Some Distinguished Victims of the Scaffold

Each palace that crowns these fairy gardens, wherein the splendour of man reaches its highest goal, is a sanctuary dedicated to the worship of feminine beauty. From every wall glows her picture, majestic in opulent lines of dazzling flesh – Cytherea draped in creamy foam, or languishing upon her couch with robes of gossamer, the divinity of the shrine. All the fair throng of lords and ladies, flashing with brilliants, shining in silk attire, are her votaries, who bow in idolatry beneath the spell. More than human are these worshippers, for they have tasted the honey-dew upon her lips, and have drunk the milk of Paradise. Yet only half their life-story has been told by François Boucher. As semi-divinities he has limned them, sporting as children around their Venus-mother, grovelling as satyrs before the throne of their queen. We must turn to other pictures to view their destiny. Their fate is that of all mortals who seek to share the pleasures of the gods. Duped by the alluring smile of the deity, they spread their tiny wings to invade her home, and the outraged divinity turns upon them in her wrath and smites them with death.

Not one of those who immortalise the romance of that fairy age can read the writing on the wall. Boucher, Fragonard, and their gay school, who are as blind to the future as the dead painter of Valenciennes, depict only what they see. The squalid little leech of Boudry is still in his country home, or wandering, an enthusiastic boy, in greedy pursuit of science to the sunny south; the sea-green avocat of Arras has not yet looked upon the light; the lion-hearted tamer of the Gironde also is unborn. Even the surly, pock-fretten features of giant Mirabeau have never passed through the streets of Paris. A long, brilliant night is still before the giddy capital.

None of the ominous hungry growls from squalid purlieus can arrest the ears of young Wynne Ryland, who has come to Paris to shake off the memory of sad Old Bailey, who sees naught but the colour and romance. Thus he breathes into his soul, with strong, eager lungs, the perfume-scented air. With the enthusiasm of genius he plunges into work at the seductive studio of the inspector of the Gobelins. Sieur Boucher is at the summit of his fame, petted by Madame de Pompadour, commissioned by King Pan. Surely the handsome, dark-faced Welshman, who can trace on copper the gallant compositions of his master as finely as any pupil of Le Bas, must have won the love of the gay, profligate painter. And, should it be his humour, what a strange world Monsieur Boucher can reveal to the pupil’s eyes! One day, perhaps, he may hold before him a jewelled fan, glowing with luscious pictures, which he has just created for la belle Marquise. Or it will be a fancy sketch of some lacquered tabouret that he has designed for her private room at Versailles. Sometimes he may grasp the young man’s arm, and, drawing him a little aside, will open a secret portfolio, whispering, with a smile upon his pleasure-worn face, and drooping his dissolute eyelids, “Pour le boudoir de Madame dans l’Hôtel de l’Arsenal.” Then, while Wynne Ryland gazes upon the beautiful Anacreontic pictures, which no scene within the cities of the plains can have excelled, his black, thoughtful eyes will flash with admiration, and his white teeth glitter between his parted lips. It is no place for innocence, nor for narrow virtue, this glowing, gilded salon of Sieur Boucher the incomparable.

Yet the young Welshman does not neglect his proper craft. As the work of later years bears eloquent testimony, none of the gifted pupils of Le Bas have profited more from the instruction of that famous school. Jacques Philippe, as might be expected, turns him on to the plates of his Fables choisies, designs after Oudry-interpretations of La Fontaine parables, spread over four mighty tomes, beloved of the amateur who collects the estampes galantes. Volume II., bearing date 1755, contains a couple of these – with signature in Gallic orthography, ‘G. Riland’ – portraits of peacock-feathered jay and boastful mule, humanised in the text, though strangely wooden in the picture.

Still, the line-engraver, with all his splendid art, is not the master that moulds the destiny of William Wynne. Among the numerous pupils of Le Bas is an ingenious person named Gilles Demarteau, who is practising a new method of working his copper plate with tiny dots which make the finished print as smooth and soft as a drawing in chalk. Out of this arises a vehement artistic causerie, for it is a sure fact that a man of forty, one Jean Charles François, has received a pension of 600 francs for this same invention, which, some say, another before him invented after all. Ryland, no doubt, learns everything he can from both pioneers, without troubling to ascertain the original discoverer, and, as this ‘stipple’ manner takes his fancy, he soon becomes as dexterous as those who teach him. Further, he finds that this same dotted plate may be tinted by the engraver’s brush, giving an almost perfect illusion of a picture in water-colours.

At last the young Welshman makes up his mind to complete the grand tour, without which the education of an artist is incomplete. Some say that the medal he gained at the Académie Royale entitles him to free tuition at Rome. At all events, he flies south to blunt his pencil upon the gnarled contours of Michael Angelo, and to shade the tender lines of Raphael – for the immortals of Leyden and Seville have not yet thrown these high priests from their altar. This same enterprise proves of much service to him when, in a year or two, the great lords at home wish him to transcribe, in the novel ‘Demarteau-after-Boucher’ fashion, their collections of the great masters. Hitherto he has been true to his first love, the line-engraving, in the dainty fashion of Le Bas, and the Parisian connoisseurs of ’57, who glue their glasses upon the rounded limbs of Leda toying with her swan – a print after Boucher which Ryland has pulled from his plate – acknowledge that some good has come from Angleterre at last.

With this same work the Welsh engraver first woos the British public, showing it at the Exhibition of the Society of Artists in Spring Gardens in the May of ’61. About this date, after an absence of five summers, when he is in his twenty-ninth year, he returns home to England. Chance has much in store for him. For a long time the canny Prime Minister, known to most of his fellow-countrymen as the Boot – an opprobrious, not a popular term, – has been looking out for a cheap line in engravings. Some time ago, courtly fellow-Scot Allan Ramsay had painted wonderful portraits of the noble favourite and royal Prince George; so, when the first was Premier and the other Defender of the Faith, it became necessary for the welfare of the nation that their lineaments should be scattered broadcast through the medium of a copper-plate.

“Robie Strange is my man,” thinks painter Allan, and makes the mistake of telling his illustrious ex-sitters before he has caught his engraver. There is a dreadful contretemps. Stout-hearted Robie is acquainted with Scottish truck – he will have none of them. “Off to Rome to copy great masters,” is the excuse. “Cannot waste four years over your pictures!” But in stout Robie’s heart of hearts there may lurk another motive; for Robie has whirled his claymore at Prestonpans, and Charlie is his darling. Indeed, he might have gone the way of wry-necked old Lovat had not a devoted damsel allowed him to hide beneath her hoop – to whose skirts, very properly, he remained attached ever after. Robie snorts at the canny price they offer him. A hundred pounds to engrave the cod-fish features of royal George! when Rome and the great masters are calling loudly, where he will kiss hands with his own King James III. “No, thank you!” says Robie, and, packing up chalks and drawing-board, takes himself off on his travels.

In this dilemma Mæcenas Bute, who, to do him justice, keeps his eyes open for budding genius, hears of the young Welsh engraver, the beater of Frenchmen on their own soil. Being an art-collector, probably he has seen an assortment of the fleshy prints after Boucher. So, as Robie is with Charlie over the water, Bute secures Ryland to copy his likeness by the polite Allan, and, in due course, “the handsomest legs in England” – legs literally fit for a boot – appear in a very creditable line-engraving, emblazoned with a coat of arms. Thus in this month of February 1763 William Wynne has reached the top of the tree, happy and smiling, at Ye Red Lamp, Russell Street, Covent Garden, close to Button’s and Will’s. The portrait of the beautiful legs, along with his red-chalk imitations – employed industriously ever since his return from the Continent in several sketches from the old masters, – convinces ‘Modern Mæcenas’ that Robie’s room is better than his company. A word whispered in the ear of the royal mother would be enough to persuade apron-string George that the clever Welshman is the artist for his features. At all events the great honour is offered, and Taffy, very shrewdly keeping his head, takes care that, from his point of view, it is a good deal. It is a most amazing deal – £100 down for the drawings, £50 a quarter as long as the work lasts, and the proceeds of the copyright. However, thus it stands – Wynne Ryland blazons himself with the fearsome title, ‘Calcographus Regis Britanniæ’ and, setting up in the true manner of a master, begins to take pupils. One of these, worthy James Strutt, who comes to him the year after his achievement with the beautiful legs, remains a trusted friend through life, and the tutor, in turn, of his eldest son, who, alas, meets an early death.

During the next four years, being paid for time, Ryland, like a true British workman, continues to pick out slowly the salmon-lips and Gillray stare of his royal master. A large number of the red-chalk engravings from pictures of the great painters in the possession of noble patrons belong to this period; and when George is finished, he goes on to copy Cotes’ picture of the Queen with the infant Princess Royal in her arms. While he is basking in smiles from the throne, he is employed in other ways, visiting Paris in the middle of his work to collect engravings for the royal connoisseur, which prints, we are told by the festive Wille, are “magnifiques épreuves … fourniés comme pour un roi.”

These are the halcyon times of the artist’s life – these are the days when we catch a glimpse of him swaggering along Bow Street, with silver-hilted sword and ample ruffles, by the side of a heavy-jowled brawler of handsome person and agile, spiteful tongue, listening with black, eager eyes and flashing teeth to the jibes and sallies of his friend. Or, beneath the arm of this same aggressive Charles Churchill, he turns into Will’s coffee-house, and sits in easy deference on the fringe of a little ring, while he hears a torrent of charming, vicious diatribe, at the expense of poor patron Bute, pouring from the wine-stained lips of the cross-eyed apostle of liberty. Or perhaps poet Charles, who wields the Twickenham rapier in the fashion of a butcher with his cleaver, may take up this Dunciad of peers, roaring out a gruesome fable – how poor John Ayliffe was strung up at Tyburn to shut his lips concerning the crimes of peculator Fox. Then, while they talk of the forged deed that brought the luckless agent to the gallows, a shudder may pass through the graceful limbs of artist William as he thinks what a small matter may take a man to the triple tree.

At other times two chairs will halt in Russell Street, and Ryland and architect John Gwynn, gorgeous in brocade frocks, satin knee-breeches, and silk stockings, will step out gaily, giving the order to their bearers in two significant monosyllables – ‘Carlisle House’ And among all the dazzling throng that crowds the salons of fair Therese Imer, alas for the worth of poor human nature! the one we know best – better, even, than the old maid in knickerbockers from Strawberry Hill – is a broad-limbed Italian, with frizzy hair and fierce nigger eyes; which same African-tinged gentleman moves through the company with much self-conscious play of robust leg, and a truculent stare, ogling such a one as half-draped Iphigenia Chudleigh, or making obeisance to buxom Caroline Harrington, while the whisper follows, keeping company the almost filial glance of pretty Sophy Cornelys – “The famous Casanova – it is the Chevalier de Seingalt.” Then, should Wynne Ryland draw close while the splendid blackguard babbles French to Milord Pembroke or Milord Baltimore, he will hear a dreadful tale of a certain Mademoiselle la Charpillon, who, to the eternal honour of her frail fame, has humiliated the sooty rascal to his native gutter. Wynne Ryland and companion John are very fond of these light and airy assemblies in Soho Square.

For the clever engraver his connoisseur Majesty seems to foster a great regard. Possibly, the proof prints of Wille – ‘fit for a king’ – have been picked up for an old song, and tickle his thrifty soul. At all events, he is pleased to grant to the artist a most amazing royal boon; for, at his intercession, he – the third George, by the grace of God – actually pardons a capital felon. A ne’er-do-weel rascal this same poor felon, so tradition relates, but all the same he is Wynne Ryland’s own brother. Near Brentford, or upon breezy Hounslow Heath, or some such fashionable highwayman resort, in a drunken frolic – after the fashion of Silas Told’s respited friend David Morgan – he calls upon two unprotected females to stand and deliver. And for this same daring frolic the rash Richard Ryland is taken, tried, and handed over to Jack Ketch. And Jack soon would have made short work of Richard if the favourite engraver to the King had not moved the royal bowels to compassion. For, incredible though it may seem, his Majesty does turn his thumb to the side of mercy, and brother Richard receives pardon; after which exertion the royal bowels remain obdurate for all time.

At last the regal portrait is finished, hanging in state upon the walls of the ‘Great Room’ belonging to the excellent Incorporated Society, when it opens its exhibition on the 22nd of April 1767. The artist is now a resident in Stafford Row, close to the Green Park, or, rather, as he prefers to particularise his address, ‘near the Queen’s Palace,’ upon whose picture, with the slumbering baby Princess in her arms, he is engaged. His portrait by Pierre Falconet, drawn during the next year, shows him a man in the prime of life, with clean-cut, delicate profile and a neat bob-wig tied by black ribbon, published by a dutiful pupil who trades as Bryer & Co. in Cornhill. This kind of trade, unhappily, has much allurement for Wynne Ryland, who, with his splendid monopoly of plates – the royal George, her maternal Majesty, the Modern Mæcenas with his shapely legs – seems to scent appetising profits. So Bryer & Co. becomes Ryland & Co., and any of the royal public who desire these regal portraits must purchase them from the proprietors at No. 27 Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange. Unhappily for this same No. 27, the public – enamoured of the Wilkes squint and disdaining the regal stare – do not treat these prints in the manner of hot cakes, and upon a fateful day in December 1771, No. 27 is in the hands of the broker’s men.

Early in the same year a strange thing happens in Ryland’s studio. A proud father brings along his fourteen-year-old son, a boy of splendid and weird genius, as the sequel shows – a sequel prolific in pictures of the immortal sheik struggling against his environment of sands and storms and improvidence, which, like his interpreter Blake, sheik Job, overwhelmed by tree-trunk legs and half a gale of beard, regards as the judgment of his God. But this weird boy with the large head and amazing eyes objects to the parental scheme of making him a pupil of the great engraver. “Father, I do not like the man’s face,” murmurs boy Blake, when the pair have left Ryland’s studio. “It looks as if he will live to be hanged!” “Prescience, intuition – all the things not dreamt of in thy philosophy,” babble his legatee mystics, bowing the knee to jaundiced mind as rapturously as to portraits of human abortions, aping verbal harmony of empty sound, plastering deformities with giraffe necks and swollen limbs in a wealth of muddy hair and a saffron skin – good and sedulous disciples. Boy Blake can have heard nothing of the brother Richard hanging-escape! Such a small affair has never been breathed by fond parents who go to entrust a weird son to brother Wynne! Prescience, intuition, are more potent physical instincts than the throb of suggestion or empiric thought. Thus clamour legatee mystics, spurning the simple mental machinery put into motion by the association of ideas.

It has been reserved for a lady of our own times, whose graceful pen has been devoted to the radiant prints of fair women of olden days, to tell the romantic story of poor, crushed, bankrupt Ryland and sweet feminine charity in the person of dove-eyed ‘Miss Angel’ A scene, alluring as any of the glowing old-world engravings, is this dainty-coloured picture painted by Mrs Frankau. Within the oak-panelled studio, through which the winter twilight is stealing in flickering shadows, the two ardent souls are wrapt in the communion of art. And while coy, diaphanous Angelica listens to the fascinating tongue of the virile, dark-skinned Welshman, her quick southern fancy whispers that this man is the knight-errant who shall write her fame amidst the stars. Ryland has come with a heart of lead; he goes away with a heart of gold. For one of the most famous of unions in the annals of painting has been sealed, and in a little while the prints after Kauffman will have captured the imagination of the whole world.

In a house in Queen’s Row, Knightsbridge, the great engraver commences one of those life-and-death struggles that genius alone can wage successfully against malicious fate. Gradually – for he is young and strong and brave, while the trust of a sweet woman warms his courage – he emerges from the choking atmosphere of debt. One by one his creditors are paid, and at last, free from his bankrupt chains, he is his own master. It is a fine work, this proud, independent cancelling of obligations – merely moral claims – a fair tribute to the lady who has been his tutelar divinity. For it is through his engravings of Miss Angel’s pictures, to which he applies the ‘stipple method’ which he learnt in France, that he wins his way back to fame and fortune. Soon he is a contributor to the newly-formed Royal Academy exhibition, sending very properly as his first works a couple of drawings copied from the canvas of the sylph Kauffman. Thus pass three sober years, while he perfects his new art, living with his young wife far from the delights of town and the old seductive companionship, first at Knightsbridge, and then moving a couple of miles further out into rural Hammersmith.

At last he resolves to tempt the grimy god of trade once more. Better assets are in his store than a salmon-profile king or maternal majesty, and he knows that the marketing bourgeois will not be hindered by squint of Wilkes from clamouring for his many pictures of Venus, beaming with the soft, dove-like eyes of pretty Miss Angel. So, in the third year after his bankruptcy, he hangs out his sign once more as an honest print-seller at No. 159 in the Strand, near Somerset House, by the corner of Strand Lane, trading as William Wynne Ryland, engraver to his Majesty. From the first the enterprise flourishes. Angelica’s plump little Cupids, drawn in rosy chalk, appeal in their suggestive resemblance to the heart of the British matron; the dainty Angelica Venus, with her large haunting eyes, becomes a pattern of female loveliness; Angelica’s mild and chaste interpretations of classic romance push aside all previous readings. More than all, the Kauffman pinks and yellows, transformed by the deft fingers of the wonderful Welshman into soft, rainbow-tinged impressions – like a delicate painting in water-colours – capture the public fancy. Such engravings never have been seen before, and never will be seen again. It is not strange that No. 159 in the Strand becomes one of the most popular print-shops in London.

During those nine years, from 1774 until the spring of 1783, the trade venture of the engraver to his Majesty continues to enjoy great prosperity. Profits reach the sum of two thousand a year, while stock and plant swell to a total of five figures. Few well-fobbed merchants, no chair-sporting City dame, can resist the temptations of that seductive window. A pleasant sight for Miss Angel, that little knot of open-mouthed shop-gazers with burning pockets, as she passes in hackney coach, a vision of clinging drapery in her white Irish polonese. While, if at that moment the happy proprietor steps out, bound for the counting-house of Sir Charles Asgill and his friend Mr Nightingale, with whom he is having some considerable bill of exchange transactions – a glimpse of those large eyes and crest of feathers at the coach window will bring down his laced hat in a sweep of obeisance, as he bows to the knees. Then, after the bankers have discounted all he wants, he will hurry off to Golden Square to show his Miss Angel the last impressions of some of her pictures, glowing in colours, or copied in the popular shade of red. Perhaps, one of these days, as he comes near the studio, a chair may stop as he passes, from which glides a beautiful lady, wearing a crown of glorious hair, brushed from her forehead, who rests her starry eyes upon him for a moment with a slight motion of her tiny rosebud lips. And his heart will beat more quickly as he recognises the woman whose radiant face has brought poor Daniel Perreau and his brother to a shameful death.

For Wynne Ryland’s conscience is becoming a heavy burden. In spite of his princely income, artistic improvidence is beginning to weigh him down. Over his soul the like spirit that swayed Sieur Boucher the incomparable reigns absolute. Gilded rooms, where the Eo. tables pave the road to ruin, swallow his guineas in their rapacious maw. His open hand scatters gold amidst his friends. Miss Angel, his patron saint, returns to her native land. Although he remains the kind husband and devoted father, the shadow of sin creeps over his roof-tree. A pretty girl, whose fresh young beauty has stolen his heart from the mother of his children, becomes a mistress who squanders his earnings faster than they are reaped. Those bill of exchange transactions with bankers Asgill and Nightingale grow more considerable. Friends and accommodators Ransome and Moreland often receive him in their counting-house, with his pockets full of crisp notes drawn upon the Honourable the East India Company of Leadenhall Street; for this clean, easy paper-credit is always welcomed as deposit for current coin.

At last comes the fatal crash, bursting over the town in a thunderclap, striking sorrow into the hearts of thousands. On the 3rd of April 1783, when the London merchant opens his newspaper —Morning Chronicle or Daily Advertiser– he reads there that William Wynne Ryland stands charged before the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor on suspicion of forging the acceptance of two bills of exchange for payment of £7114, with intent to defraud the United East India Company. Kind John Gwynn throws aside his plans of stately edifices, walking the streets with streaming eyes, sorrowing for his friend. Statuesque Domenico Angelo hurries to condole with poor Mary Ryland, and the sight of the agonised wife and children robs the good-hearted Italian swordsman of sleep. But the engraver had left his home at Knightsbridge on the first of the month, and although the City Marshal searches for him in the Old Bailey and in the Minories, nothing is heard of him for fourteen days.

On the morning of the 15th of April, a drunken woman reels into the ‘Brown Bear’ Bow Street, hiccupping an exciting story that entices the runners even from their pewter pots. She is the wife of a Stepney cobbler, who for many days has been harbouring a strange lodger – a man garbed in an old rusty coat, with green apron and worsted nightcap, who poses as invalid Mr Jackson who needs the country air; which same delicate invalid rests indoors all day, only venturing out after nightfall to enjoy the health-giving April east winds. But he is not Mr Jackson at all, babbles tipsy Mrs Cobbler Freeman, for, when taking one of his shoes to her husband to mend, she noticed a bit of paper pasted on the inside, and, tearing it away, she has seen written his real name – William Wynne Ryland. This is great news for the ‘Brown Bear’ runners, and Chief-officer Daly, accompanied by a fellow robin-redbreast, takes coach with Mrs Cobbler Freeman to Stepney Green.