Old English mezzotints by Salaman Malcolm C. (Malcolm Charles) 1855-1940 & Holme Charles 1848-1923

Author:Salaman, Malcolm C. (Malcolm Charles), 1855-1940 & Holme, Charles, 1848-1923
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mezzotint engraving, British, Mezzotint engraving
Publisher: London : The Studio
Published: 1910-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

with those twenty-one children ; Georgiana, Countess Spencer and Daughter; Miss Price; Mrs. Lascelles and child ; Miss Greenivay (Hon. Mrs. Francis Napier) ; and that interesting Holland House group of the two cousins, Lady Sarah Lennox and Lady Susan Strangways, with young Charles 'James Fox. Francis Cotes's excellent portrait-painting is admirably interpreted in the Lady Boynton, and the charming print of Lady Susan O'Brien, Strangways no more, after her sensational runaway marriage with the handsome and fascinating actor, William O'Brien, which set all the society gossips agog. Although Gainsborough was never an easy painter to engrave, James Watson made fine prints of Richard, Viscount Howe, and the elegant Hon. Augustus John Hervey, husband of the notorious Elizabeth Chudleigh, the Maid-of-Honour, who was tried for bigamy as the Duchess of Kingston.

Dublin sent us yet another able engraver in John Dixon. A very handsome young man of winning personality, he had turned from the craft of engraving on silver to art-studies in the schools of the Royal Dublin Society. Having squandered a fortune amid the gaieties and allurements of the Irish capital, he came to London to commence life seriously with the practice of mezzotint. He had talent, and he had the fortunate gift of making his talent go a long way ; he was successful almost from the beginning. His vigorous print of Nathaniel Dance's portrait of David Garrick as Richard III. was immediately popular, and revealed to the painters and print-sellers a new engraver with an individual touch. And this touch, too, through Zoffany's characteristic portraiture, was to give us another vivid record of Garrick's acting as Abel Drugger in " The Alchymist." It was Reynolds, however, who inspired him to his best, to wit, The Countess of Pembroke and her son. This was the beautiful Lady Pembroke who, at George III.'s Coronation, as Walpole said, " alone of all the Countesses looked the picture of majestic modesty," and, pondering Dixon's print, one can well credit this, as one can believe also the magnanimity and sense of irony with which she consented to run away with her own husband after he had eloped with a Miss Kitty Hunter, and quickly tired of her, when, discovering that he possessed a wife "above rubies," if not pearls in her hair, he wooed her all over again. Emma and Elizabeth Creive ; Mary, Duchess of Ancaster ; Lady Blake as Juno receiving the Cestus from Venus ; William, Duke of Leicester, all after Reynolds ; A Tigress, after Stubbs ; The Flute Player, after Franz Hals ; and Rembrandt's Frame-Maker, might induce us to regret Dixon's marriage with the wealthy widow, and his subsequent life of luxurious ease, which robbed us doubtless of many fine prints. But, after all, one feels that Dixon was a very human person ; he

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