The English Print 1688-1802

English prints have recently been the subject of intense scholarly interest; over the past four years, a cluster of significant, useful, and beautifully illustrated books have appeared on this once-neglected subject. The most important of these books are Antony Griffiths's The Print in Stuart Britain 1603-1689 and Sheila O'Connell's The Popular Print in England 1550-1850, both published by the British Museum Press; Mark Hallett's The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth, Diana Donald's The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III, and Timothy Clayton's The English Print 1688-1802, all published by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Griffiths's magisterial Print in Stuart Britain, written with the collaboration of Robert Gerard, is the first systematic, comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century British print making. O'Connell's Popular Print studies inexpensive, mass-produced images sold in large numbers to a wide public. Looking beyond Hogarth, Hallett's Spectacle of Difference interprets a wide range of graphic satires sold as artistic (rather than quasi-literary) products and circulated in London's print market during the first half of the eighteenth century. Focusing on the second half of the 1700s and the early decades of the following century, Donald's Satirical Prints analyzes the nature and scope of graphic satires, especially political satires, as complex pictorial artifacts.

Clayton's English Print, the subject of this review, is a broadly conceived study of prints, print selling, and collecting in eighteenth-century England from 1688 to 1802. It describes the publication and distribution of foreign and domestic images, outlining the structure of the trade and identifying its chief participants. It also treats changing fashions in collecting, using, and displaying prints. Finally, it traces all too briefly some of their principal themes: fruits and flowers, fowl and fish, sporting subjects (including cricket), amorous and erotic subjects, naval campaigns, architecture, antiquities, topography, and rural scenes. Quite reasonably, it gives abridged coverage to satires and portraits, which have been disproportionately well-served by previous scholarship. It also says little about the meaning or interpretation of images, either in general or with regard to particular engravings.

The book is arranged chronologically and divided into three sections that offer separate surveys of print producers, sellers, and buyers operating under very different conditions at different periods. Part I treats the interval between 1688 and 1730, when the print market in England was dominated by imported designs; these images were chiefly recent publications from France and Italy executed by craftsmen like Nicolas Dorigny, Bernard Picart, and Pietro Aquila. This section of the study also records the first efforts to publish, often by subscription, the so-called "curiosities of Britain": these include engraved or etched reproductions of historical portraits, buildings, gardens, antiquities, but especially old master paintings by Rubens, Raphael, Poussin, and Le Brun. The publication of these possessions displayed the artistic wealth of England for patriotic virtuosi who wished to advertise the glories of ancient and modern Britain so that the nation might take its rightful place beside Italy and France. Part I ends with an account of the changes in the print trade that happened about 1730 and later, when a marked increase occurred in the publication of commercial prints designed by English craftsmen. These engravings and etchings were produced by native print sellers and artists, rivals whose frequent animosities resulted in the Engraving Copyright Act of 1735, the so-called "Hogarth Act," which protected craftsmen from the depredations of piratical publishers.

Part II covers the period from 1730 to 1770, when print selling businesses in London were on the increase and the trade in English designs began to quicken and spread, first to the provinces and then to the continent. It surveys print shops and engravers working in the middle decades of the century, looks at the full range of decorative or instructive images they produced, and discusses the purchasers of these luxury goods--a wide public that, in place of state or royal patrons, provided collective and enthusiastic sponsorship for the enterprises of artists and publishers. Part II also looks at English print makers as fledgling contributors to the graphic arts of continental Europe. Although London in 1688 was a backward outpost in the international print market, publishing little that would have been taken seriously by Dutch, French, or Italian buyers, that situation began to change in the early eighteenth century. (One obvious exception is Marcellus Laroon's Cryes of the City of London drawne after the Life published by Pierce Tempest in 1687 and sold with captions in three languages: English, French, and Italian.) Increasingly indigenous craftsmen served an international market, documenting the classical and modern arts of Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, or providing views of the beauties of Wales and England, most notably, British buildings, gardens, statues, and paintings.

The last section of Part II treats the stormy, productive period between 1750 and 1775, when the founding of the Society of Artists, the Society of Arts, and the Royal Academy stimulated craftsmen to engrave increasingly fashionable English paintings, which laid the foundations for what was soon to be called the "English school." During this turbulent period, an enthusiastic audience demanded ambitious prints, especially landscapes and reproductions of history paintings. The number of prints published increased dramatically, as painters, engravers, and entrepreneurial publishers worked together under the protection of a second and stronger copyright act. "These innovations," Clayton writes, "upset traditional patterns of artistic hierarchy and provoked bitter dissension that was compounded by the reflection within the artistic community of contemporary political divisions" (xiv).

Part III treats the London print trade in the period from 1770 to 1802 when publishers and engravers were extremely numerous and active in the capital and its suburbs. Unfortunately Clayton gives no census of these "trading Maecenases" for this or earlier periods. But he does tell us in some detail that these artists and businessmen commissioned paintings, launched costly subscriptions, and issued best-selling engravings in editions of thousands, making small fortunes from the sale of one image or a single suite like Francis Wheatley's Cries of London. The most popular suite of prints ever to be published in England, Wheatley's Cries was painted in order to be engraved; its engravings were then sold on a scale that was nearly industrial: the plates to Wheatley's Cries wore out from reprinting and had to be completely re-engraved.

In this period, the "English School" was well-recognized and widely admired, especially for its historical and literary subjects. Indeed this, the newest of the schools, was so admired that English prints became the subject of a vital export trade that eclipsed domestic commerce in them. Continental admirers and collectors cherished the English style, reputed to be honest, unaffected, direct, freethinking, and natural. According to Clayton:

English prints took a prominent place in European collections; Englishmen were given official appointments at foreign courts and put in charge of schemes to publish princely collections of paintings, while continental artists were sent to London to complete their training. Paris was still a powerful rival and an alternative place in which to train and to obtain prints but the dominance of England can be seen in the way that French printsellers now copied English prints. (xiv)

Clayton's book is a history of the production and consumption of English prints narrated as a "progress." Yet despite a certain relentlessness in this narrative's advance and an emphatic nationalism in its tone concerning "this British triumph" (xii), it establishes a broad, schematic history of the print that is convincing and useful. The book's conviction is based on the enormous amount of literary evidence mustered in support of its case; the most impressive aspect of this evidence is that it is freshly quarried from contemporary newspapers, magazines, poems, memoirs, lives, catalogues, proposals, and other sources. So the history of the print that Clayton offers will be the outline that other scholars of this subject will follow for the indefinite future (as I do in my study of the London Cries, now nearing completion).

The authority of Clayton's work is also founded upon the new visual evidence it offers. The book's illustrations are drawn from a wide range of images, with respect to format, chronology, subject, and genre. In addition, many of its images are startlingly fresh: where other studies use familiar prints to make their points, this book uses engravings unearthed by long and patient labors in the archives, most notably the archives of the British Museum and Worcester College. As a consequence, the reader comes away from this book with a new sense of the quantitative breadth and qualitative strength of English print making in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, Yale University Press has done a superb job in reproducing these images, numbers of which are printed in glorious color. Whether they are printed in color or black and white, the book's magnificent 307 illustrations (plus a colored frontispiece, one full-page detail, and two endpapers) are reproduced in a way that renders them clear and easy to read. A few are replicated with breathtaking clarity: Dorigny's title plate from the Planetarium after Raphael is printed (in color) with such high definition that the indentation made by the copperplate and even a small wrinkle on the surface of the paper are fully legible.

All this is not to say that The English Print is problem free. At too many points in the narrative, Clayton writes dismissively of "crude prints that were sold very cheaply (compared with other prints) to the widest audience" (16) and of "cheaper, cruder" (52) sets of engravings. Elsewhere he describes Cluer Dicey selling engravings like Camillus, a Fine Running Horse Belonging to His Grace the Duke of Bolton at "the bottom of the market" (118); again he refers to popular prints at "the bottom end of the market" (52), which he contrasts to the images he treats: luxury goods created for rich buyers coming from the "upper part of the business" (vii). The use of pejorative terms like "crude," "bottom," "upper," and "top of the market" to denigrate certain categories of popular art and elevate others, with no account of underlying assumptions, is problematic on several grounds. Statements to the effect that "the wealthier or more cultured middling people bought fine, 'original' prints, while the bulk of the middle class bought cruder and smaller versions of the same design" (134) substitutes easy opprobrium for historical, economic, and bibliographical analysis aimed at establishing categories of style, price, audience, and function, which Clayton often tackles boldly. It perpetuates the invidious distinction between high art and low, which scholars of the popular print have long labored to erase. And it moralizes style, assigning certain prints a lower status on the basis of technique and intended audience much the way that erotic images (to which Clayton justifiably pays special attention) were quarantined and dismissed in earlier periods. Surely popular images, no less than images at "the cutting edge of fashion," deserve to be taken on their own terms rather than being made the subject of unflattering comparisons simply because they were executed in an uncomplicated style and acquired by common people--"servants, poor craftsmen, and misers" (129). After all, these prints also "illuminate issues that have preoccupied historians tout simple as well as art historians" (viii), the declared intention of The English Print.