Part 399: “A Gossip about Scenery and Scene-Painters,” 1866, third section
While researching the English scene painting families, I came across an interesting article from 1866. It seems an appropriate time to share this article, as my house is full of friends for the Helios Masonic Symposium in St. Cloud today. It is the perfect time to examine how the history of scenic art was presented during the mid-nineteenth century in the United Kingdom.
The article “A Gossip about Scenery and Scene-Painters,” was published in “The Era” on February 4, 1866. Here is the third of five installments.
“Great improvements in the scenic department were made at the beginning of the last century, when Rich, who was Manager of the playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn-fields, denominated the new Theatre, and set up in rivalry, of Drury Lane, designed a series of spectacular entertainments, which drew the audiences from the old house, although it retained a strong company under the management of Wilkes, Booth, and Cibber. Italy had long been famous for its scene painters and the splendour of its Pantomimic representations. Canaletti, the great painter, designed the scenery for the Venetian stage. Some of these foreign artists were employed by Rich, and then it was the English first beheld the delightful effect of the picturesque as viewed through a splendid proscenium on a lengthened stage.
The Managers of Drury, in self defense, were compelled to attempt the same kind of entertainment, and they pressed into their service a celebrated scene-painter, named Devoto, and a ballet-master, Monsieur Thermond, who projected a Pantomime of which Jack Sheppard was the hero. This set the wits of the town on the Managers, who, with the scene-painter, were dragged to the satiric whipping-post. On these Pantomimic pieces they were lavish of expense, as the scenery and machinery were the principal attractions.
When Rich removed his dramatic corps from Lincoln’s Inn-fields to the newly-erected Theatre in Covent-garden, Hogarth caricatured the whole house moving in procession across the market-place in front of the piazza, not forgetting to have a hit at his friend George Lambert, whose scenes he piled in a wagon wherein the thunder and lightning were made conspicuous. Lambert, who had been joint scene-painter at Lincoln’s Inn, was appointed principal in that department at Covent-garden, and it was in the scene-room here that he founded the Beef-steak Club. Harvey, a landscape painter, and Amiconi, who painted the fine groups on the upper part of the staircase at old Buckingham House, executed the decorations of the proscenium, an allegory of Shakespeare, Apollo, and the Muses. John Laguerre, the historical painter, occasionally designed the scenes for Lincoln’s Inn stage, and the curious scene-cloth representing the Siege of Troy, depicted in Hogarth’s “Southwark Fair,” is from his design. Michael Angelo Rooker, whimsically Italianized himself into Signor Rookerini, and who was at once painter, Harlequin, Scaramouch, and engraver, was principal scene-painter to the elder Colman at his Theatre in the Haymarket.
John Richards, the old Secretary of the Royal Academy, painted many years for the stage. His rural scenery for “The Maid of the Mill” is perpetuated in two line engravings, which are in the portfolios of all our old-fashioned Collectors of English prints.
De Loutherbourg who for some time delighted and astonished the town by his interesting dioramic exhibition, which he called “The Eidophusikon,” was the first to increase the effect of scenery by lighting from above the proscenium, and using coloured glasses for the lamps. Many ingenious devices, now familiar, in their effects at least, to a playgoing public, owe their adoption to the dashing, vigorous Flemish battle-painter, whose appearance was as martial as his pictures, and whom Jack Bannister nicknamed “Field-Marshal Leatherbags.”
Another distinguished artist of this period was Mr. Greenwood, father of Mr. T. L. Greenwood, so long associated with the management of Sadler’s Well’s Theatre.
For many years the scenery of the Royal Circus (now the Surrey Theatre) was painted by Mr. Greenwood, who invested the ballets and senior musical spectacles brought out there by Mr. J. C. Cross with remarkable scenic attractions, and, when the artist was transferred to Drury-lane he became even more prominent. Byron, in his “English Bards and Scottish Reviewers,” speaks of “Greenwood’s gay designs” as being then the chief support of the Drama at that period.
To be continued…
