It might be doubted if Cruikshank personally cared for any locality
except London if it were not for evidence in the South Kensington Museum
and the dispersed collection of the metropolitan Royal Aquarium. Number
9502A/C in the South Kensington collection of his work is a design for a
house which he intended to build for himself at the seaside. The Royal
Aquarium collection contained several water-colours by him of littoral
subjects. Hastings may remember what she was like before the building of
her esplanade by means of two water-colours by him, dated respectively
1820 and 1828, which Mr Walter Spencer bought for five guineas. _A
Distant View of Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover_, secured by Mr Frank
Karslake, tempted that art-dealer, who was its possessor when I last saw
it, to withhold it from his customers. It is soft, slight and pretty.
With a fanciful _Beachy Head_ (a water-colour "sketch from [sic] part
of Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover, 1830") it sold for seven guineas, the
"Beachy Head" being an outline of the cliff resembling a head looking
left with dropped eyelid as seen (perhaps exclusively) by Cruikshank,
who represents himself as standing in front of it; and I mention this
"Beachy Head" because the same idea informs a rather subtle drollery in
"My Sketch Book" (1833), where a couple are depicted in their fright at
seeing a human face outlined by the edge of the top of Shakespeare's
Cliff. All the sales mentioned in this paragraph were made at the
auction at Sotheby's, 22 and 23 May 1903.
[Illustration: Miss Eske carried away during her Trance.
From "Clement Lorimer," 1849.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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