Painting_,’ vide his ‘_Works_,’ edit. London, 1798-1822, quarto, volume
iii., page 72, note. ‘The father of the Lord Treasurer Oxford’--says
the noble author in that place,--‘passing over London Bridge, was
caught in a shower; and stepping into a goldsmith’s shop for shelter,
he found there a picture of Holbein,--who had lived in that house,--and
his family. He offered the goldsmith £100. for it, who consented
to let him have it, but desired first to shew it to some persons.
Immediately after, happened the fire of London, and the picture was
destroyed.’ Another famous Artist of London Bridge, who is mentioned
in both the works which I last cited, was Peter Monamy; so excellent
a painter of marine subjects, as to be considered but little inferior
to Vandevelde himself. Lord Orford says of him, at page 421, that he
‘received his first rudiments of drawing from a sign and house-painter
on London Bridge;’--and that ‘the shallow waves, that rolled under his
window, taught young Monamy what his master could not teach him, and
fitted him to paint the turbulence of the ocean.’ This artist died at
Westminster in 1749. We are also informed, by Edward Edwards, in his
‘_Continuation of Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting_,’ London, 1808,
quarto, page 214, that Dominic Serres, the Marine Painter, who died in
1793, also once kept a shop upon London Bridge. To these celebrated
men, the author of ‘_Wine and Walnuts_’ adds Jack Laguerre, the
Engraver, ‘a great humourist, wit, singer, player, caricaturist, mimic,
and a good scene-painter,’ son to that Louis, who painted stair-cases
and saloons, where, as Pope says, ‘sprawl the saints of Verrio and
Laguerre.’ His residence, according to our lively author, who states
that he received his information from ‘old Dr. Monsey and others,’
was on the first floor of the dwelling of a waggish bookseller, and
author of all-work, named Crispin Tucker; the owner of half-a-shop on
the East side, under the Southern gate. The artist’s _studio_ was,
chiefly, in a bow-windowed back room, which projected over the Thames,
and trembled at every half-ebb tide; in which Hogarth had resided in
his early life, when he engraved for old John Bowles, of the Black
Horse in Cornhill. It resembled, we are told, on page 135 of the
work and volume which I have already quoted, one of the alchemist’s
laboratories from the pencil of the elder Teniers. It was ‘a complete
smoke-stained confusionary, with a German-stove, crucibles, pipkins,
nests of drawers, with rings of twine to pull them out; here a box of
asphaltum, there glass-stoppered bottles, varnishes, dabbers, gravers,
etching-tools, walls of wax, obsolete copper-plates, many engraved on
both sides, caricatures, and poetry scribbled over the walls; a pallet
hung up as an heir-loom, the colours dry upon it, hard as stone; an
easel; all the multifarious _arcanalia_ of engraving, and, lastly, a
Printing-press!’ This curious picture is also from the information
of Dr.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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