GAINSBOROUGH'S COLLECTION OF PRINTS,
ILLUSTRATIVE OF ENGLISH SCENERY

"The father of modern landscape"

[GAINSBOROUGH, THOMAS.] A COLLECTION OF PRINTS, ILLUSTRATIVE OF ENGLISH SCENERY; From the Drawings and Sketches of Gainsborough: In the various Collections of the Right Honorable Baroness Lucas; Viscount Palmerston; George Hibbert, Esq., Dr. Monro, and several other Gentlemen. [London:] W. F. Wells, and J. LaPorte, [ca. 1805]. Oblong folio. Contemporary half red morocco on marbled boards. 2 leaves (title and dedication), as issued. Seventy-two engraved plates after sketches by Gainsborough, twenty-five of which are hand-tinted. Moderate rubbing to extremities, light scuffing to covers, sometime recornered, title and preliminaries creased, a few plates foxed. Very good.

FIRST EDITION, with the plates untitled and watermarked 1801 or earlier, and much scarcer than the 1819 edition with sixty plates described by Abbey and Tooley. Ironically, Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), who came to be known as "the father of modern landscape" (DNB), earned his living primarily as a portrait painter and is not known to have sold any of his landscape drawings or sketches during his lifetime. "It has been suggested that Gainsborough painted portraits to live but that he lived to paint landscapes" (Woodall, Gainsborough's Landscape Drawings). Gainsborough did, however, give away many of his landscape sketches. "The people who owned Gainsborough drawings in the eighteenth century were thus for the most part either the artist's friends, or those sitters and patrons who became his friends" (Hayes, The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough). Although many of the sketches were made as preliminary studies for paintings, they are works of art in their own right. "For this reason they have a special interest, as they show Gainsborough's spontaneous work, when he was pleasing his own fancy and not that of his patrons. . . . After Gainsborough's death the drawings were greatly in demand, and were collected by all the connoisseurs of the time" (Woodall).

Among those connoisseurs were George Hibbert (1757-1837) and Dr. Thomas Monro (1759-1833), from whose holdings most of the plates in A Collection of Prints, Illustrative of English Scenery were reproduced. Hibbert was a prominent West Indian merchant, "a patron of art and a collector of pictures and books" (DNB). He is known to have purchased three of Gainsborough's sketch books from Gainsborough's daughter Margaret in 1799 and, at one time, "he possessed well over 100, perhaps nearer 140" (Hayes) of Gainsborough's sketches. Monro, "an amateur artist, a teacher, and a patron, who specially devoted himself to assisting and training young artists in the practice of landscape-painting in water-colour, which was then in its infancy" (DNB), was a friend of Gainsborough's who had accompanied him on sketching expeditions. Monro was also an avid collector of Gainsborough's sketches - "His collection of Gainsborough drawings alone numbered over 130 examples, and, apart from Hibbert's, was the largest ever to be formed by any private person" (Hayes). After Gainsborough's death, Monro played a large part in promoting the artist's fame through the drawing school Monro founded in his home. There, under his patronage, young artists such as Girtin, Turner and Hearne were allowed to copy sketches in Monro's collection, including Gainsborough's.

John LaPorte (1761-1839) and William Frederick Wells (1762-1836), who published A Collection of Prints, Illustrative of English Scenery, were contemporaries of Hibbert and Monro who shared their admiration for Gainsborough's work and several other associations. Both LaPorte and Wells were landscape painters who had exhibited at the Royal Academy, but whose primary occupation was as drawing instructors. In fact, Monro had been one of LaPorte's pupils. Like Hibbert and Monro, LaPorte collected Gainsborough's sketches, some of which were reproduced in A Collection of Prints, Illustrative of English Scenery, including one that Woodall describes as "[a] man driving a plough drawn by two horses; trees in the background" [See image above.] and as "probably a very early drawing." Wells is not known to have owned any of Gainsborough's sketches, and his role in producing the book may have been limited to that of engraver, as many of the plates are signed by him. Though neither LaPorte or Wells would have had the means to rival Hibbert or Monro as collectors of art, their collaboration in A Collection of Prints, Illustrative of English Scenery has preserved Gainsborough's reputation as a master landscape artist, and the book is now recognized as "an invaluable document in identifying Gainsborough's drawings" (Woodall). Cf. Abbey Life 203 (1819 edition, 60 plates) and Tooley 231 (60 plates). BT000092.

Provenance: Bookplates of Matthew Lewis and Francis Thomas de Grey Cowper. Lewis (1775-1818) was a prolific English author and playwright best-known for The Monk (1795), a popular and scandalous romance. The seventh and last Earl Cowper (1834-1905) maintained a "valuable family library" (de Ricci) at "the fine domain of Panshanger in Hertfordshire . . . where the beauties of nature were rivalled by the masterpieces of art collected by his ancestors" (DNB). Lord Cowper's grandmother, Amabel Hume-Campbell (1751-1833), was the fifth Baroness Lucas and no doubt the "Right Honorable Baroness Lucas" mentioned in the subtitle of A Collection of Prints, Illustrative of English Scenery.

$5200

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