A 19th century museum memorabilia?

One of the artworks that I like most among all those found in Portobello Road market is a small original chromolithography that reproduces a painting by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) which is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (50.145.17). According to that picture, the title of this lithograph would be ‘Cottage Children’ or ‘The Wood Gatherers’. Printed on paper laid on brass and with a hand-inked background, this chromolithography was probably published in London circa 1880s. "Chrome", as it was also called at the time, or colour printing from a stone, reached the market in the 1870s, and its heyday was in the 1880s and 1890s. The original painting is about a century older than this lithography. Its dimensions are very reduced, like in a miniature, 30 x 36 inches (76 x 92 mm). It was purchased on November 29, 2019.

 

In a chromolithography like this one, the artist had to draw a separate plate for each colour, producing the final image by using more than eight lithographic stones. A good result basically depended on the skill of the lithographer. As a reproduction process it could be very time consuming and extremely cumbersome, and by the end of the 19th century the new technology made it possible to make colour separations, and colour printing began to replace chromolithography as a colour reproduction technique.

Thomas Gainsborough, the author of the original oil painting, was along with his great rival Joshua Reynolds, the leading portrait painter in late 18th century England. Born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1745 Gainsborough had established his own studio in London, but by 1748 he had taken up residence in Suffolk. In 1752 he moved to Ipswich, and by 1759 he had settled in Bath, a fashionable spa town that provided him with many clients for his portraits. From 1761 to 1769 Gainsborough exhibited at the Society of Artists, which had begun its activity in 1760, and in 1768 he was a founding member of the Royal Academy, as was Reynolds, although years later Gainsborough had a couple of quarrels with the Academy, and never exhibited there again. The reason for both disputes was his disagreement with the hanging of his paintings. In 1772 he took his nephew, Gainsborough Dupont (1754–1797), as his studio assistant, and two years later  Gainsborough had already achieved a prosperous position as a portrait painter, although he always showed an interest in landscape painting and the depiction of rustic scenes. Back in London, he fixed his residence in Pall Mall. In 1782 Gainsborough toured the West Country with his nephew, and the next year he visited the Lake District with Samuel Kilderbee. Gainsborough died in London after a reconciliation with Reynolds, who eulogised him at the Royal Academy. He is buried in Kew Churchyard. A posthumous sale of his pictures and drawings was held at Schomberg House, Gainsborough's home in Pall Mall, in 1789. Executed in 1787, towards the end of Gainsborough’s life, ‘Cottage Children’ was exhibited at that event, and the artwork was acquired by Lord P Porchester. In Thomas Gainsborough (New York, 1915, pp. 242, 291–92, 294), William Thomas Whitley quotes Henry Bate-Dudley's admiring account of the picture, which he saw at Schomberg House in November 1787 and which had already been sold to Lord Porchester, identified the boy as "the Richmond child, Jack Hill". The painting was exhibited years later at the British Institution, in 1814 (no. 154) and again in 1844 (no. 154), and at the Royal Academy in 1881 (no.172). 

There is a smaller version of the painting which is attributed to Gainsborough Dupont (Tate N00311). It was formerly part of the Vernon collection. Robert Vernon (1774-1849) was a London merchant who amassed a fortune during the Napoleonic Wars. He collected some 200 paintings between 1820 and 1847, mainly from living British artists. In 1847 he presented 157 paintings to the trustees of the National Gallery. The artworks were first exhibited at Vernon's house in Pall Mall, and later at Marlborough House. In 1897 the Tate Gallery -then called the National Gallery for British Art- was founded, and many of the artworks were transferred there.

Cottage Children, oil on canvas attributed to Gainsborough Dupont (1754–1797).

The scene depicts three children in a wooded landscape. This kind of subject was meant to inspire compassion among the people of Sensitivity, who may in truth have been far removed from the realities of rural poverty. Inspired by the Spanish artist Murillo (1617–1682), Gainsborough's oil on canvas is one of what, in the 18th century, were called ‘fancy pieces’, depicting peasant children in rustic settings. The sentiment expressed in them was pleasing to Gainsborough's contemporaries, who seem not to have noticed in the hollow-eyed and wistful expressions of the sitters an undercurrent of deprivation. In 1814 one critic referred to them as the works "on which Gainsborough's fame chiefly rests".

In November 1787, after a visit to Gainsborough’s studio, Henry Bate-Dudley described this painting in the following terms: "A landscape of uncommon merit ... a picturesque scene ... beautifully romantic" into which the artist had introduced three "charming little objects [who] cannot be viewed without the sensations of tenderness and pleasure, and an interest for their humble fate" (quoted in Whitley 1915, p. 291). Such works enjoyed high praise and high prices in Gainsborough's lifetime. Later, however, they gradually fell out of favour with audiences who found them sentimental and condescending. More recently there has been a shift in the scholarly literature, and they have been read as a commentary on the poverty and pious industry of the landless poor (Barrell 1980).

We have already mentioned that the seated boy was identified as Jack Hill, a beggar boy Gainsborough had met in Richmond, and whom he also depicted in another fancy piece in the Museum's collection (89.15.8). F. G. Stephens, writing in the catalogue of the 1885 Grosvenor Gallery exhibition, suggested that the work was a disguised portrait, identifying the children as Charles Marsham, later Earl of Romney, and two of his sisters (Stephens 1885). The second Earl, born in 1777, did have two sisters, but the source for this improbable suggestion is not disclosed. A drawing of about 1780, Studies of Girls Carrying Faggots (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), while not a study for the present painting, relates closely to it.

An engraver’s version (Tate Britain, London) of the painting, now thought to be by Gainsborough Dupont (1754–1797), may have been made in preparation for a contemporary print that was never executed; it was later engraved by George Baird Shaw.

A copy of this etching (Art Journal, 1850) is kept at the British Museum (museum number: 1872,1012.1982). It was printed by Horwood & Watkins, and engraved by George Baird Shaw after Gainsborough (Waterhouse 807), published by Virtue & Co. The description of the etching is as follows: A little boy sitting by the edge of a path, holding firewood, with an older girl standing next to him, carrying a little girl, all barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, with a thatched cottage in a field at the foot of a mountain in the background to right”. It is lettered below image with title, ‘From the picture in the Vernon Gallery’. Production detail: ‘T. Gainsborough, R. A. Painter’.

The process for producing a chromolithography was very different from these etching techniques. A chromolithography produced a result more similar to that of a painting. Actually, lithography was one of the printing techniques practiced by many artists, allowing them to draw directly on the lithographic stone. Lithography was first invented in Germany in 1796 by Alois Senefelder. Originating from lithography, chromolithography was a method of producing multi-colour prints. Depending on the number of colours present, a lithographer could spend months in producing a chromolithography, gradually correcting the print until he achieved a result similar to that of the painting to be reproduced, which he should have in front of him. Sometimes it was necessary to use dozens of layers. As a colour printing technique, it was no longer used in the late 1930s.

Since chromolithographs were printed from stones, the printed image retained the grain of the stone. Using a jeweler's magnifying glass (at least 10x) we can appreciate these colour "dots", which are irregular compared to the "dots" obtained in a colour separation. The dots in the lithograph will not always look the same, they will look like the grain in the stone used. We can also see that some areas in the background were coloured by hand, with watercolours or inks, as the colour is flat with no dots. 

Here are some close-ups of the chromolithograph:

Louis Prang, who traveled to Europe to study printing methods, detailed the process of chromolithography in an 1897 speech at the Pratt Institute in New York: “Lithography, as we understand it today, is the art of printing from a perfectly flat stone, on which the pattern is neither raised in relief nor cut in intaglio. The lithographic stone, which is an amorphous limestone, dense in texture without being hard, …[and] has a great affinity for fat … The drawing on the stone is made with the lithographic crayon, consisting of soap, wax and lampblack, … The drawing, when finished, undergoes an operation called technically ‘the preparation’. It consists in flowing over the face of the stone the gum Arabic solution acidulated with nitric acid. The acid neutralizes the alkali of the soup in the crayon and ink, sets the fat free, and in doing so creates a permanent union of this fat with the stone by forming lime soap, insoluble in water” (New York Tribune). In that same speech Prang explained how a chromolithography was produced to resemble an original painting: “To make a close reproduction in print a painting of the object is absolutely required. In copying … we were obliged to make a painting of every object … The process … begins with analysing its colour for a colour scale … The next step is to cover the painting with a sheet of perfectly transparent gelatine, upon which the outline of the design, as well as the different colours, is to be drawn … This drawing, transferred to a stone by simple pressure and inked up, gives the keyplate [or outline]. The artist has to draw a separate plate for each colour … Impressions have to be taken from that keyplate in common black ink on hard highly calendered paper, dusted over with finely powdered red chalk, which only clings to the ink, and thus they are transferred to as many stones as the particular case requires”.

 

Literature and references:

-Katharine Baetjer, British paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1575-1875, New York; New Haven and London, 2009, nr. 49.

-William Hazlitt. Criticisms on Art: And Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England. London, 1843, p. 194 [2nd ed., 1856, p. 194], quotes the Morning Chronicle, in which he reviewed the 1814 Gainsborough exhibition and gave preference to "Cottage Children" among the fancy pictures.

-Engravings from the Works of Thomas Gainsborough, R.A. by J. Scott, G. H. Every, G. Sanders, and Other Eminent Engravers. London, n.d. [ca. 1880], unpaginated, no. 112, ill., publishes an 1868 engraving by G. H. Every after Lord Carnarvon's "Cottage Children".

-F[rederic]. G[eorge]. Stephens. Thomas Gainsborough, R.A. Exh. cat., Grosvenor Gallery. London, 1885, p. 45, no. 82, as "Cottage children, including portraits of Charles Marsham, afterwards Earl of Romney, and two of his sisters".

-Walter Armstrong. Gainsborough & His Place in English Art. London, 1898, pp. 126, 157, 184, 204 [popular ed., New York, 1904, pp. 168, 211, 250, 284–85], attributes the painting to the last few years of the Bath period, that is, the 1770s, and notes that there is a "small sketch or replica" in the Vernon Collection at the National Gallery.

-William T[homas]. Whitley. Thomas Gainsborough. New York, 1915, pp. 242, 291–92, 294, quotes Henry Bate-Dudley's admiring account of the picture, which he saw at Schomberg House in November 1787 and which had already been sold to Lord Porchester; identifies the boy as "the Richmond child, Jack Hill"; mentions the sketch or study in the Vernon Collection at the National Gallery and notes that it was probably this study that was exhibited at the Liverpool Society in autumn 1787.

-Ellis K. Waterhouse. "Gainsborough's 'Fancy Pictures'." Burlington Magazine 88 (June 1946), p. 140, no. 11, notes that the painting remained with the Earls of Carnarvon until 1924; describes the Vernon picture as an "engraver's version (it was not, in fact, engraved)".

-Josephine L. Allen and Elizabeth E. Gardner. A Concise Catalogue of the European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1954, p. 40.

-John Barrell. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840. Cambridge, 1980, pp. 82–84, 170 n. 83, ill., as one of Gainsborough's late paintings of the children of the poor who, assuming they were industrious, were regarded with benevolence in the writings of the period.

-Ann Bermingham. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860. Berkeley, 1986, pp. 52, 54, fig. 26, reproduces it as an illustration of Gainsborough's romantic vision of the vulnerability and innocence of childhood; points out that the fancy pictures are closely related to the society portraits of the same date.

-Thomas Gainsborough. Ed. John Hayes. Exh. cat., Palazzo dei Diamanti. Ferrara, 1998, p. 166, remarks that the popularity of the fancy pictures was assured by the immediate sale of this painting at a high price.

-Michael Rosenthal. The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: 'a little business for the Eye'. New Haven, 1999, p. 254.

-Ann Bermingham in Sensation & Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough's "Cottage Door". Ed. Ann Bermingham. Exh. cat., Yale Center for British Art, Yale University. New Haven, 2005, pp. 6–8, fig. 9 (color), states that Murillo's images of beggar children inspired Gainsborough's fancy pictures.

-Katharine Baetjer. British Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1575–1875. New York, 2009, pp. 110–12, no. 49, ill. pp. x (gallery installation, color), 111 (color), calls it "Cottage Children (The Wood Gatherers)".

 

Three months after finding that miniature after Gainsborough, I found a second unsigned chromolithography at Portobello Road Market, this time by Charles Burton Barber (1845-1894). It was on February 28, 2020. The scene depicted was an interior with a girl in a pink dress with her dog, a composition identical to the one shown in "Dress Up", an original painting by Barber. 

Framed chromolithograph by Charles Burton Barber. Late 1800's.

 

Considered one of the best genre and animal painters in England, Charles Burton Barber would achieve great success as an artist throughout his professional life.  At the age of 18 Barber was already in London studying at the Royal Academy Schools.  In 1864 he was awarded a silver medal and two years later he exhibited his first work at the Royal Academy (RA), while living in Notting Hill. Barber became a highly sought after artist, and in the early 1870's he obtained his first commission from Queen Victoria, to paint her favorite dogs. In 1883, the year he painted Off to School, he was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters. In 1894, Barber was commissioned to paint Queen Victoria in her horse-drawn carriage surrounded by her grandchildren.  This would be his last commission as the artist would die shortly thereafter. It is often said that Barber was a quiet man who valued his privacy. Unlike other artists, when he received commissions from Queen Victoria, Barber did not try to make a name for himself. 

Barber's paintings often depict girls from wealthy homes and their pets, as in the image of this chromolithography. Many of Barber's paintings were printed by photoengraving or, as in this case, by chromolithography. Barber was a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Walker Art Gallery, the City of Manchester Art Gallery and the Fine Arts Society. Much of his artwork is on display at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight. The nature of his work made it ideal for commercial applications, with the artist focusing on depictions of children and animals. Although his works were offered primarily as chromolithographic prints, rather than sold as original oil paintings, Barber continued to be an exacting artist.  The commercial application of his work was not limited to selling prints of his works to the public. 

In the next posts I will continue describing the varied pieces in this small art collection acquired in flea markets and charity shops, and surprising the reader with some artworks that could well hang on the walls of some British museums. The preserved work of some of the artists that will be appearing in this blog is very limited, which makes them special and valuable.