Subscribe
Bluesky
X-twitter

Sketches Taken at Print Sales
by Paul Sandby (1731–1809), 1798

The stories the sitters tell

 

 

Robert G Walker

 

 

 

The British Museum holds an etching by Paul Sandby (1731–1809) entitled Sketches Taken at Print Sales (1798), depicting the portrait heads of 54 men (Pl 1).[1] As the BM website explains in prefatory remarks to its identification of the subjects, there are two different contemporary sources for identifying the men depicted, sources which are usually but not always in agreement. These are, first, the annotations on the etching itself, and, secondly, other annotations (not in Sandby’s hand) on the ‘thumbnail drawings made by Paul Sandby in the margins of print sale catalogues of the 1780s, now in an album in the Royal Library’ at Windsor Castle, from which drawings the etching was compiled.[2]

 

A group of men's faces Description automatically generated

 

1 Sketches Taken at Print Sales (1798) by Paul Sandby (1731–1809), 1798. Etching, 23 x 36.2 cm. British Museum

 

 

The curator at the BM responsible for the explanations has done an admirable job, first in transcribing the annotations found on the etching, then in providing an alphabetical list of the sitters’ names based on the ‘identifications on the print, and giv[ing] additional information from annotations at Windsor and the BM’. In only five cases are we left with the bare annotation and then told ‘no further identification’ has been made. This essay discusses several common characteristics of the society formed by those attending print auctions in the late 18th century and, in addition, identifies three of the five previously mysterious portraits.

As we might expect, those attending print sales were often artists themselves, or those who otherwise made their living in the print business (eg, print publishers and print dealers), but ‘collectors’ were also well represented, and their collecting often was not limited to art. For example, Sandby has depicted ‘Baker’, that is, ‘Mr. Baker of St. Paul’s Cross’. George Baker was by profession a lace merchant but also ‘known as a print collector and bibliophile’. Similarly, ‘Mr Combes numismatist’ is the physician Charles Combes. In other words, attendee collectors would fit often into the related categories of antiquarian and connoisseur, and as such were sometimes the object of satiric characterization in other pictorial works of the period. In fact, three of the 54 men in Sandby’s etching also appear as three of the five figures in James Gillray’s Connoisseurs examining a collection of George Morland’s (1807): George Baker (just mentioned); banker Matthew Mitchell; and wine merchant Caleb Whitefoord. Baker also perhaps appears as one of four figures in Thomas Rowlandson’s Connoisseurs (1799) (Pl 2, Pl 3).

A group of men looking at pictures Description automatically generated2 Connoisseurs Examining a Collection of George Morland’s by James Gillray (1756–1815), 1807.
Print, 37.7 x 30.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

A group of people looking at a picture of a naked baby Description automatically generated

 

3 Connoisseurs by Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), 1799. Hand-coloured etching, 27.2 x 21.4 cm.
Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

A few more details about Baker are in order, if not for his particular importance, for the typicality of his life as a collector. His obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine for February 1811 – he was born in 1747 – suggests how a collector was often expansive in his interests while highly focused on living the life of a collector: ‘Early in life he shewed a taste for the Arts, and afterwards became a zealous and liberal collector of drawings and engravings, and of many valuable works of literature… This pursuit engaged much of the time that could be spared from business; and together with the society of certain eminent artists, formed the chief source of his pleasures.’ An anecdote in the work of the bibliographer Thomas F Didbin (1776–1847), who was sometimes inaccurate in his scholarly work but entertaining in his playful digressions, fits well into our story of Baker. The second, expanded edition of Didbin’s Bibliomania (1811) satirizes Baker anonymously as ‘QUISQUILIUS;–a victim to the Bibliomania’. Baker’s fondness for inadvertently created rarities is skewered: ‘If one single copy of a work happen to be printed in a more particular manner… and if the compositor (clever rogue!) happen to have transposed or inverted a whole sentence… –oh, then, thrice happy is Quisquilius!’[3] Didbin notes Baker’s range of collecting (‘he devotes no small portion of wealth to the accumulation of Prints; and can justly boast of a collection of which few of his contemporaries are possessed’) and his quarrelsomeness toward other collectors (‘let Quisquilius enjoy his hobby horse, even to the riding of it to death! But… let not foolish prejudices, or unmanly suspicions, rankle in his breast: authors and book-collectors are sometimes as enlightened as himself, and have cultivated pursuits equally honourable’ (p168). After Baker’s death, Didbin softened further his portrait of Quisquilius in his Bibliographical Decameron (1817), where he is placed in ‘the death-train of Book-Auction-loving Bibliomaniacs’ and named specifically in a footnote: ‘His forte lay in priced-catalogues … proof impressions of fine engravings, and a knowledge of Morland’s paintings’,[4] and this taste for George Morland’s work led, Didbin tells us, to Baker’s being ridiculed in an etching.

Didbin’s narrative at this point is second-hand, which may account for a bit of confusion: ‘He [Baker] was once introduced into a caricature print; but the tremulous sensibility of our collector, within a very few days, swept the copies out of all the shop-windows – for he was resolved not to be graphically lampooned. My friend Mr. Haslewood tells me the likeness was very strong. He was drawn in the act of looking through a glass at some choice morceau of Morland’s pencil’ (p12).

Connoisseurs were frequently satirized, both in words and in images, for examining a picture through a magnifying lens or ‘glass’, but in neither of the best-known prints that include Baker is he so depicted.[5] In Gillray’s Connoisseurs Examining a Collection of George Morland’s (Pl 2) he is standing, second from the right, and the only satiric element – beyond the general attack on Morland’s rustic-animal subject matter – may be what an eagle-eyed BM curator has spotted, namely, the word ‘pig’ written on the catalogue he holds. A far more forceful and direct satire appears in Rowlandson’s Connoisseurs (Pl 3). I suggest here that Baker is the right-hand figure of the three standing, again without a glass and with a leer that implies a prurient rather than artistic enjoyment; although the subject of the gaze (Aphrodite and Cupid) seems not one typically associated with Morland, unlike the pigs in Gillray’s Connoisseurs. Rather than positing a third, unknown, print depicting Baker, I suggest that Didbin simply got the details of the anecdote a bit wrong, conflating these two prints with the more general satiric treatment of the connoisseur. Baker’s prickly personality argues for the overall truth of the event, and he probably was reacting to Rowlandson’s work. Collectors, we must assume, were aware of and sensitive to how their images might be used to ridicule them. In this regard, I have referred, conventionally, to the 54 men in Sandby’s etching as ‘sitters’, even though none of them likely had ‘sat’ for the original sketches. It is interesting to compare the portrait that George Baker did sit for, painted by his friend Ozias Humphry; a line engraving after it by Thomas Bragg appeared as the frontispiece for the sale catalogue of Baker’s collection in 1825 (Pl 4).[6]

 

A portrait of a person Description automatically generated

 

4 George Baker by Ozias Humphry (1742–1810), 1794?, engraved by Thomas Bragg. Frontispiece of the 1825 Sales Catalogue of Baker’s collection

 

 

Gillray’s and Rowlandson’s works are clearly satirical: the figures in both cases are so representative as to be identified, but it is their activities that are the subject of ridicule. On the other hand, Sandby, whose previous work had at times been highly satirical,[7] is not satirical at all in Sketches Taken at Print Sales, perhaps because he is limiting himself only to the heads of the figures, perhaps because those portrayed were friends or potential buyers. As Edward Croft-Murray wrote in a review of Oppé’s Drawings of Paul and Thomas Sandby at Windsor Castle, ‘His favourite subjects are the men and women with whom he came into daily contact, many sketches being excellent portraits’.[8] Even without the satirical backdrop, the contemporary annotations we find on both the antecedent thumbnail sketches and the etching suggest that in pursuing the identities of the figures, we are doing no more than what was being done when the images first appeared.

Scholars have productively engaged in such pursuits, especially for satirical portraits. An excellent recent example is Bradford K Mudge’s ‘Gazing Games: Portraits and Satire in Rowlandson’s Connoisseurs’,[9] in which Mudge moves from the identification of two of the four figures in the print (Sir Joshua Reynolds and Francesco Bartolozzi) to a convincing argument about Rowlandson’s larger satirical target. He regards the other two figures merely as anonymous comic types while above I tentatively identified one of those two as George Baker. Mudge’s summary of ‘what art historians have called the “gazing game” of late-eighteenth-century portraiture in which spectators were delighted by the challenges of recognizing the who, what, and why of the likenesses before them’ (p164) suggests that pleasures were to be found broadly in such identifications; the annotations to Sandby’s etching argue that such pleasures extended beyond satire.

The three portraits that I believe we can now identify – beyond these brief annotations provided on the Sandby etching – are of ‘Davenport of the Strand,’ ‘Wilson a Gunsmith,’ and ‘Woodhall’ (Pl 5, Pl 6, Pl 7).

 

A close-up of a person's face Description automatically generated

 

5 John Davenport (?1719–1789). Detail from Sandby’s Sketches Taken at Print Sales

 

 

A drawing of a person's face Description automatically generated

 

6 William Wilson (1732–1808). Detail from Sandby’s Sketches Taken at Print Sales

 

 

A drawing of a person's face Description automatically generated

 

7 ‘Woodhall’ [Michael Wodhull]. Detail from Sandby’s Sketches Taken at Print Sales

 

A portrait of a person Description automatically generated

 

8 Michael Wodhull by William Nelson Gardiner (1766–1814), 1801, engraved by Edward Harding.
Frontispiece to Wodhull’s Poems

 

 

John Davenport (?1719–1789) was a wealthy woollen merchant whose business address near the end of his life was 432 Strand. Davenport & Gilpin was a prosperous enterprise that had lucrative contracts to supply military uniforms. I am sceptical of the assertion in a genealogical website that Davenport wrote Rules for Bad Horsemen. Addressed to the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (London 1762), but he certainly was the ‘John Davenport, of the Strand, Woollen-Draper’, whose name appeared among many in the List of the Members of the Corporation of the Amiable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office (London 1776, p9). Perhaps the large cash bequests he made to his wife and children upon his death were in part the result of this early version of a life insurance policy.[10]

Davenport’s will singles out some items (‘China’, ‘plate’, and, notably, ‘pictures’) but there is nothing to suggest he was a prolific collector of prints, and the same can be said of ‘Wilson a Gunsmith’, who is certainly William Wilson (1732–1808), the middle principal in a three-generation family business quite well known in the century. He followed in the footsteps of his father Richard Wilson (1702–1766) as a prolific gun manufacturer, selling often to North America, and he supervised the business from 1766 to 1806, when he was succeeded by his son, also named William (1765–1837). I owe most of the information I have about the Wilsons from the research of firearm historians, one of whom refers to the Wilsons’ company as ‘the largest single gunmaking firm in London until at, the very least, the final decades of the 18th Century’.[11]

My third proposed identification may at first seem much less certain that those of Davenport and Wilson. With the clearly-written surname ‘Woodhall’ on the etching (see Pl 7), it may seem perverse guesswork to suggest that the sitter was the well-known book collector, and translator of Euripides, Michael Wodhull of Thenford (1740–1816). Certainly Michael spelled his surname Wodhull – and so signed his will – but the surnames Woodhall and Wodhull were related etymologically and the century’s relative lack of attention to orthography may be reflected in the etching’s caption. That second parties were casual in the spelling of surnames, even those of their benefactors, I found quite common as I studied the subscribers to the works of Laurence Sterne. But why is this particular Wodhull a very good possibility? Two reasons. First, let us turn to a posthumous publication by John Thomas Smith, known as ‘Antiquity’ Smith (1766–1833), a painter, engraver, and antiquarian, who served from 1816 until his death as the keeper of prints for the British Museum.

Smith wrote A Book for a Rainy Day: or, Recollections of the Events of the Last Sixty-Six Years (London 1845) which includes, among many other things, a gossipy but first-hand description of the ‘frequenters of print sales’ in London in the 1780s. At one sale in particular in 1783, Smith describes in detail the characteristics of several attendees, including a significant number found also among the 54 men etched by Sandby: in 14 pages we find verbal sketches of Whiteford, Baillie, Baker, Woodhouse, Mitchell, and Wodhull.[12] This suggests to me that the coterie-nature of those attending print auctions cannot be over-estimated, and that Wodhull, whom all standard biographies emphasize as an eminent book collector, attended art auctions as well, and quite often.[13] Smith describes him as ‘very thin, with a long nose and thick lips; of manners perfectly gentlemanly. The great singularity of his appearance arose, perhaps, from his closing his coat from the first button, immediately under his chin, to the last, nearly extending to the bottom of his deep-flap waistcoat-pockets’. He was taciturn and a highly disciplined bidder: ‘Though he frequently went away without purchasing a single lot, or even speaking to any one during the whole evening, he always took off his hat, and bowed low to the company before he left the auction-room’ (98–99). Fortunately, we have visual evidence further to support our identification, beyond ‘very thin, with a long nose and thick lips’. A portrait of Wodhull by William Nelson Gardiner and engraved by Edward Harding is the frontispiece for the revised edition of Wodhull’s Poems published in 1804. The sitter is a match for the detail from Sandy’s Sketches Taken at Print Sales (compare Pl 7, Pl 8).

To what purpose might these three additional identifications be directed? Their origin in the margins of sales catalogues suggests Sandby approached them first of all as potential buyers or customers – hence the absence of characterization. The ridicule of ‘connoisseurship’ in the 18th century perhaps reached its acme of humour in Laurence Sterne’s dismissal of them all: ‘The whole set of ’em are so hung round and befetish’d with the bobs and trinkets of criticism… that a work of genius had better go to the devil at once, than stand to be prick’d and tortured to death by ’em.’[14] But the woollen draper and gunmaker should remind us that for the rising merchant class in 18th-century Britain, an investment in art works was one certain sign of success. (Here Michael Wodhull, whose substantial wealth was inherited, is an exception.) Their very success in business, moreover, would indicate their shared awareness that where one invested one’s money required the most careful study and deliberation if it were to produce substantial reward. The connoisseurs portrayed by Gillray, Rowlandson, and others are sometimes humorous to be sure, but if one pictured them instead as studying a spreadsheet or annual report, their absorbed devotion to detail would be somewhat more acceptable. The modern plutocrat, with several canvases by Picasso or Cézanne stashed in a vault, would fully understand their dedication.

In addition to Davenport and Wilson and the aforementioned Baker, Mitchell, and Whitefoord, several other sitters were members of the rising merchant class. These include Charles Asgill (banker), John Woodhouse (banker), and Mr. Moore, ‘collector of Rembrandts… formerly linen draper in York’, whom we can now further identify as James Moore (1762–1799).[15] But we should always keep in mind that categories may be both overlapping and porous, as witnessed by sitter ‘Goodison’, glossed by the BM as ‘Benjamin Goodison junior, the cabinet maker.’ He had succeeded his father, also named Benjamin, in the family business, and the former also produced noteworthy picture frames, thus suggesting a commercial association with print publishers and print dealers.[16] The father then, and perhaps the son, may have been studying prints both as potential purchasing investors and, since ornamental frames would be considered an enhancement of value, for a business connection in the world of art sales. A good carpenter would be yet one additional cog in the cognoscenti world illustrated by Paul Sandby.

This essay has focused on details about the sitters in Sketches Taken at Print Sales and has argued that from those details conclusions may be drawn about the social makeup of the world of print auctions. Finally, I would like to put away my connoisseur’s magnifying glass, or perhaps substitute a wide-angle lens, so that I might suggest how Sandby’s etching fits into a larger pattern in the art history of the century.

It is well known that Sandby satirized in some of his early work the dominant figure of his day, William Hogarth (1697–1764). It seems very likely, then, that he – like any major artist of his time – would have been familiar with Hogarth’s Characters and Caricaturas (Pl 9), in which, as Constance C McPhee succinctly puts it, the artist ‘warn[ed] against what he saw as a debased foreign form’, that is, the caricatures done by Italian artists.[17]

 

A close-up of a collage of faces Description automatically generated

 

9 Characters and Caricaturas by William Hogarth (1697–1764), 1743. Etching, 27.7 x 22.4 cm.
Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

She continues about the Hogarth work: ‘Further examples of character are provided by a cloudlike arrangement of profiled male heads in a tiered format resembling that of a caricature drawing by Agostino Carracci… although the influence is not acknowledged.’ The phrase ‘cloudlike arrangement of profiled male heads’ is a wonderful description of the top section of Hogarth’s work, a conception that Hogarth may well have borrowed from Carracci (Pl 10).[18]

 

A group of sketches of men Description automatically generated

 

10 Sheet of Caricature Heads by Agostino Carracci (1557–1602), 1594. Pen and ink on paper, 20.2 x 28 cm.
The Henry Barber Trust. Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham

 

 

Sandby’s arrangement in his 1798 composite of individual portraits taken from the margins of print catalogues, while completely lacking the polemical message of the lower part of the Hogarth, otherwise seems clearly indebted, in its turn, to Hogarth’s etching of 1743.

 

 

  1. For a copy of the etching, see https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1876-1209-612. The museum number is 1876,1209.612. All quotations in this essay otherwise unidentified are from this website. The website says there are 55 portraits, but this is an error for fifty-four. I wish to thank Professor Melvyn New for helpful suggestions in relation to an earlier version of this essay. ↑
  2. For information on the thumbnail drawings, the website references AP Oppé, The Drawings of Paul and Thomas Sandby at Windsor Castle, London and New York 1947), pp83–85. ↑
  3. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania: Or Book Madness, London 1811, pp167–168. Hereafter cited in the text. ↑
  4. TF Dibdin, The Bibliographical Decameron: Or, Ten Days Pleasant Discourse Upon Illuminated Manuscripts, And Subjects Connected With Early Engraving, Typography, And Bibliography, London 1817), III, p11. Hereafter cited in the text. ↑
  5. For the trope in poetry see the discussion of James Robertson’s ‘The Connoisseur’ (1770) in Robert G Walker, ‘The Painted Fly and the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century British Literature’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 86 (2023), pp347–354; for examples in painting see Harry Mount, ‘The Monkey with the Magnifying Glass: Constructions of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Oxford Art Journal, 29 (2006), pp167–184. ↑
  6. A Catalogue of the Very Choice and Select Library of the Late George Baker, London 1825, frontispiece. ↑
  7. For a good recent and detailed study of this aspect of Sandby’s art, see Ann V Gunn, ‘The Fire of Faction: Sources for Paul Sandby’s Satires of 1762–63’, Print Quarterly, 34 (2017), pp400–418. ↑
  8. Edward Croft-Murray, review of AP Oppé, The Drawings of Paul and Thomas Sandby at Windsor Castle, in Burlington Magazine, XC (April 1948), pp120–121. ↑
  9. Bradford K Mudge, ‘Gazing Games: Portraits and Satire in Rowlandson’s Connoisseurs’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 55 (2022), pp163–189. Hereafter cited in the text. ↑
  10. Will of John Davenport, Woollen Draper of Strand, Middlesex. The National Archives reference PROB 11/1181/246. ↑
  11. See DeWitt Bailey II, ‘The Wilsons: Gunmakers to Empire, 1730–1832’, https://americansocietyofarmscollectors.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2002-B85-The-Wilsons-Gunmakers-to-Empire-1730-183.pdf. Reprinted from the American Society of Arms Collectors Bulletin, 85 (April 2002), pp11–24. ↑
  12. John Thomas Smith, A Book for a Rainy Day: or, Recollections of the Events of the Last Sixty-Six Years, London 1845, pp91–104. Hereafter cited in the text. ↑
  13. For additional contemporary anecdotal information about Wodhull, especially as a book collector, see Dibdin, The Bibliographical Decameron, III, pp363–367. ↑
  14. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, III, ch 12. ↑
  15. For a short biography of James Moore, see https://thomasgirtin.com/collection/biographies/2578/page/1. ↑
  16. See ‘British Picture Framemakers, 1600–1950’ at the National Portrait Gallery London website, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/research/programmes/conservation/directory-of-british-framemakers/g/. ↑
  17. Constance C McPhee and Nadine M Orenstein, Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine, New Haven: Metropolitan Museum and Yale University Press, 2011), p32. Subsequent quotations from this page. ↑
  18. Robin Simon makes this specific comparison and also points to Hogarth’s wider knowledge of the Carracci in Hogarth, France and British Art: The rise of the arts in eighteenth-century Britain, London 2007, p8. ↑

 

 

 

Download as PDF
Subscribe