Tag Archive: 0illustration

On the evening of 27 April 1848, at St James’s Theatre in London, a special charity performance of Colman’s comedy The Heir-at-Law took place, to raise funds for the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution (founded 1814 and still in existence today). It was billed as an ‘Artists’ Amateur Performance’, and all the male roles were taken […]

Orléans was a major eighteenth-century centre for the production of both block-printed papers (papiers dominotés) and popular prints (imagerie populaire), cut from wood, inked, printed, then stencilled by hand.  Jean-Baptiste Letourmy (also Letourmi, 1747–1800), was both dominotier—‘un des très grands producteurs de papiers dominotés de son temps’ (Valérie Hubert, Les papiers dominotés, 2016, p. 34)—and […]

William Crotch (1775–1847) ‘was an exceptional child prodigy and became one of the most distinguished English musicians of his day …  At the age of about 18 months he began to pick out tunes on a small house organ which his father had built, and soon after his second birthday he had taught himself to […]

This is a copy of the first edition of Les amours de Mirtil (‘Constantinople’, but actually Paris, 1761), attributed variously to Fontenelle, Claude-Louis-Michel de Sacy (though he would have been only fifteen at the time), and Marc-Ferdinand Groubentall de Linière.  There was another edition the same year, also with a fictitious ‘Constantinople’ imprint, but unillustrated.  Cohen–de Ricci […]

As it states here, this souvenir item, printed on silk, ‘is presented by Mrs. Langtry on the occasion of the 100th performance of the “Degenerates” [by Sydney Grundy] at the Garrick Theatre.  For permission to use Mr. Kipling’s poem Mrs. Langtry has made to the “Daily Mail” a contribution of £100 for the benefit of […]

In his A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor writes that ‘you can hardly turn on the radio or open a newspaper these days without being bombarded by yet another anniversary – a hundred years since this, two hundred years since that.  Our popular history seems to be written increasingly in centenaries, […]