Eighteenth Century Manuscript of Naive Illustrations of Scenes from English History

Limp card. Very Good. Circa late 18th Century. (Watermark suggests 1760 to 1780.) 8vo. 20 by 16.5 cm. Unpaginated, 48 pages with visual content, most of which we would deemed finished artwork. Plus two pages of curious text.

On these pages are menus of several Medieval banquets -- we do not know whether these extensive menus are based on a legitimate source or were imagined by the compiler, or some combination. The occasions also don't seem to relate to any of the artwork, other than the Medieval commonality.

Much of the illustration, (truncated) happily, is accompanied with handwritten captions. For the drawings, the medium is generally wash watercolor, with touches of color to suggest human flesh. Subject-wise, the sketches are mostly backward-looking to the Middle Ages, and in this, the notebook can be seen as an outgrowth with the Romantic Era's newfound fascination with that period, as was manifest in the Gothic Revival Movement then just getting under way. The artist carries his survey forward to the Renaissance, Tudor England, and the seventeenth century, or Jacobean and Restoration England. On some pages, the portraits are arranged in a gallery format - imagine the walls of the National Portrait Gallery. Elsewhere, a portrait can take up the page. We also mention there are a few non-historic drawings, such as a man with a turban, and a several portraits of people in eighteenth century dress. These portraits, though, are really not of a piece with the costume survey; these contemporary portraits are sketchier and all pencil drawings.

Clearly of interest to the artist was historic costume, and indeed, the book can be seen as a manuscript version of the kind of costume treatise that was to become a mainstay among nineteenth century plate books. Among these costume-oriented drawings are many warriors, jousters, swordsmen, gentlemen, courtly ladies, hunters, astrologers, laborers and various professions, court entertainers and most significantly, monarchs. Just like many a printed costume surveys, there are several pages of drawings of crowns, sceptres and other historic objects. Finally, there are action and historic genre scenes. One is a theater scene. In another, Earl Rivers presents a Caxton bible to Edward IV. Some of these scenes collectively suggest a narrative, as a sequent beginning with the pre-Norman Conquest "Odo as Early of Kent". We can not always be sure whether a specific historic event is depicted since not all the drawings come with captions.

As the artwork is heavily portraiture, a good amount of this is most certainly copied from other artwork. An obvious example is the portrait of diarist John Evelyn, which is based on a work by Thomas Worlidge. For the most part, though, our intuition is that the artwork here is only loosely based on existing sources.

While this is a true sketchbook with some willy-nilly-ness to it -- not all the drawings having the same page orientation -- there is an over-arching cohesion to the artwork, and in our view, the totality is more satisfying than the sum of the parts.

Condition: chips to the heavy card binding; creases showing on the marbled paper of the cover. Moderate age toning of the leaves, and scattered finger smudges and other soiling. (Inventory #: 005854)