English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 18th century
Fifty years ago there were but few specimens of Stothard's works in the
Print Room of the British Museum, and even those were not arranged so as
to be easily accessible. To-day, this complaint, which Pye makes in that
miscellany of unexpected information, his 'Patronage of British Art,'
can no longer be renewed. In the huge Balmanno collection, a labour of
five-and-twenty years, the student may now study his Stothard to his
heart's content. Here is brought together his work of all sorts, his
earliest and latest, his strongest and his feeblest, from the first
tentative essays he made for the 'Lady's Magazine' and Hervey's 'Naval
History' to those final designs, which, aided by the supreme imagination
of Turner, did so much to vitalise the finicking and overlaboured blank
verse of his faithful but fastidious patron at St. James's Place.=
```'Of Roger's "Italy," Luttrell relates,
```It-would surely be dished, if 'twere not for the plates,'=
said the wicked wits of 1830; and the sarcasm has its parallel in the
'Ce poëte se sauve du naufrage de planche en planche,' which the
Abbé Galiani applied to Dorât embellished by Marillier and Eisen. But
Stothard did many things besides illustrating Samuel Rogers. Almanack
heads and spelling-books, spoon-handles and decanter labels,--nothing
came amiss to his patient industry. And in his book illustrations he
had one incalculable advantage,--he lived in the silver age of
line-engraving, the age of the Cooks and Warrens and Heaths and Findens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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