Santiago de los Santos
ca. 1820
hand-colored etching
British Museum

Anonymous printmaker
Miss Julia Smith as Madge
ca. 1835
hand-colored lithograph
British Museum

William Heath ('Paul Pry')
Hat Boxes (Opera Reminiscences)
1829
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

William Heath ('Paul Pry')
Monstrosity of 1829 ('Lo, this is their very guise')
1829
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

William Heath ('Paul Pry')
 Much Ado about Nothing
1828
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

William Heath ('Paul Pry')
"We have the exhibition to examine (ah, if one could but see)"
ca. 1830-40
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

from The Quangle Wangle's Hat

On top of the Crumpetty Tree
        The Quangle Wangle sat,
But his face you could not see,
        On account of his Beaver Hat.
For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide,
With ribbons and bibbons on every side
And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace,
So that nobody ever could see the face
        Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

– Edward Lear (1877)

Johann Nepomuk Rauch after Marcus Dinkel
Portrait of Elisabeth Grossmann
ca. 1829-47
hand-colored etching and aquatint
British Museum

Johann Gottfried Schadow
Woman Dancing
ca. 1820-30
hand-colored etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Sydney Vacher
In a French picture gallery before the War
ca. 1921
etching
British Museum

John Sloan
A Thirst for Art
1939
etching
British Museum

Edward Francis Burney (1760-1848)

Edward Francis Burney
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts
Great Hall (North Wall) Somerset House
1784
drawing
British Museum

Edward Francis Burney
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts
Great Hall (East Wall) Somerset House
1784
drawing
British Museum

Edward Francis Burney
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts
Great Hall (West Wall) Somerset House
1784
drawing
British Museum

"Burney came from a family prominent in the arts.  His uncle was the musicologist Dr Charles Burney and his cousin the writer Fanny Burney.  Edward Burney enrolled in the Royal Academy School in 1776, staying until sometime in the early 1780s.  He became acquainted with James Barry and other less prominent artists, and was soon encouraged in his career by the Academy President, Joshua Reynolds.  A virtuoso draughtsman, Burney devoted the greater part of his career to producing book illustrations [including those for Fanny Burney's Evelina], although he also painted some portraits.  He rarely exhibited at the Royal Academy, and never married.  His performances on the violin as part of amateur private concerts receive occasional mention in contemporary journals."

"Burney possessed a fine comic sense and his use of wit and irony, combined with his somewhat rococo drawing style, connects him with William Hogarth.  His most important and interesting work is a set of four large watercolours [directly below] from the 1820s in which he satirises contemporary musical and social life.  Two of these are in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and two are in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.  The Tate Gallery owns an oil version of one of the Yale watercolours, Amateurs of Tye-Wig Music (Musicians of the Old School)."

– biographical notes from the Tate Gallery

Edward Francis Burney
An Elegant Establishment for Young Ladies
ca. 1820
watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum

"This famous caricature mocks women's education that consists only of lessons in deportment and dress, music and dance.  Such an education is shown to be both superficial and self-indulgent.  The artist implies that these were the only accomplishments thought necessary for a 'career' of marriage and motherhood.  Indeed, one girl is seen in the act of eloping with her suitor through the window.  She is the finished product of this kind of schooling."

– curator's notes from the Victoria & Albert Museum

Edward Francis Burney
The Waltz
ca. 1820
watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum

"Watercolor drawing of a waltzing party, caricaturing the dancers who are all either unusually matched or accident prone, except one young couple in the centre who hand their heads.  There are many inscriptions regarding humorous and spurious dance rules.  A band are also depicted comically, as are two disapproving women, a praying woman and a man with an ear-trumpet who look on from the opposite balcony.  The scene is chaotic with several people having fallen over and glasses smashed on the floor.  Some of the dancers are in a rage and others are evidently miserable.  In the middle of the floor, a kitten dances with a puppy."

– curator's notes from the Victoria & Albert Museum

Edward Francis Burney
The Triumph of Music
ca. 1820
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

"This drawing, also known as The Glee Club, appears to be part of a coherent group along with The Waltz, An Elegant Establishment for Young Ladies, and Amateurs of the Tye-Wig Music.  All four pictures are of similar format and finish are are linked by their musical theme.  Although no printed version has yet been identified, it is possible that Burney may have intended to publish them, but they may also have been created for the amusement of his private circle.  The Triumph of Music depicts the type of musical group to which the Burney family belonged, a group of gentlemen (and sometimes ladies) who met to sing, eat, and drink together.  Specifically, it refers to types of songs popular during the period; the numerous inscriptions are the title of catches, canons, glees, and rounds.  Glees in particular are characterized by their double, sometimes obscene meanings and the repetition of words or fragments of words.  Here, the formal attributes of the picture echo the structures of glee and canon singing: the figures of the three old women on the right, for example, are repeated in the three young women on the left, and salacious visual puns abound.  The tall, thin man on the left may be a self-portrait."

– curator's notes from the Yale Center for British Art

Edward Francis Burney
Amateurs of Tye-Wig Music
ca. 1820
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

Edward Francis Burney
Amateurs of Tye-Wig Music
(Musicians of the Old School)
ca. 1820
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

 
Of the four large musical watercolors, Amateurs of Tye-Wig Music is " . . . the only one, apparently, which Burney reworked as an oil painting.  Its theme is the battle between 'modern' and 'traditional' taste in the music world.  The modern is represented by references to Beethoven, Mozart and others in the foreground, while traditional taste is epitomised by Handel,  whose bust looks down upon a group of musicians, appropriately dressed, who are playing (discordantly) music by his great contemporary Arcangelo Corelli.  The concert takes place in a room whose decorations are predominantly Gothick in style, a further indication of the revival of ancient tastes.  Burney includes many apparent and traditional amusing details such as the howling dog, noisy children, striking clocks, a careless servant, and a sneezing, coughing, snoring and throat-clearing audience."

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery

Edward Francis Burney
View of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon
ca. 1782
drawing
British Museum

"The Eidophusikon opened in February 1781 in Lisle Street, Leicester Square and held up to 130 people, who paid 5 shillings entrance.  The stage was ten feet wide, six feet high and eight feet deep.  The performance consisted of changes of scenes accompanied by coloured light effects and vocal and instrumental music.  This particular scene from 'Paradise Lost' was first shown on 31 January 1782 . . . titled, Satan Arraying his Troops on the Banks of a Fiery Lake, with the Raising of the Palace of Pandemonium." 

– curator's notes from the British Museum

Edward Francis Burney
Académie - Tom Tring the Boxer
ca. 1790-1800
drawing
British Museum

Edward Francis Burney
Académie - Tom Tring the Boxer
ca. 1790-1800
drawing
British Museum

Edward Francis Burney
Académie - Nude with Sword and Shield
ca. 1790-1800
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

Edward Francis Burney
Académie - Seated Nude
ca, 1790-1800
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

Edward Francis Burney
Antique Warrior's Head
before 1848
drawing
British Museum

Edward Francis Burney
Portrait Bust of David Garrick by Joseph Nollekens
before 1817
drawing
British Museum

"The portrait takes the form of a classical memorial, set in a wash frame that forms a trompe-l'oeil niche, the bust turned away from the viewer to emphasize the actor's profile.  It is not inscribed with the name of the sitter, sculptor or artist and is not known to have been engraved, making it likely that this was a personal and private commission from the artist's cousin Charles for his collection.  . . . Charles Burney (1757-1817), the second surviving son of the historian of music of the same name [and brother of Fanny Burney], was expelled from Cambridge for stealing books from the library, and finished his degree elsewhere.  He became a successful schoolmaster in London and classical scholar and was ordained in 1808.  His greatest achievement was the library he amassed which was purchased for the nation after his death.  Mostly classical texts, it also included 400 volumes of material on the English stage, including newspaper clippings, prints, playbills, etc. with which he intended to write a history of the theatre.  This drawing is one of three watercolours relating to the actor David Garrick (1717-1779) that were removed from one of the volumes still in Prints and Drawings [at the British Museum].  The rest are now in the British Library.  . . .  J.T. Smith recorded that Mrs. Garrick visited the Print Room in 1821 in order to look over the portraits of Garrick collected by Charles Burney." 

– curator's notes from the British Museum