Art in England Part 6

In truth, Romney appears to have been always curiously timid and reticent; to have suffered from excessive moral cowardice. On his first arrival in London and a.s.sociation with the young painters of the day, he began to feel some shame at his early imprudence, and some alarm lest it should present any hindrance to his professional advancement. He had given 'hostages to fortune,' and dreaded the result. He was thus persistently silent on the subject; and, as time went on, it became more and more difficult for him to avow the marriage he had from the first made so much a matter of mystery. And then, too, the prosperous unions of other artists, his contemporaries, excited his jealousy and increased his apprehensions. He began to think it indispensable to the success of a painter that he should marry well. Nathaniel Dance had been united to Mrs. Drummer, known as 'the Yorks.h.i.+re fortune,' with eighteen thousand a year. John Astley had secured the hand of Lady Duckenfield, with an income of almost equal value. Then, from his literary and poetic friends he was little likely to receive encouragement to act justly in such a matter. Laurence Sterne was no especially good exemplar of conjugal fidelity. Mr. Hayley and the rest indulged in extremely poetic views concerning the privileges and prerogatives of genius; were opposed to trammels and scruples of any kind in such respect; and poured round the painter dense showers of versified adulation, so infused with ideality and Platonism that the simple rules of right and wrong were quite washed away by the harmonious and transcendental torrent. Romney, weak, vain, selfish, suffered himself to be led down paths which, however flowery and pleasant, were yet mean and contemptible enough, and listening to the tw.a.n.ging of Hayley's lyre, turned a deaf ear to the pining of the poor woman fading away, alone and deserted in the north--the Mary Abbott whom he had vowed in his youth until death should them part to love, honour, and cherish. For some thirty years the husband and wife never set eyes upon each other--were absolutely separated.

He had now as much work as he could possibly execute. He was often at his easel for thirteen hours a day, beginning at eight in the morning, lighting his lamp when the daylight had gone, and toiling on sometimes until midnight. He had five, and occasionally six, sitters a day. He generally completed a three-quarter portrait in three or four sittings, and could accomplish this easily, provided no hands were introduced into the picture. The sittings varied in duration from three-quarters of an hour to an hour and a half each. His only time now for ideal or historical art was in the interval between the departure and arrival of his sitters, or when they failed to keep their engagements with him; but he would regard such disappointments with pleasure, having always at hand a spare canvas upon which he could employ himself with some fancy subject. Of course, this close application was not without injurious effect upon him in the end. 'My health,' he wrote, at a later period of his life, 'is not at all constant. My nerves give way, and I have no time to go in quest of pleasure to prevent a decline of health. My hands are full, and I shall be forced to refuse new faces at last, to be enabled to finish the numbers I have in an unfinished state. I shall regret the necessity of forbearing to take new faces; there is a delight in novelty greater than in the profit gained by sending them home finished. But it must be done.' His annual retirement for a month's holiday to Hayley's house at Eartham was of little real service to his health. He was compelled the while to att.i.tudinize incessantly as a genius. Hayley, in globose language, was always entreating his guest to moderate his intense spirit of application, conjuring him to rest from his excess of labour 'in the name of those immortal powers the Beautiful and the Sublime,' etc., while he was at the same time urging the painter to new and greater toils, teasing the jaded man with endless suggestions, bewildering him with a jabber of sham sentimentality and hazy aestheticism. 'Whenever Romney was my guest,' writes Hayley, 'I was glad to put aside my own immediate occupation for the pleasure of searching for and presenting to him a copious choice of such subjects as might happily exercise his powers.' Poor Romney was permitted no rest.

Hayley was for ever in close attendance gratifying his own inordinate vanity at the painter's cost. He produced four representations of Serena, the heroine of Hayley's _Triumphs of Temper_. He painted a scene from the _Tempest_ for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, which project Romney always claimed to have originated, and Hayley was in the studio sitting for Prospero. At Hayley's house a small coterie of poetasters, male and female, a.s.sembled for purposes of mutual glorification in the most windbag sort of verse, and were glad to buy portraits and sketches from the painter with such small coin as sonnets and stanzas, and poetic epistles. Romney executes a likeness of Mrs. Hayley, and is rewarded with eighty-eight glowing lines by her husband, who calls to his aid Eolus, Orion, Boreas, Auster, Zephyr, Eurus, Famine, and Ceres for the better decoration of his verse. He paints a portrait of Miss Seward, and the lady's grat.i.tude gushes forth in eulogy of

....the pleasures of the Hayleyan board, Where, as his pencil, Romney's soul sublime Glows with bold lines, original and strong, etc.

'Beloved and honoured t.i.tiano!' she wrote, some years later; 'how that name recalls the happy, happy hours I pa.s.sed with you at Eartham; when by the t.i.tle 'Muse' you summoned me to the morning walk!' Amongst the drossy twaddle which pa.s.sed current as poetry at Eartham, a sonnet in Romney's honour by a true poet--William Cowper--may be counted as pure gold.

In the beginning of 1782 Emma Lyon, then known as Mrs. Hart, afterwards as Lady Hamilton, first sat to Mr. Romney. Painters and poets enough had already been busy celebrating her loveliness, the lady nothing loth. She took pleasure in the full display of her charms: holding probably that her beauty was not given her for herself alone, but that the whole world, if it listed, might at least look on it and adore. At one time indeed she was rumoured to have personated the G.o.ddess of Health, when the 'celestial' Doctor Graham was giving his strange and indecorous lectures in Pall Mall; but that scandal has been contradicted. Certain it is, however, that her witcheries effectually subjugated Romney and Hayley. The painter went fairly mad about her; could not see her often enough; was restless and miserable out of her presence; reduced the number of his sitters, and admitted no visitors until noon, that he might have time sufficient to devote to the beautiful Emma and her portraits. This infatuation endured for years. 'At present,' he wrote to Hayley, in 1791, 'and the greatest part of the summer, I shall be engaged in painting pictures from the _divine lady_. I cannot give her any other epithet; for I think her superior to all womankind.' For a long time he seemed to be able only to paint Emma Lyon. His son enumerates some two dozen portraits, in which she appears as Circe, Iphigenia, St. Cecilia, Sensibility, a Bacchante, Alope, the Spinstress, Ca.s.sandra (for the Shakespeare Gallery), Calypso, a Pythoness, Joan of Arc, a Magdalen, etc.; some of these were left unfinished. But at one time the form and features of his beautiful model appeared upon the painter's canvas, let him try to paint what he would. The fair Emma had absolutely enthralled him. Absent from the object of his adoration, he was reduced to despair. He writes to Hayley, complaining that he has discovered an alteration in his Emma's conduct: 'a coldness and neglect seemed to have taken the place of her repeated declaration of regard.'

Hayley sends up some verses for the painter to copy and sign, beginning 'Gracious Ca.s.sandra,' and asking pitifully,

.... what cruel clouds have darkly chilled Thy favour that to me was vital fire?

Oh, let it s.h.i.+ne again: or worse than killed Thy soul-sunk artist feels his art expire!

The poet seems to have been not less love-stricken. 'Her features,' he writes, 'like the language of Shakespeare, could exhibit all the feelings of nature and all the gradations of every pa.s.sion with a most fascinating truth and felicity of expression.' Presently the lady has given her hand to Sir William Hamilton and set sail for Naples. She makes peace with the painter, however, before her departure; calls upon him, resumes her former kindness of manner, is as cordial with him as ever, and sits to him for a portrait he is to paint _as a present to her mother_. Poor Romney!

In 1794 there were symptoms of decay in the painter's const.i.tution; his mental infirmities increased. He became the victim of a sort of intellectual superfetation. He was perpetually planning labours of a magnitude which, from the first, rendered them hopelessly impracticable.

His brain was morbidly active, while his hand grew tremulous and uncertain, and his sight dimmed. His manner became irritable, and more than ever timid and suspicious. He wrote to his son: 'I have made many grand designs; I have formed a system of original subjects, moral and my own, and I think one of the grandest that has been thought of; but n.o.body knows it. Hence, it is my view to wrap myself in retirement and pursue these plans, as I begin to feel I cannot bear trouble of any kind.' He quits his house in Cavendish Square and becomes the purchaser of a retreat at Holly Bush Hill, Hampstead, after abandoning a project he at one time entertained for the purchase of four acres near the Edgware Road, and covering them with a group of fantastic buildings of his own design. To the house at Hampstead he made many whimsical additions, however, erecting a large picture and sculpture-gallery, a wooden arcade or covered ride, a dining-room close to the kitchen, with a b.u.t.tery hatch opening into it, so that he and his guests might enjoy beefsteaks 'hot and hot' upon the same plan as prevailed at the Beefsteak Club, then occupying a room in the Lyceum Theatre. The cost of these changes amounted to nearly three thousand pounds. With quite a childish eagerness he took possession of his new house before the walls were dry, and while the workmen were still completing the changes he had ordered. Still he had not room enough for his numberless art-treasures.

His pictures were crammed and huddled away any and everywhere. Some were arranged along the wooden arcade, where, exposed to the open air, and to the alternate action of moisture and frost, they were almost entirely destroyed in the course of the winter, while some were deliberately stolen. The painter could do little work now: he could begin, but was unable to finish or even to resume his undertaking. His appet.i.te for art seemed to fail him; he ceased to have faith in himself; he was preyed on by nervous dejection; weighed down with dark alarms and vague forebodings. Soon his head is swimming and his right hand numb with incipient paralysis. Hayley visits him for the last time in April 1799, and had 'the grief of perceiving that his increasing weakness of body and mind afforded only a gloomy prospect for the residue of his life.'

He lays down his brush for ever. Suddenly, without a word to any one of his intentions, he takes the northern coach and arrives at Kendal.

Fainting and exhausted, he is received with the utmost tenderness and affection by his wife. No word of reproach for the neglect and solitude to which he had doomed her for so many years escapes her lips. With unremitting solicitude, with religious earnestness, this loving, forgiving woman tends the sick-bed of the sinking man. His mind expires before his body; for months he remains hopelessly imbecile, free from suffering, but wholly unconscious; breathing his last at Kendal on the 15th of November 1802, in the sixty-eighth year of his age.

The inconsistency manifest between Romney's wanton cruelty in his domestic character, and his reputation among his intimates and contemporaries for great kindliness of nature, generosity, and general worth, is remarkable enough. There are many men, however, who appear to the least advantage when seen by the light of their own fireside. Hayley says much of his friend's _extreme sensibility_:' his lips,' writes the poet, 'quivered with emotions of pity at the sight of distress or at the relation of a pathetic story.' c.u.mberland mentions that the painter was, 'by const.i.tution, p.r.o.ne to tears.' Yet his charity was not for home wear; the distress he did not see troubled him very little. It is vain to seek for any sufficient apology for Romney's shameful treatment of his wife and children. If it were possible to forget this deep stain upon his character he would seem, in all other relations of life, to be ent.i.tled to esteem and commendation. For the poor and needy he was ready, not merely with his sensibility, but with his purse. To his friends he was ever faithful and liberal. After attaining professional eminence he was almost indifferent to the emoluments of his art, prizing money much less for its own sake than for the recognition of his position and abilities that it demonstrated; while to all young artists he was especially kind and indulgent. He was the first to encourage Flaxman, and to appreciate and applaud his works; was ever the cordial and loving friend of the sculptor, as their correspondence amply testifies. 'I always remember,' says Flaxman, 'Mr. Romney's notice of my boyish years and productions with grat.i.tude; his original and striking conversation; his masterly, grand, and feeling compositions are continually before me; and I still feel the benefits of his acquaintance and recommendations.'

Romney's historical pictures are very numerous; though comparatively few of them can be considered as completely finished works. According to Allan Cunningham's estimate, for one really finished there are five half done, and for five half done there are at least a dozen merely sketched out on the canvas. The painter was all impulse; very eager and impatient at the beginning, but soon wearied, and only by painful efforts and extraordinary labour ever arriving at the conclusion of his undertakings. There was a want of concentrative power about him; he was ever frittering away his undeniable abilities upon a number of hastily adopted projects, crudely conceived, and remorselessly abandoned when the temperature of his enthusiasm lowered, or any unlooked-for difficulties appeared in his path. How the erratic and desultory nature of his mind was fostered and aggravated by Hayley's mischievous efforts has already been shown. That the glowing eulogium p.r.o.nounced by Flaxman upon his friend's productions will be endorsed by modern critics is hardly to be expected. Indeed, the characteristics upon which Flaxman especially dwells as worthy of the highest praise will be rather accounted as defects in the present day. The severe imitation of the antique; the artificial simplicity of composition; the bare background; the bas-relief style of treatment; the pseudo-purity which rejected natural feeling and action in favour of a conventionally ideal expression--these were precious gifts in Flaxman's eyes; to modern artists they will appear rather errors of judgment pertaining to a past school of art: false fas.h.i.+ons which the present generation of painters have happily outgrown and abandoned. At the same time, however, it should not be forgotten that the majority of Romney's works of this cla.s.s will bear comparison with the best productions of his contemporaries, and that some of them evince in a remarkable degree his grace of manner, skill in expression, and loftiness of aim.

As a portrait painter Romney will be more prized and remembered, although it is not likely that any existing connoisseurs will be found to proclaim themselves with Lord Thurlow, of 'the Romney faction,' as opposed to the school of Reynolds. In contrasting the works of the rival painters, it is easy to see that however close a race for fame they seemed to be running in their own time, there exists in truth a wide distance between the president of the Academy and 'the man in Cavendish Square.' It is not only that Romney had not the variety of Reynolds; that he could not give to portrait painting the new life with which Reynolds had so happily invested it:--he did not hit character nearly so well; he could not endow his sitters with the air of repose, ease, and elegance peculiar to the Reynolds portraits; he failed to give interest to his backgrounds, generally too near and flat, and heavily painted; and he had not Sir Joshua's success in subduing the eccentricities of costume of the day, and bestowing a certain grace and beauty upon even the most exuberant capes, cuffs, ruffles, wigs, cravats, and frills, prevalent a century ago. There is an air of _fas.h.i.+on_ about many of Romney's portraits as opposed to the look of _n.o.bility_, which is the especial attribute of Reynolds's pictures. In contemplating a Sir Joshua there will be found a propriety, an integrity about the work which effectually prevents all thought of the parts played by the tailor or the milliner at the toilet of the sitter. This is not always the case with Romney's portraits; pattern, and cut, and vogue do not fail to a.s.sert themselves. In colour Romney is very unequal; in his own day it was notoriously inferior to Reynolds's, though in spite of some instances of chalkiness and thinness, generally rich, pure, and l.u.s.trous. But the President's recourse to meretricious methods of obtaining beauty of tint has ruined the majority of his works, rendering their glories fleeting as photographs. Romney prudently adhered to a safer manner. Many of his pictures can even now be hardly less fresh and glowing in colour than when they first left his easel. His carnations and flesh tints are often singularly fine. His small portraits possess dignity, with force and manliness, however, rather than absolute ease or refinement. But his chief success was in his female heads. In quick and distinct appreciation of beauty he was not behind Reynolds; while, occasionally, he attained a certain poetic height of expression it would be difficult to parallel among Sir Joshua's works.

The fluctuation in fame which Romney has suffered has, of course, fallen to the fate of many of his professional brethren. We read, for instance, that Sir G.o.dfrey Kneller sometimes received in payment for a portrait a considerable sum in hard cash, with a couple of Rembrandt's thrown in by way of makeweight. Yet now a single specimen of Rembrandt exceeds in value a whole gallery of Knellers. And Rembrandt died insolvent, while Sir G.o.dfrey ama.s.sed a fortune! No one will dispute the justice of the reversal of judgment which has taken place; the elevation of Rembrandt at the expense of Kneller. But it may be a question whether George Romney has not been unfairly abased, even though it may be agreed on all hands that Sir Joshua Reynolds has not been unduly exalted. Possibly, however, when a man rises or is lifted up to a high pitch of celebrity, it is inevitable that he should in some degree mount upon the prostrate and degraded reputations of his contemporaries.

COSWAY, THE MINIATURE-PAINTER.

Biographers seem often to choose between two weaknesses. They are fond of a.s.serting that the hero of their narration comes in truth of a gentle stock, however the clouds of misfortune may for a time have veiled from general observation the glories of his family tree,--or, failing this, they take a sort of pride in dwelling upon and exaggerating the humbleness of his descent and condition. He is a somebody, or he is a n.o.body; a gentleman of distinguished origin or an utterly unknown creature with the vaguest views about his lineage: a waif of the wayside, a stray of the streets, his rise from obscurity to eminence being entirely attributable to his own intrinsic merits and exertions.

To this last-mentioned method of biographical treatment has been subjected Richard Cosway, painter and Royal Academician of the last century: a man of fame in his day, though that fame may not have come down to us in a very good state of preservation. The fact that in his prime he was a man of fas.h.i.+on, a 'personage' in society, the companion of princes, and an artist of eminence, has given a sort of impetus to the fancy of tracing him back to a vastly inferior state of life.

Writers dealing with the painter's story, and prepared to point to him presently as the occupant and ornament of a 'gilded saloon,' have found a preliminary pleasure in dilating upon his earlier and humbler position as an errand-boy in a drawing academy. The contrast was effective, picturesque--dramatic. Contemplate this scene of gloom and degradation; now turn to this other canvas, all suns.h.i.+ne and prosperity. Is not the comparison impressive? But then it ought to be true.

This black and white view of the vicissitudes of Cosway's career is due, in the first instance, to Mr. J.T. Smith, engraver, antiquarian, and author of the _Life of Nollekens_ and other books. Mr. s.h.i.+pley, from Northampton, brother of the Bishop of St. Asaph, and founder of the Society of Arts, had established a drawing school at No. 229 in the Strand. Cosway, when quite a lad, says Smith, obtained the notice of s.h.i.+pley, and was engaged by him to attend in the studio and carry to and fro the tea and coffee with which the housekeeper of the establishment was permitted to provide the students at a cost of threepence per head.

Nollekens and the father of Smith were among the students, and good-naturedly, the story goes on to say, gave the boy Richard Cosway instruction in drawing, and encouraged him to compete for the prizes he afterwards obtained from the Society of Arts. These particulars probably Smith obtained from his father or from Nollekens--if indeed they be not wholly due not so much to his own invention as to the confusion of names and misconception of incidents to which every one is liable who puts too great a strain upon his memory. Allan Cunningham, it may be observed, relates facts concerning Cosway's origin and youth which go far towards controverting the errand-boy episode in his life, as chronicled by Smith.

Richard Cosway was born in 1740, at Tiverton, in Devons.h.i.+re, a county singularly productive of famous artists, having given birth among others to Haydon, Northcote, and Reynolds. The father of Cosway was the master of the grammar-school at Tiverton: his uncle was for some time mayor; and the family, originally Flemish, and engaged in woollen manufactures, was possessed of considerable property in the town and neighbourhood. To the connexion of the Cosways with Flanders was ascribed their owners.h.i.+p of certain valuable works by Rubens, which first lit up a love of painting in the heart of young Cosway, and made him an idle schoolboy and an indefatigable artist. The master of Tiverton school was naturally indignant at the want of scholarly application of his son and pupil; was for birching him into better behaviour, forbidding him to ply his pencil at all under heavy penalties. The boy's uncle, the mayor, and a judicious friend and neighbour, one Mr. Oliver Peard, seem to have better appreciated the situation. They interposed on behalf of the young artist, and succeeded in obtaining for him permission to make drawings during such times as he could be spared from the grammar-school. But at last it appears to be agreed on all hands that the boy must close his books: he is wilful, and must have his way--become an artist: there is no hope whatever of his succeeding in any other line of life. He is to be humoured to the top of his bent. His pa.s.sion is to be cured by indulging it. If he succeeds--well and good,--there is nothing more to be said. If he fails, his failure will sober him, his friends argue: render him docile and tractable, obedient to parental commands for the future.

He was sent up to London, at thirteen, to study under Hudson, Reynolds's preceptor (and more remarkable on that account than on any other, though his merits as a portrait-painter are less contemptible than many suppose); all expenses were to be defrayed by the Mayor of Tiverton and kindly Mr. Oliver Peard. After a year under Hudson, young Cosway entered s.h.i.+pley's Academy, already mentioned. Probably he was a somewhat puny, insignificant-looking lad, and was therefore made the b.u.t.t and f.a.g of the robuster students, compelled to attend upon them and obey their behests, even to performing menial offices, just as younger boys do in other academies--for might is right in the world of school--and thus Mr.

Smith's errand-boy story may have originated. But it can be scarcely said to be substantiated by the further facts he proceeds to narrate: how that young Cosway in the course of a few years obtained no less than five premiums, some of five and one of ten guineas, from the Society of Arts: the first awarded when he was only fourteen years old, the last when he was under four-and twenty. The unskilled errand-boy could scarcely have received a prize instantly on his commencing to study.

Quitting s.h.i.+pley's, he became for a time a teacher at Parr's Drawing School, but was soon busily employed on his own account in supplying the jewellers' shops with miniature paintings on ivory; pretty heads and fancy subjects or mythological scenes to be framed with gold or set with diamonds; the beau of the day was incomplete without a costly snuff-box adorned with a lid, the prettiness of which, perhaps, somewhat surpa.s.sed its pudicity. Cosway seems to have been just the artist to supply a demand of this sort. He was industrious, fond of money,--but rather because it ministered to habits, which were inclined to be extravagant, than for any very sordid reasons--and was without high views as to his art. He did not mind debasing it a little, accommodating his friends the shopkeepers, and filling his own pockets. And his execution was very rapid and adroit; he could put just as much work into his subjects as would give them in uneducated eyes the effect of high finish, while in truth they occupied but little of his time, and provided him with most ample profits. But, if slight, they were certainly elegant; if not very pure in art, they were unquestionably pleasing to a large and important cla.s.s. The demand for specimens of Mr. Cosway's ingenious taste became at last almost in excess of his powers of supply.

First, by his snuff-box subjects, and afterwards by his portraits--on ivory or in red and black chalk--after the manner Bartolozzi had introduced--Cosway earned large sums. For many years he was reputed to have been in possession of a handsomer income than could be secured by the efforts of all his artist-brethren put together. But it must be said for him that he worked very hard. At the height of his fame he would sometimes boast as he sat down to dinner, that he had during the day despatched some twelve or fourteen sitters. He would often complete portraits at three sittings of half an hour each. But then his finish was of the slightest kind, and many of his miniatures can only be regarded, from a modern point of view, as tinted sketches, after allowance has been made for the perishable nature of the pigments he employed. He seems to have possessed a trick of enriching the colours of the eyes, lips, and cheeks of his sitters, by reducing every other hue in the picture to a cold blue-grey tone. By this system of violent contrast any hint of positive colour gained in warmth and brilliance to a remarkable degree. The miniature painter can hardly help improving and refining the subjects he deals with; for one reason, because the delicate nature of the material upon which he works, its exquisite surface and delicate texture, imparts a marked purity to all his tints.

The coa.r.s.est complexion gains in l.u.s.tre and smoothness when attempt is made to render it upon ivory; the dainty groundwork gleams through and gives beauty and clearness to the swarthiest hues. And then, in addition to this, Cosway had in full the portrait-painter's faculty of flattering his sitters. He could hardly fail to please them. He understood thoroughly how, while preserving a real resemblance, to catch the happiest expression; to subdue unattractive lines; to modify plain features; to conceal weaknesses; bringing out the really good points of a face; to light up dull eyes, and flush pale lips and cheeks. The faults of his portraits consist in their over-conscious graciousness; they smile and sparkle and are arch and winning to an excess that sometimes approaches inanity. And he was disposed, perhaps, to record the fas.h.i.+ons of his time with too intense insistence. There was a rage then, as we know, for a piling up on the head of all sorts of finery: feathers, lace, ribbons, velvet hats, mob-caps, and strings of pearls.

Cosway will hold back from us none of these adornments, rather he will force upon us a redundancy of them, and contemplating the aspects of the grandmothers and great-grandmothers of the present generation as they appear to us according to Cosway's art, we are led to the conclusion that the dear old ladies were in truth most killing coquettes, with quite an extravagant regard for the dictates of their fas.h.i.+on-books, and occupied by a pa.s.sion for ogling their fellow-creatures to an extent that was decidedly reprehensible.

But it must be allowed that Cosway suited his customers, and, moreover, in the main satisfied the art-demands of his period. However stern critics might censure, or rival painters scoff, his success was a.s.sured.

And in artistic facility and accuracy of drawing, when he cared to be particular in that respect, he could hardly be said to be behind his contemporaries. His copies from the antique were both graceful and correct, owing to his frequent practice in the Duke of Richmond's gallery, and his outlines received the fervent admiration of Bartolozzi and Cipriani. He tried his hand now and then at the high historic order of art of Barry and Fuseli, but his ambition was probably limited to a less pretentious range,--'the little pleasing paradise of miniature,' as Allan Cunningham phrases it; he cared rather for the caresses of the world of fas.h.i.+on than the applause of the cognoscenti. In society he was a power; for could he not by means of his pencil bestow, as it were, a certificate of beauty upon whom he would? Have not many of his sitters acquired, thanks to him, a reputation for good looks which has survived even to our day, and which, but for his skilful flattery, they never could have possessed at all? So, in drawing-rooms and boudoirs he was feted, and fondly greeted, and made much of, while plenty of money was slipped into his pocket, and so, according to one of his biographers, from the gold he gained and the gaiety of the company he kept, he rose from one of the dirtiest of boys to be one of the smartest of men.

He was, indeed, c.o.xcombical in his smartness. But then he lived in days when, among a large cla.s.s, a love of fine clothes had risen to quite a pa.s.sion. Patronized by the Prince of Wales, what could he do but imitate his patron--who was nothing if not 'dressy?' 'The Macaronis' were furnis.h.i.+ng the sensation of the hour. A party of young gentlemen who had made the grand tour had formed themselves into a club, and from their always having upon their table a dish of macaroni--a comestible then but little known in England--they acquired the name of the Macaroni Club; at least their name has been generally thus accounted for. The Macaroni Club was to the last century what Crockford's was to this. 'It was composed,' says Walpole, 'of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying gla.s.ses.' In matters of fas.h.i.+on the Macaronis claimed absolute supremacy. They ruled the world of _ton_--especially interesting themselves in toilet matters. To wear a style of dress that had not been sanctioned by the Macaroni Club was to be scouted as an outer barbarian. For a time everything was '_a la Macaroni_.' It became the phrase of the hour--springing into existence as suddenly, possessing the town as wholly, and disappearing at last as completely as such phrases always do. Of course Cosway must be in the fas.h.i.+on,--must chime in with the universal humour. He dressed in the height of the Macaroni vogue. His small plain person was to be seen in all public places clothed in a mulberry silk coat profusely embroidered with scarlet strawberries, with sword and bag and a small three-cornered hat perched on the top of his powdered toupee. He a.s.sumed a mincing, affected air--a tone of excessive refinement and exquisite sensibility. He pretended to an absurd superiority over his fellows, and striving to conceal his real and more honest situation as a hard-working artist, posed himself incessantly as a creature of fas.h.i.+on. Of course in the end he disgusted his brother painters, while he did not really conciliate 'the quality.'

The former scorned him, his fine clothes, splendid furniture, and black servants--the more satirical holding him up to ridicule in the shop windows, by laughable caricatures, such as 'The Macaroni Miniature Painter; or, Billy Dimple sitting for his picture:' the latter came to his feasts, drank his wines, won his money from him at hazard, stimulated his extravagance to the utmost, while they made mouths at him behind his back, and condemned in secret and among themselves the folly of his conduct. It must be said for the artist, however, that he toiled earnestly and successfully to make his professional earnings keep pace in some sort with his lavish private habits. Cipriani used to relate, that after whole nights had been wasted by Cosway in the most frivolous and worthless of pursuits, he was yet to be found at an early hour in his studio, sedulously toiling to redeem lost time and money, very penitent for the past, full of the best intentions for the future: all of course to be abandoned and forgotten when the evening came, the chandeliers were lighted, the cards strewed the table, and the world of society gathered round him in his drawing-room again.

A less honest source of emolument than his own pencil provided, Cosway found in helping to supply the demand then existing for specimens of the old masters. The love of the connoisseurs for ancient art, even to its most suspicious examples, had survived the satire of Hogarth and the indignation of Barry. The patrons of the day were warmer friends to the picture-dealers than to the painters. Modern works of any pretence were at an alarming discount: the productions of the past were at high premium. Cosway skilfully contrived to reap profits in the double capacity of dealer and painter. He joined the ranks of those whom Barry, in a tone of bitter complaint, describes as 'artful men both at home and abroad [who] have not failed to avail themselves of this pa.s.sion for ancient art ... for vending in the name of those great masters the old copies, imitations, and studies of all the obscure artists that have been working in Italy, France, and other places, for two hundred years past.' Cosway went into the market of doubtful old masters, and purchased largely; about many of his specimens there was probably no doubt whatever. These he repaired, re-touched, re-varnished, re-framed, and sold for good prices, as 'masterpieces of ancient art,' to such n.o.ble and gentle patrons as had galleries to fill, or walls to cover, and money to part with. This method of proceeding was doubtless profitable rather than honourable. Cosway's apologists--Hazlitt among them--say for him, that he was 'Fancy's child,' the dupe of his own deceptions, that he really believed in the genuineness, the pure originality of the old masters he had with his own hand worked upon, almost past identification. But self deception which is so decidedly a source of profit to the deceiver has, to say the least of it, a suspicious element about it.

Cosway at first occupied a house in Orchard Street, Portman Square; but as his income improved, he moved to No. 4 Berkeley Street, opposite the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re's wall, and at that time, according to Smith, he was attended by a negro servant remarkable for having published an octavo volume on the subject of slavery. It was in Berkeley Street that Cosway was first noticed by the Prince of Wales and his royal brothers, whose liberal patronage of the painter brought him into fas.h.i.+onable and general estimation. He was appointed painter in ordinary to the Prince; and in 1771 he was elected a Royal Academician.

Cosway married Maria Hatfield, the daughter of an Englishman who had made a fortune by keeping an hotel at Leghorn. There is a tinge of tragedy about the lady's story. Four elder children had been secretly murdered by a half insane maid-servant, whose crime remained undiscovered until she was overheard threatening the life of the child Maria. Upon interrogation, the murderess confessed her guilt, and was condemned to imprisonment for life. Other children were subsequently born to the Hatfields. Charlotte, who lived to become the unhappy wife of Coombe, the author of Dr. Syntax, and a son, afterwards known as an artist of some promise. Maria Hatfield was educated in a convent, where she learnt music and drawing. Subsequently she studied painting at Rome, and there made the acquaintance of Battoni, Maron, Fuseli, Wright of Derby, and other artists. Upon her father's death she had resolved to return to the cloister; but her mother brought her on a visit to London, and a friends.h.i.+p she then formed with the popular Angelica Kauffman induced her finally to renounce all idea of a nun's life. Soon she became the wife of Richard Cosway. The marriage took place at St.

George's, Hanover Square; Charles Townley, of Townley Marble celebrity, giving away the bride.

She possessed beauty,--she was a fair Anglo-Italian with profuse golden hair--talent, and money. The year of her marriage she exhibited certain highly-admired miniatures at the Royal Academy. Her fame spread. The youth, the loveliness, the genius of Mrs. Cosway became town talk. Her husband's house was thronged with people of fas.h.i.+on who came to see, admire the lady artist, and purchase specimens of her art. But Cosway, probably from pride, though it might be from an acute perception of the greater advantages to be derived from reserve in such a matter, would not permit his wife to paint professionally. A favoured few might now and then become the possessors of some slight sketches by Mrs. Cosway; occasionally she might honour a lady of rank by painting her portrait; but Mrs. Cosway's ability, it was to be distinctly understood, was not placed at the service of the general public. Of course this exclusive system enhanced the market value of the lady's works considerably, and while the majority of people were lauding Mr. Cosway as a husband too fond and indulgent to permit his sweet wife to ruin her health by hara.s.sing work at her easel, a judicious minority were perhaps doing Mr.

Cosway stricter justice in accounting him a very cunning pract.i.tioner indeed, in the way of making the most of Mrs. Cosway's talent.

For this, it must be said, however, that as the times went, it did not really need such careful nursing; it was strong enough, or very nearly so, to run alone: it was of a highly respectable order. The lady possessed poetic feeling, with considerable artistic facility. Her sketches of scenes from Spenser, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Homer compare not unfavourably with the designs of many of her contemporaries. And her portraits were of real merit; one of the fair d.u.c.h.ess of Devons.h.i.+re, painted as the Cynthia of Spenser, extorted unbounded admiration from the critics and connoisseurs of the period.

From Berkeley Street Cosway removed to the south side of Pall Mall, occupying part of the large mansion originally erected by the Duke of Schomberg--that 'citizen of the world,' as Macaulay calls him, who was made a Duke, a Knight of the Garter, and Master of the Ordnance by William the Third, and falling by his master's side at the battle of the Boyne, was, according to Lord Macaulay, buried in Westminster Abbey; but, in truth, it would seem that his remains were deposited in the Cathedral of St. Patrick, Dublin, Dean Swift and the Chapter erecting there a monument to his memory, and the Dean writing _more suo_ a sarcastic epitaph[15] on the heirs who had neglected to do their duty by their great ancestor. Schomberg House--after the Duke's death divided into three separate houses, and still existing, though in a somewhat changed and mutilated form, part of it being now occupied by the War Office--has sheltered many artists of fame under its roof. Here Jervas painted--the pupil of Kneller, and the admired of Pope, whose deformity the painter in his portrait of the poet did his best to mend and conceal; here lived mad Jack Astley, who made so prosperous a marriage with the rich Lady Duckenfield; and Nathaniel Hone, the Royal Academician, retaining on the premises a negress model, famous for her exquisite symmetry of form; then Cosway--and, greatest of all, Thomas Gainsborough, dying in an upper room on the 2d of August 1778. In the s.p.a.cious saloons of Schomberg House, Cosway thought he should find ample room and verge enough both for himself and his fas.h.i.+onable friends.

[15] This epitaph may be read in Mr. Samuel Lucas's _Secularia; or, Surveys on the Mainstream of History_, p. 293.

And room was becoming very necessary; for Mrs. Cosway's receptions were now the town rage--were crowded to inconvenience. They were marked by what was then a speciality; though it has since become a common enough characteristic of such a.s.semblies. 'Lions' were to be met with there--literary, artistic, and otherwise. The last new poets, painters, players, were to be seen with their honours in their newest gloss; the latest discoverers, navigators, and travellers--freshly escaped from s.h.i.+pwreck or cannibals--the rising stars of the House of Commons--anybody and everybody of the least note, with the provision, possibly, that they should be 'elegant and ingenious,'--these thronged the charming Mrs. Cosway's drawing-rooms. The elect of society, for the first time on the same floor and under the same roof, met and shook hands, deriving a curious piquant sort of pleasure from the proceeding, with--_Bohemia_; the word must be used, though not an agreeable one, much misused and liable to be misinterpreted, and above all, though in the Cosway period it was altogether unknown and unheard of. Especially were to be noted among the guests the Whig adherents of the Prince of Wales, the politicians of the buff and blue school: little Cosway, busy in the midst of them, attempting a statesman-like att.i.tude, sympathizing with revolution, and affecting to discover in the convulsions of the French nation the dawn of an empire of reason and taste, in which genius and virtue alone would be honoured. Possibly the painter expressed too unreservedly his views in these respects. A prince may be permitted to masquerade as a _proletaire_; but for a bystander to talk red republicanism to a royal heir-apparent is rather doubtful taste, to say the least of it. By-and-by wild Prince Hal came to power, and shrunk from his old a.s.sociates. The Regent abandoned his buff and blue friends, looked coldly upon his whilom political companions: withdrawing his favour from Cosway among the rest. The painter troubled himself little about the matter. He was too proud or too indifferent to make any effort to regain the royal patronage. If he had done little to merit its bestowal upon him in the first instance, certainly he had done nothing to deserve its withdrawal from him at last.

A frequent guest at Mrs. Cosway's during the last ten years of his life was Horace Walpole, very pleased at receiving 'little Italian notes of invitation' from the winning lady. He relates to the Countess of Ossory, in 1786, his meeting 'la Chevaliere d'Eon,' after many years' interval, at Mrs. Cosway's. He found 'la Chevaliere' noisy and vulgar; 'in truth,'

he writes, 'I believe she had dined a little _en dragon_. The night was hot, she had no m.u.f.f or gloves, and her hands and arms seem not to have partic.i.p.ated of the change of s.e.xes, but are fitter to carry a chair than a fan.' At another time he admits: 'Curiosity carried me to a concert at Mrs. Cosway's--not to hear Rubinelli, who sang one song at the extravagant price of ten guineas, and whom, for as many s.h.i.+llings, I have heard sing half-a-dozen at the Opera House; no, but I was curious to see an English Earl [Cowper] who had pa.s.sed thirty years at Florence, and who is more proud of a pinchbeck princ.i.p.ality and a paltry order from Wirtemberg than he was of being a peer of Great Britain when Great Britain was something.' Elsewhere he speaks admiringly of Mrs. Cosway, and describes her reception as a Diet at which representatives of all the princes of Europe a.s.semble.

From Pall Mall Cosway moved to a larger mansion at the south-west corner of Stratford Place, Oxford Street. A carved stone lion stood on guard at the entrance--a fact which incited some wag to affix to the door the following lines, generally attributed to Peter Pindar:--

'When a man to a fair for a show brings a lion, 'Tis usual a monkey the sign-post to tie on.

But here the old custom reversed is seen, For the lion's without, and the monkey's within.'

According to Smith, a certain ape-like look in Cosway's face in a measure justified the satire. Irritated by the attack, the painter moved once more--to No. 20 in the same street.

Dr. Wolcot (Peter Pindar), who had been busy throwing mud and stones at the Royal Academicians, did not of course spare either Cosway or his wife. In the lines beginning--

'Fie, Cosway! I'm ashamed to say, Thou own'st the t.i.tle of R.A.'

he recommends the painter to find some more honest calling, and bids Mrs. Cosway mend s.h.i.+rts and stockings, and mind her kitchen, rather than expose her daubs to the public. Then, as though repenting of his rudeness, he proceeds:--

'Muse, in this criticism I fear Thou really hast been too severe: Cosway paints miniatures with decent spirit, And Mrs. Cosway boasts some trifling merit.'

The furniture and fittings of Cosway's house in Stratford Place seem to have been of a most extravagant kind. He surrounded himself with suits of armour, Genoa velvet, mother-of-pearl, ebony and ivory, carving and gilding. His rooms were crowded with mosaic cabinets set with jasper, bloodstone, and lapis-lazuli, ormolu escritoires, buhl chiffoniers, j.a.panese screens, ma.s.sive musical clocks, damask ottomans, with Persian carpets and Pompadour rugs on the floor, and costly tapestries on the walls; enamelled caskets set with onyxes, rubies, opals, and emeralds loaded the tables; the chimney-pieces, sculptured by Banks, were decked with bronzes, cut-gla.s.s, models in wax and terra-cotta, Nankin, Dresden, and Worcester china: altogether the place must have been quite a broker's paradise. Yet the painter was immensely proud of it; never seemed to weary of adding new curiosities to his overcrowded collection.