Mid-August in Messina

Posted on August 15, 2012 by mercedes-c

Between 1782 and 1787, the French painter and printmaker Jean Hoüel (1735-1813) published a travel book entitled Le Voyage pittoresque des isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari. Douce included one of the 264 plates that illustrated Hoüel’s work among his prints of ‘Ceremonies’; according to the caption, plate 77 shows the religious festival known as ‘Bara, or Simulacrum of the Assumption of the Virgin, celebrated every year on the 15th of August in Messina’:

Jean Hoüel, Bara ou Simulacre de l'Assomption de la Vierge, c. 1779-82, aquatint (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

In the text accompanying the plate, Hoüel explained that he was so desirous of attending the festival that he worked day and night so that he could be free to travel to Messina. As a result, he became ill and when he arrived at 8 am on the day of the Assumption he was ‘almost dead’. Hoüel does not say whether the show was worth the inconvenience, but even in his dying state, he managed to provide a very detailed account of the celebrations and a precise description of the main contraption illustrated above:

Voyage pittoresque des Isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari, vol.2

All the angels were actual children, and the Virgin was represented by a young girl of 14, who had to stand, rather precariously, on the hand of a sculpture of Christ. I was relieved to find out that, in the current version of the festival (called ‘Vara’ by the locals), the young girl and the children have been replaced with statues:

Vara di Messina in 2007 (©Comune di Messina - Comitato Vara e Giganti)

Hoüel assured his readers that the arrangements were perfectly safe and that neither the little children nor the girl could fall from the moving tower. The experience was, however, far from enjoyable for those most directly involved: in 1823, the Encyclopaedia Britannica quoted fragments from the Voyage pittoresque in their entry on the ‘Bara’, with the following addition:

This complication of superstitious whirligigs may have already nearly turned the stomachs of some of our readers, or at least rendered them squeamish. But think of the poor little cherubims, seraphims, and apostles, who are twirled about in this procession! for, says Mr Houel, some of them fall asleep, many of them vomit, and several do still worse: but these unseemly effusions are no drawback upon the edification of the people.

 

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Spanish rebus

Posted on August 7, 2012 by mercedes-c

Douce’s collection contains a remarkable amount of Spanish prints. Apart from works by well-known artists such as Goya and Ribera, it is possible to find many rare devotional images and popular prints produced in Spain between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The woodcut below is a good example:

Anonymous, Todo el mundo en general..., woodcut, 18th century (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

This rebus is based on the couplet composed by the Sevillian poet Miguel Cid in 1614-15: “Todo el mundo en general / a voces reina escogida / diga que sois concebida / sin pecado original” (Lisa Duffy-Zeballos has managed to translate it keeping the original rhyme: “All the world in general / with one voice, chosen Queen / proclaimed that you are conceived / without original sin”). Admittedly, this was not one of the finest moments in the history of Spanish poetry, but I think that the critic who wrote in The London Magazine of August 1825 that ‘such doggrel, however “immaculate” in “conception”, is wretched in expression’ might have missed the point.*

Cid and his poem were included by Francisco Pacheco (1564-c.1644) in this Immaculate Conception, painted shortly afterwards for the Cathedral of Seville:

The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception with Miguel Cid

Although Cid’s poem appeared in the early seventeenth century, its enduring popularity is attested not only by Douce’s print, but also by modern performances of the accompanying music composed by his contemporaries Bernardo del Toro and Francisco Correa de Arauxo:

‘Todo el Mundo en General’ by Francisco Correa de Arauxo – Jordi Savall

*The title of the article was ‘Spanish Religious Tournaments’ (p. 538).

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Rural sports

Posted on July 27, 2012 by mercedes-c

On the same day the Olympic Games are officially starting in London, and in the spirit of Douce’s wonderfully mad notebooks of Coincidences (Bodleian), the first image that came to my attention when opening the folder of prints to catalogue earlier this morning was this obvious antecedent of contemporary athletics:

Thomas Rowlandson, Rural sports. Smock racing, hand-coloured etching, 1811 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

The prize was not a gold medal, but ‘a linen smock decorated with ribbons’ (see Costa and Guthrie, eds., Women and Sport, 1994, p. 33). A related drawing and other plates from the same series of ‘Rural Sports’ by Thomas Rowlandson can be found in the British Museum:

Thomas Rowlandson, Smock race at a country fair, pen and brown ink with watercolour (The British Museum, London)

 

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A festival book

Posted on July 25, 2012 by mercedes-c

Two weeks after my post on tournaments, I have come across a few more prints on this subject, kept in a different location. Among Douce’s ‘miscellaneous woodcuts’, there are five hand-coloured illustrations taken from Ordenliche Beschreybung der Fürstlichen Hochzeyt…  (Augsburg, 1568) by Heinrich Wirre:

Early Modern Festival Books

Jousting was just one of the elements involved in any decent public celebration in the sixteenth century, as a  quick look at the digitized copy of Wirre’s work in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek makes clear:

Ordenliche Beschreybung der Fürstlichen Hochzeyt…

The prints owned by Douce are five pages from the book, cut and pasted on large cardboard mounts. In the example below, two horsemen wearing heavy padding and feathered baskets that cover their heads face each other (sort of) in the field of honour:

In Douce’s book of acquisitions, or Collecta, there is an entry that refers to a ‘German tournament book’ given to him by ‘Mr Ellis’ (probably Henry Ellis, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum) in February 1823. The book could be either of the two copies from Douce’s bequest now in the Bodleian (Douce W subt. 62 and Douce W. 261).

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Satirical highlights

Posted on July 13, 2012 by mercedes-c

Douce’s satirical prints are being catalogued at the moment. With only one more folder to go, I have chosen the highlights below -they loosely relate to some topics of current interest: bad weather, economic recession, and major public celebrations involving fireworks:

Anonymous, The Contrast 1749, etching (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

This print, published by George Bickham the Younger, shows an Englishman biting his nails before the fireworks display organized to celebrate the 1749 Jubilee in St James’s Park, while a very smug Dutchman stands by him, his pockets overflowing with money and his exports carried all over the world in the well laden ships in the background (a contemporary cartoonist would make him German).

The second highlight is actually a drawing, probably a study for a satirical print that I have yet to find:

Anonymous, Vhat a disagreeable Vind -I hope I dont show my legs to the fellers!!, c. 1800-15 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Douce identifies the plump lady in the striped dress that complains about the weather as ‘Mrs. B.’ -I wonder whether he could be referring to Mrs. Billington (Elizabeth Billington, rumoured to be one of George IV’s mistresses).

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Douce’s evening readings

Posted on July 4, 2012 by mercedes-c

In the evening of 26 September 1830, Douce was reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Scott was a friend of Douce: in 1804, he had sent him a  copy of his edition of the medieval romance Sir Tristrem (now in the Bodleian). In a letter to Rev. Polwhele, Scott explained that he had been able to consult ‘two fragments of a metrical history of Sir Tristrem […] in the Romance language’ belonging to Douce when preparing his own manuscript.

In his book of Coincidences, Douce wrote: ‘I was accustomed in my evening readings to have a portfolio of unsorted prints before me’. The print he took up ‘at random’ just when he was leafing through Scott’s description of the tournament in Ivanhoe was a woodcut of the same subject by Lucas Cranach; the three prints produced by Cranach in connection with the celebrations at Wittenberg in 1508, as well as this tournament in a town square, can be found among Douce’s prints in the Ashmolean:

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The tournament, 1506, woodcut (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

This work by Cranach is full of life, dynamism, and anecdotal detail, but I always think of Ivanhoe in glorious technicolour -maybe because the first copy of the book I owned as a teenager was a Spanish edition whose cover reproduced a still from the 1952 film adaptation:

Excitingly, and long before this Hollywood take on Scott’s novel, Douce’s friend Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783-1848) had a similar colourful view of what a tournament should look like. Among Douce’s prints, there are four lively watercolours signed by Meyrick and supposedly based on some original drawings owned by his son, Llewelyn. The image below shows four jesters wearing brightly coloured costumes who could have been part of the ‘gay and glittering procession’ described by Scott at the beginning of the tournament scene:

Samuel Rush Meyrick, Four jesters, c. 1820-1834, watercolour (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

The four grinning men carry not only the arms of the knights they serve, but also four lances very similar to those depicted by Douce in a sketch kept in the same portfolio:

The way the lances were used is illustrated by another of Meyrick’s wonderful drawings, showing two horsemen starting ‘out against each other at full gallop’:

Samuel Rush Meyrick, Jousting, c. 1820-34, watercolour (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

The caged owl attached to the helmet is surely the best heraldic device ever. The original drawings must have been very similar to those in René d’Anjou’s Livre des Tournois (c. 1488-1489). Douce owned a few mid-eighteenth-century prints by Gerard van der Gucht after the scenes of tournaments depicted in the Livre:

These images were produced much later than the episodes described in Ivanhoe, but there is another print among Douce’s which made me think of the misfortunes of Scott’s ‘black-eyed Rebecca’. Although I have not been able to establish what the subject is, an annotation in pencil explains that this ‘Moorish battle piece’ is based on an ‘Arabian painting’ in the Alhambra:

James Neagle after J. C. Murphy, Jousting, 1801, etching (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

 

Scott might have also been able to find information on jousting equipment and etiquette in Joseph Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, where the start of the proceedings is thus illustrated:

Joseph Strutt, Tournament, c. 1801, etching (Ashmolean Museu, Oxford)

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The spiritual Quixote

Posted on June 19, 2012 by mercedes-c

Among Douce’s satirical prints, there is a full set of caricatures of clerics after designs by George Moutard (or Murgatroyd) Woodward (1760?-1809). When Mary Dorothy George catalogued the five prints from the series in the collection of the British Museum, she wrote “possibly there is a missing print: ? The Rector” (Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vol. 6, p. 748). She was, of course, right -Douce’s set includes a portly rector grinning approvingly at the servant who brings a suckling pig to his table:

After G. M. Woodward, The Rector, 1790, etching and aquatint (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Moreover, a seventh print not mentioned in the catalogue depicts The Incumbent, an elderly cleric who reads his newspaper on a bench under a tree:

After G. M. Woodward, The Incumbent, 1790, etching and aquatint (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

When I first saw the seven prints, I wondered whether Douce’s series was complete. Thanks to the verses below the images, I found the answer (and Woodward’s source) in this ‘Parody on the Speech of Jaques, in Shakespeare’s As you like it’:

[…] And Parsons are but men, like you or me.
They have their foibles, and their fopperies:
And one sees amongst them sundry characters.
To mention only seven -And first- the Curate […],

The rest of the poem, which appears on pp. 197-198 of the third volume of Richard Graves’s The Spiritual Quixote: or, the Summer’s Ramble of Mr Geoffry Wildgoose. A Comic Romance  (London, 1773), provides the captions for the remaining prints in the set.

The prints after Woodward’s designs were published much later, on 1 December 1790, by William Holland. The reason for this might have been the enduring popularity of Graves’s parody, reproduced, for instance, in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1794 and in the Sporting Magazine in 1797.

 

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Poetry and Astronomy

Posted on June 6, 2012 by mercedes-c

I missed the transit of Venus earlier this morning.

Transit of Venus

I thought that special equipment was required but, apparently, all you need is a piece of paper -or so Jim Naughtie said in the Today programme. He was talking to Prof Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, who is giving a lecture about poetry and astronomy at the Hay festival tonight.

The combination of astronomy and poetry reminded me of the print below, filed by Douce with his images of table games:

After Charles-Nicolas Cochin, fils, Le Jeu de Comete, c. 1758-59, etching and engraving (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

I have not been able to find it in the Inventaire du Fonds Français, but it is recorded as after Charles-Nicolas Cochin fils (1715-1790) in at least two nineteenth-century catalogues. It shows a group of three men and a woman playing cards in an elegant drawing-room decorated in the rococo style. Through the window open to the garden, a comet can be seen crossing the sky.

The verses below the image explain how, presumably due to their improved knowledge of the natural world, these four people do not fear the comet any more. Unlike their superstitious forebears, they do not regard it as an omen. In fact, and judging from the print itself, they do not regard it at all -they seem more interested in their game of cards. More puzzingly, the couplet also refers to how the comet ’causes happiness every day’, ‘triumphs over any games’ and ‘often subjugates even the less sensitive heart’ (‘et tu soumets souvent le coeur le moins sensible’).

The comet’s triumphing over games could be read as a an allusion to the calculation of its orbit -a ‘triumph’ over hazard or chance. From the publisher’s address inscribed at the bottom of the print, it must have been produced in the 1750s -and, in 1758-59, the comet last seen in 1680 returned as predicted by Edmond Halley. As Ruth Wallis explains (Annals of Science, 1984, vol. 41, p. 279) ‘Never before had the appearance of a comet been predicted’ and the public interest was such that, by November 1758 the expected return of the comet had ‘become the subject of every day’s conversation’ (see, for instance, The Edinburgh Magazine for that month).

When Comet Halley finally appeared, its return represented the triumph of calculation over randomness. Or, as an anonymous contributor to The Gentleman’s Magazine controversially stated a few months before the sighting, ‘it is as absurd to believe the world to be ruled by chance, as to believe it was first made by chance’. His piece was entitled ‘Comets not dangerous’.

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French Prints and Fans

Posted on May 30, 2012 by mercedes-c

My colleague Cath Casley has noticed a pretty fan in the Ashmolean’s collection which seems to relate to some of the prints in which Douce was interested -I am copying her message below:

Found this fan within the collection of Western Art at the Ashmolean which depicts the Virgin of Loreto.  I know I have seen prints within the Douce collection which feature this subject.  The fan is 18th century and French, bequeathed by Professor Ingram Bywater, 1915.

Anonymous French, Notre Dame de Lorette, c. 1797, ivory and hand-coloured etching (Ashmolean Museum, WA1915.33.2)

 

Prints were often used to make fans, but this one is unusual because of its subject. The fan reproduces, in a slightly different format, the same elements that can be seen in this broadside from Douce’s collection:

Jacques-Louis Bance, Notre Dame de Lorette, c. 1797, hand-coloured etching (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

In the fan, the image of the Virgin and Child appears in the centre, with an open crate at left and a cloak said to have been worn by the Virgin at right. Exactly the same objects appear in the broadside, although their arrangement has changed:

The inscription ‘Procés verbal ce 26 Pluviôse an 5eme’ on a piece of paper on the edge of the crate refers to the Directory’s plans to confiscate works of art and other valuable objects in the course of Napoleon’s Italian campaign. The convoy arrived in Paris in late July 1798 and it included the Apollo Belvedere, the Medici Venus, the Laocoön group, paintings by Raphael and Correggio, natural history collections, and manuscripts from the Vatican, among other things. As Dorothy M. Quynn explains, ‘the popular interests were catered to by the inclusion of the animals [from Italian zoos] and of such famous religious relics as the miracle-working wooden Virgin of Loreto, attributed to [St] Luke’:

A. Girardet and P.-G. Berthault, Entrée triomphale des monuments des sciences et des arts en France , etching and engraving, 1802 (Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

 

The images on both sides of the Virgin are taken from the depiction of the walls of the Basilica of the Santa Casa in Loreto:

Douce’s print provides us with a more precise date and context for the fan, which might have been produced as a souvenir to mark the public celebrations surrounding the arrival of Napoleon’s convoy in Paris (so it would be the equivalent of a Diamond Jubilee mug).

 

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The Prodigal Son Sifted

Posted on May 22, 2012 by mercedes-c

Despite their various nationalities and the different periods in which they lived, the authors of the satirical prints collected by Douce seemed to share their belief that ‘things ain’t what they used to be’. When seen together, however, the prints themselves suggest that the opposite is true.

Recurrent themes include images of young men being sieved, ground, or distilled, although the purposes and results of such operations vary. The educational applications of sieving, for instance, are explored in the popular print The Prodigal Son Sifted. In the text below the title, the anonymous author considers that his warnings should be ‘taken notice of by all people in this vain and debauched age’. He also refers to the print as ‘a useful table to be set up in all families’, which makes it sound as an early eighteenth-century equivalent of parenting classes:

Anonymous British, The Prodigall Son Sifted, c. 1700-40, etching (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

The young man to whom the title alludes is being sieved of his vices by his long-suffering parents. Playing cards, tobacco pipes, lace cuffs, glass wines, a tennis racket, dice, and two tightly-wrapped mummy-looking babies fall from the sieve symbolizing the disreputable pastimes of his youth. His drinking, smoking, gambling, womanizing, and duelling are all detailed in the eight scenes depicted on both sides. In case some viewers mistake all this debauchery for an attractive lifestyle, the author adds some threatening references to ‘drunken sickness’, ‘suretyships’, the ‘prison house’ and the gallows.

The same subject had been represented in older prints and broadside ballads since at least the seventeenth century (see O’Connell 1999, pp. 76-77). In the 1740s, William Dicey and Robert Walton published a print entitled The Prodigal Sifted that shows exactly the same central motif that can be seen in Douce’s, although the eight accompanying scenes are more elaborate and their position is reversed:

Anonymous British, The Prodigal Sifted, 1740s, etching (The British Museum)

 

The print in the British Museum includes two lines with the names and addresses of the publishers -in Douce’s etching, the platemark visible alongside the bottom edge indicates that no production details were inscribed below the image. The coarser manner in which the latter has been executed, together with the lack of narrative logic in the arrangement of the smaller scenes, suggest that Douce’s print might be a copy after earlier models.

Another version of the same subject in which an older woodblock has been reused can be seen in this broadside ballad, also in the British Museum:

Anonymous British, The Prodigal Son Sifted, c. 1750, hand-coloured woodcut (The British Museum)

 

These prints were published roughly in the first half of the seventeenth century,  which is when William Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress (1735) appeared. They can be regarded as part of the ‘popular graphic tradition’ from which Hogarth’s works derived (Paulson 1976, p. 45).

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