Douce Blog

Scandinavian Noir

Posted on May 1, 2012 by mercedes-c

Long before subtitled Danish drama reached these shores*, Douce was already championing Scandinavian story-telling of a different sort, as transcribed by his friend the Danish scholar and antiquary Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752-1829). On 28 April 1819, Douce wrote in his book of Coincidences:

A Col. Silverschildt a Dane called with a letter from my old friend Dr Thorkelin of Copenhagen at the moment when my nephew Tom was with me, who had probably exchanged shots with this Colonel at the infamous attack on Copenhagen.

John Bluck, View of Copenhagen ... during the bombardment ... 4th September 1807, 1808, hand-coloured acquatint (British Museum)

Among the many reasons Douce had to call the attack ‘infamous’, he probably counted the loss of the edition of Beowulf on which Thorkelin had been working for twenty years -his notes were destroyed when his house burnt down as a result of the British bombardment in 1807. Thorkelin’s edition was based on the extremely fragile manuscript now in the British Library, which he and James Matthews transcribed in 1786-7:

Beowulf

Fortunately, Thorkelin’s transcript of the poem survived the fire and, in 1815, he finally published the text under the title De Danorum rebus gestis secul. iii & iv, poëma danicum dialecto anglosaxonica. Douce owned copies of both Thorkelin’s edition (Bodleian shelfmark Douce SS 105 (101) and the English edition published by Kemble in 1833 -more details on transcripts, editions, and collations below:

University of Kentucky’s Electronic Beowulf

Douce might have been particularly interested in the sources of the poem and in the information on Scandinavian and Germanic mythology that it provided -this was part of its appeal to the ‘poetical antiquary’, as John Josias Conybeare remarked in his Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1826), also on Douce’s book-shelves.

The customs and beliefs of ‘the Northern peoples’ were examined and illustrated in Olaus Magnus’ Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555), whose woodcuts are scattered among Douce’s prints of witchcraft. These images, which ended up integrated in the series of Douce’s prints arranged by subject, were probably cut from two different unidentified early editions of Magnus’ work. Douce owned at least three more copies of the book, including a first edition. They are all now in the Bodleian.

The woodcuts that I have seen so far are all from the third book of Magnus’ Historia, which deals with the ‘superstitious culture’ and pagan traditions of the North. Unusually for him, but very helpfully for later cataloguers, Douce annotated some of the images indicating the specific passage they illustrate, as can be seen in this depiction of a ‘Marine Magician’, practising his dark arts from what looks like a surf board:

In the scene below, a swineherd and his pigs sit peacefully on top of a cliff totally oblivious to the incantation performed by a sorceress just behind them and to the shipwreck in the background. The first woodcut is the same illustration published in the first edition of Magnus’ book -the second is a later (and much more dramatic) copy:

* Danish drama wins global fanbase

Posted in Literature, Networks, Poetry, Prints, Uncategorized, Witchcraft | Comments Off

Douce and Flaxman

Posted on April 26, 2012 by mercedes-c

Douce counted the artist John Flaxman (1755-1826) among his friends: numerous gifts from the sculptor are recorded in his Collecta and Flaxman’s Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus (1795) was one of the books bequeathed by Douce to the Bodleian.

While going through Douce’s folders of satirical prints, which I will start cataloguing shortly, I came across the etching below:

Anonymous, Selections of drapery, c. 1802, etching (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

The folder in question is labelled ‘Burlesques. Satirical and Humorous. English’. Douce owned two impressions of the etching, whose full title is Selections of drapery from an illuminated Manuscript of 14th Cent.y highly illustrative of the divine Poetry of the immortal Dante. In an annotation in pencil, Douce explains that these are ‘Tracings from Flaxman’.

The print is a parody of what Flaxman’s contemporaries praised as his ‘chaste outlines’. The author has a lot of fun suggesting spurious sources for the set of sixteen disembodied cloaks, supposedly copied from Flaxman’s illustrations of Dante. No. 5, for instance, shows ‘A Sublime idea taken from a Towel hung to dry’. Sugar wrappers, a ‘Spanish borachio’ or wine-bag, and a ‘broken Tobacco Stopper’ are other objects from which the artist is said to have drawn inspiration.

As is well known, Flaxman’s 111 illustrations for the Divine Comedy were commissioned by Thomas Hope and produced in Rome between 1792 and 1793. Their circulation was restricted to Hope’s immediate circle of friends until the publication of Tommasso Piroli’s unauthorised second edition in 1802. This anonymous print was probably produced after that date. The satire focuses on the novelty of Flaxman’s style and on his antiquarian interests, which Douce shared and possibly promoted.

Posted in Literature, Prints, Satirical prints | Comments Off

The ringball alley

Posted on April 4, 2012 by mercedes-c

After cataloguing Douce’s prints of ‘Cricket, Racquets &c., Bat and Ball’, I have just started working on his images of ‘Billiards, Bowling, [Quoits], Skittles &c’. The first few mounts contained the usual Doucean mix of engravings from various Dutch books of emblems, French eighteenth-century etchings and early German prints. But this was quite unexpected:

Rembrandt, A man playing ringball, 1654, etching (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Despite his fondness for Dutch prints, Douce did not seem particularly interested in Rembrandt. He owned at least ten prints and a drawing by this artist but, so far, I have not come across his name in any of the lengthy discussions of printmaking-related issues that are a regular feature of his correspondence with George Cumberland and Thomas Kerrich. The etching above is the second of two known states (it does not show the border and the white area along the top margin that can be seen in the first state).

Douce probably acquired this etching because of the figure playing with a club and a ball in the background. Though the print is commonly referred to as ‘the kolf player’ or ‘the golfer’, the sport depicted is actually called ‘Klossen’ (see Stogdon 2011, p. 291). The combination of three different scenes has been interpreted as a representation of ‘the active and passive aspects of the theme of leisure’, while this type of game could have been regarded at the time as ‘a metaphor of the Game of Life’ (Dickey 1986, p. 258).

Posted in Everyday life, Games, Prints, Sports | Comments Off

Palm Sunday

Posted on April 3, 2012 by mercedes-c

Douce was very interested in religious ceremonies and devotional practices and hence he gathered a remarkable number of prints on this subject. However, the only depictions of Easter parades that I have found among his prints are images of Palm Sunday processions. The print below, cut from Jean Frederic Bernard’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-1743), shows an unusually child-free (and donkey-free) Palm Sunday parade:

Bernard Picart, La Procession des Palmes le Dimanche des Rameaux, c. 1723, engraving (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

As you can see, the cloaks worn by the participants are embroidered with skulls and the pervading mood is rather gloomy. The text accompanying this image focuses on Palm Sunday celebrations in the Vatican, which might explain the extreme seriousness of the procedures. The Dutch etching below, also from Douce’s collection, is more like the Palm Sunday parades I am familiar with:

Anonymous, De Processie op Palm Sondag, 1729, etching (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

The print was published as an illustration to Isaac Le Long’s Historische Beschrijving van de Reformatie der Stadt Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1729), a few pages of which were kept by Douce in the same folder, which does not contain any other images. The Dutch etching is more or less contemporary with the engraving by Picart, but it shows a completely different way of staging the same religious event. The pomp and circumstance of the Vatican contrast with the simplicity of the outfits and props used in the procession outside a Dutch town -with the exception of the wonderful donkey on wheels, which could be exactly what the ‘donkey parade’ in Hamble, near Southampton, needs:

Palm Sunday in Hamble, near Southampton

Posted in Everyday life, Festivals, Prints, Religion | Comments Off

Student life

Posted on March 26, 2012 by mercedes-c

Sports and various outdoor activities seem like an appropriate subject for a post, now that we have 123 days to go before the London Olympics start, Hilary term has just ended, and the first days of Spring have brought sun and lovely warm weather -perfect for any of the pastimes depicted in the prints that Douce filed as ‘Cricket, Racquets &c., Bat and Ball’:

Crispijn de Passe, Game of balloon, 1612, engraving (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

This print belongs to a series published by Crispijn de Passe and Jan Janszoon of Arnhem under the title Academia sive speculum vitae scolasticae (The university, or mirror of student life) in 1612. In his book Profit and Pleasure (Rotterdam, 2001), Ilja M. Veldman explains how this set of prints aimed at students presented them with detailed scenes of university life. Sports were included because, as De Passe optimistically states in the Preface:

It is a quality common to almost all, not so much habituated as bestowed by Nature herself and in a sense innate, to amuse themselves with various activities and exercises, and to guard life against sloth.

The ball game depicted above was played with a leather ball struck with the hand protected with a cork brace (see Veldman, p. 49). Another sport supposed to keep ‘bodies and minds constantly engaged’ was real tennis, played with racquets and a net in special indoor courts. Veldman suggests that the court depicted below was the private court in Leiden, which was as exclusive as it sounds:

Crispijn de Passe, Game of real tennis, 1612, engraving (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Some of the De Passe’s plates, however, had already appeared in Jacob van der Heyden’s Pugillus facetiarum iconographicarum (1608) and they were reused again in his Speculum Cornelianum. The Cornelius of the title was a dissipated student, whose adventures and misadventures were further illustrated by the German engraver Peter Rollos in his Vita Corneliana (Berlin, 1625). Most conveniently, Douce also had Rollos’ versions (in reverse) of de Passe’s engravings. To make things even more confusing, Rollos’ plates were copied in a number of late seventeenth-century editions of his work, published in Paris under the title Le Centre de l’Amour:

Peter Rollos I, Apte mitto pilam..., c. 1625, etching (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Peter Rollos I, Quando pilla et spherae flectuntur..., c. 1625, etching (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Le Centre de l’Amour (Paris, 1687)

A 1643 edition of Jacob van der Heyden’s Pugillus facetiarum iconographicarum owned by Douce is still in the Bodleian -the call no. is Douce Prints e.37 (f.10-61). The two prints above are not the only images from this series that Douce kept with his Sports and Pastimes: the engraving below, which appeared in the 1608 edition of the Pugillus, is filed under ‘Gaming with Cards, Dice, &c’:

Jacob van der Heyden, Der Teuffel hatt dasz best im Spill, 1608, etching and engraving (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Why would this satirical print be included? Like De Passe’s and Rollos’s books, Van der Heyden’s work was aimed at students, but it was not an illustration of student life. It was a miscellaneous collection of prints based on students’ drawings, which allowed for the inclusion of what is, ultimately, an anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim satire. The student in question was not terribly original (or witty, for that matter), since a similar theme had been used with the same purpose in an anonymous Dutch print a few years earlier:

Anonymous, O ghy valsche ketters..., 1598-1600, engraving, BM Sat 81 (The British Museum, London)

Posted in Everyday life, Games, History of printmaking, Prints, Satirical prints, Sports | Comments Off

The valorous and witty-knight-errant Don Quixote

Posted on March 12, 2012 by mercedes-c

I recently saw (and very much enjoyed) The Romance of the Middle Ages at the Bodleian:

The Romance of the Middle Ages

Quite a few beautiful manuscripts and fascinating rare books from Douce’s collection have been included in this exhibition but, being Spanish, my favourite knight in armour had to be ‘the valorous and witty-knight errant’ Don Quijote de la Mancha. Douce’s Sir Billy of Billerecay, or the Essex Don Quixote, is on display and this is just one of many versions, translations, and editions of Cervantes’s work he owned. Interestingly, the 1819 Spanish edition published under the auspices of the Real Academia is among them -Douce thus acquired the most up-to-date Don Quijote in its original language, although this might have been because of the plates, which had been commissioned to Spain’s best engravers.

Douce’s interest in both romances and parody explains his fascination with Don Quixote, which, of course, was not unusual in the eighteenth-century, when many translations and illustrated editions were published. An instance of this popularity are the series of plates by Daniel Chodowiecki, to which the fight against the sheep below pertains:

Daniel Chodowiecki, Don Quixote fighting the sheep, 1770, etching, Bequeathed by Francis Douce, 1834 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

Douce also owned a drawing by John Vanderbanck that, as D. B. Brown explains in his catalogue, was a ‘preliminary design for the third of Vanderbanck’s sixty-eight illustrations for Lord Carteret’s Spanish edition’ of the novel (cat. no. 1834), published in 1738:

John Vanderbanck, Don Quixote outside the Inn, 1726, pen and brown ink over indications in graphite (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

Posted in Collections and Collectors, Exhibitions, Literature, Romances | Comments Off

The Science of Sleep

Posted on February 27, 2012 by mercedes-c

Last weekend, I saw this article on sleep habits on the BBC news website:

The myth of the eight-hour sleep

If you scroll down, you will see two prints used by Prof Ekirch as visual evidence of his findings on sleeping patterns before the 17th century. This sounds like a very Doucean subject -and the search for images of how people used to spend their nights in the past is also a way in which Douce’s collection of prints could have been used (see Ellis’s enquiry about bathing habits in a previous post).

The obvious places to look for this kind of image would be either sets of the Four Times of Day or the folder labelled ‘Ancient Bedsteads and Bedchambers’, where I found this engraving by Gerard de Jode after Hans Vredeman de Vries:

Gerard de Jode, Daniel and his vision, 1585, engraving (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

This print was part of a series entitled Thesaurus Sacrarum Historiarum veteris testamenti. Douce probably regarded it as a source of information on what a 16th-century Netherlandish bedroom looked like. I have not chosen it to suggest that having apocalyptic visions was one of many activities that took place during the ‘waking period’ between the first and second sleep. But the article also refers to how some people ‘used the time to meditate on their dreams’, which is what Daniel might be doing here.

Posted in Everyday life, Prints | Comments Off

The Society of Gentlemen at Exeter

Posted on February 23, 2012 by mercedes-c

One of Douce’s oldest friends was the writer Isaac D’Israeli (1766-1848), whose correspondence I am reading at the moment. Douce’s networks of antiquaries, artists, and fellow collectors hugely contributed to the formation and development of his collection. D’Israeli was responsible for some interesting additions to Douce’s circle: his introduction of the painter James Barry to Douce is a well-known example.

Between 1794 and 1796, D’Israeli spent some time in Exeter recovering from a nervous breakdown. During his convalescence, he wrote that he had joined a society of literary gentlemen:

Sir William Charles Ross, Portrait of Isaac D'Israeli, black and red chalk on brown paper (The British Museum, London)

There is […] a Literary Society who meet every 3 weeks, consisting of 12 gentlemen, who are going to publish, in imitation of the Manchester Society a volume of their transactions. I am going to be ennobled among these 12 apostles –Our Memoirs will not be of a scientific kind, nor of the valuable cast I fear of the Manchester –since I find that they admit Poetry in their volumes.

The Memoirs to which D’Israeli refers appeared under the title Essays by a Society of Gentlemen at Exeter in 1796. The aims of the Society are outlined in the Address read on 28 June 1792:

Being at least lovers of literature, having some taste for the arts, some acquaintance with the sciences, it was natural that we should meet together. It was natural to suppose that at such meeting we should experience a conversation different from that of more promiscuous assemblies; a conversation, in which wit might be joined with hilarity, learning with humour, information with decent gaiety; while properly trained, our minds would be subservient to that bond of politeness which consecrates the intercourse of scholars and gentlemen.

In the following paragraphs, the author explained that the ‘decent gaiety’ fostered by a good dinner and ‘the consequent enlivening glass’ somewhat hindered the coherent exchange of information that was the main aim of the Society. Therefore, its members decided that any discussion of their thoughts on topics ranging from Pindar to falconry, and from sepulchral stones to the contraction of the iris, should take place in writing. The nature and activities of the Society have been recently studied by Dafydd Moore in an article entitled ‘Patriotism, Politeness, and National Identity in the South West of England in the Late Eighteenth Century’ (ELH, vol. 76, no. 3, 2009, pp. 739-762).

During his stay in Exeter, D’Israeli provided some of his literary friends with letters of introduction to Douce. One of them was for Richard Hole, clergyman, antiquary and author of the poem Arthur, or the Northern Enchantments (1789). Another was for Thomas Gainsborough’s friend William Jackson (1730-1803), whose portrait (a mezzotint after James Walker) is included among Douce’s collection of ‘English literati’ (portfolio 135, no. 91).

Jackson’s son-in-law was the painter John Downman (1750-1824), who was also the cousin of another member of the Society, the physician and poet Hugh Downman (1740-1809). While looking through the works by Downman in the British Museum website, I came across this Portrait of Jane Douce:

John Downman, Portrait of Jane Douce, 1804-1806 (The British Museum, London)

This drawing was part of the exhibition The Intimate Portrait (BM 2008-09). The catalogue entry explains that the sitter was Jane Downman, the painter’s niece, who would become the wife of Douce’s nephew, William Henry, in 1807. But John Downman would have been acquainted with the Douce family much earlier, since a study for a portrait of ‘Old Mr Douce […] The Father of Thomas and William and Francis’, also in the British Museum, is dated 1788.

Douce corresponded with George Cumberland, based in Bristol, and with Thomas Kerrich in Cambridge, but his networks have always seemed to gravitate around London. D’Israeli’s’s introductions to the Society of Gentlemen at Exeter suggest that his activities and connections were more far-reaching. Their correspondence offers a different perspective on Douce’s association with what Moore has called ‘the discourses of Enlightenment Britain’.

Posted in Letters, Networks | Comments Off

Courtships and Love Affairs

Posted on February 14, 2012 by mercedes-c

After going through Douce’s folder labelled ‘Courtships & Love Affairs’, I think it is fair to say that he was not much of a romantic. His selection of images of romance includes this depiction of a gloomy ‘man in love’ from the title-page of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):

A couple holding hands and watching some cautionary frogs, from a Dutch book of emblems:

Jacob Cats, Spiegel Van den Ouden ende Nieuwen Tijdt, In's Graven-Hage, 1632, plate 16, p. 62 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

And a French young lady shopping with her lover, who seems rather keen on printed fabrics:

Luckily for the purposes of this Valentine’s post, an element of drama, a hint of forbidden romance, and plenty of exclamation marks are all provided by this Italian scene of elopment:

Giovanni Cardini after Antonio Fedi, Oh delizie d'Amor!, c. 1810-20, etching and stipple (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

I was surprised not to find any examples of the themes of the Triumph of Love and the Garden of Love -both, however, are duly represented among the prints (also from Douce’s collection) arranged by artist, period and school. This, for instance, is a rather complex allegory of the power of Venus by Hieronymus Hopfer after the Monogrammist PP:

Hieronymus Hopfer, The power of love, c. 1543-63, etching on iron (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Meanwhile, in the delightful Master ES’s Garden of Love, two couples play chess and make garlands, while a young woman reads a love letter under the quizzical gaze of a court fool or jester:

Master ES, The garden of love with chess-players, 1450-67, engraving (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Posted in Everyday life, Fools, Games, Prints | Comments Off

A game of cards

Posted on February 9, 2012 by mercedes-c

Among Douce’s many correspondents, Richard Twiss is probably my favourite -his style is maddening, since he constantly jumps from subject to subject, but his letters are very entertaining. He bombarded Douce with numerous enquiries about all sorts of matters often interspersed with gossip and pieces of domestic information. For instance, on 13 July 1789, Twiss sent Douce some queries concerning his latest book, to which he proudly added the following news:

My son has just farrow’d eleven pigs, one of which is dead, the rest with the mother as well as can be expected. you will come to the [christen]ing, after which we will eat one of them. I wonder the World has not noticed the book; I sent them one.

These lines tell us not only of Twiss Jr.’s occupations on the eve of the Storming of the Bastille, but also of his father’s nervousness regarding the recent publication of his second book on Chess. Table games were one of many interests that Twiss and Douce shared: Douce supplied Twiss with quotes on chess from his library, while Twiss sent Douce playing cards that he had acquired in his travels:

I wanted to send you the cards but I do not know how, you had better take them yourself; the pack I have was made in France 1760. The suits are Denier, Coupe. Epée & Baston a Cavalier to each suit is 56. & 22 more picture cards. is 78. of which the last is le Mat. not mate, but il matto. the fool. This pack is called Cartes de Taro. There are no other sort of cards used in Spain but these & the common ones. they are likewise used in France, Switzerland, Italy & Holland. I saw the grand duke of Tuscany play with such a pack with a French gentleman, at Florence. & I was told the method of playing a particular game with them, in the nature of piquet the last time I was at Marseille (in 83). which I have forgotten if you are desirous of learning to play, I know several swiss in London, & three Spaniards are just arriv’d, who I suppose are able to teach you.

Douce’s folders of images of games and pastimes include a section on Gaming with Cards, Dice &, whose contents range from contemporary prints, such as this aquatint after Maria Cosway:

Caroline Watson, after Maria Cosway, The Winter's Day Delineated (plate 11), 1803, etching and aquatint (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

… to gaming-related scenes cut from seventeenth-century books of emblems:

Emblem 36 from Johan de Brune's 'Emblemata, of Zinne-werck', Amsterdam, 1661 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

As Twiss’s letter suggests, Douce also collected actual playing cards. Their function was double, since they aided his historical research on games and pastimes, while the earlier examples were useful as ‘evidence in the vexed question of the invention of printing’ (see The Douce legacy, Oxford, 1984, pp. 121-123). The cards mentioned by Twiss did become part of his friend’s collection -they were published in Marseille by François Bourlion although, according to Douce’s annotation, the pack had been bought in Spain.

The material gathered by Douce was ultimately put to good use by his friend Samuel Weller Singer, whose Researches into the history of playing cards appeared in 1816. Singer’s book is illustrated with many examples from Douce’s collection, such as these “Oriental” cards on ivory:

He also reproduces Douce’s round cards of birds and rabbits, but not this very fine engraving of the Eight of Dogs by Israhel van Meckenem after the Master ES, now in the Ashmolean Museum (WA1863.2096):

Posted in Games, History of printmaking, Letters | Comments Off