Douce Blog

Green boughs

Posted on October 11, 2011 by mercedes-c

As it happens with his creative etymologies, Douce’s explanations of particular details taken from the images that he collected are sometimes as difficult to believe as one of Munchausen’s tales. On 1 February 1801, Douce sent the following note to George Ellis, probably in response to a query regarding 15thC-bathing etiquette:

Not only women bathed together, but husbands & wives, lovers and their mistresses used the bath in common. The old fabliaux & romances abound with instances of this practice […]. Promiscuous bathing is likewise exemplified in some of the early specimens of engraving, from which it also appears that women attended men to the bath for the purpose of rubbing, drying, &c.

Johann Theodor de Bry, Sardanapalus in the bath, c. 1576-1623 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

The image above can be found in one of Douce’s folders, labelled ‘Sweating & Bathing Rooms’. It provides an example of how Douce used his collection as a visual encyclopaedia and as a source of information on all aspects of everyday life in the past. As further proof of his account of early modern bathing arrangements, Douce describes another image from his repository:

The emperor & King of Bohemia Wenceslas who died in 1418, was remarkably attached to the bathing girl who attended him during his captivity. In a finely illuminated bible written at his instance & still preserved in the Imperial library at Vienna, this woman is represented several times. In one painting, she stands by the emperor who is sitting apparently in the stocks, her arms & legs naked, in one hand a bathing tub, in the other a bundle of green boughs formerly used in Bohemia & perhaps elsewhere, in the baths, to cover the nudities; it was called Badenquast. On account of this girl Wenceslas is said to have bestowed many privileges & inmunities on the owners of the Baths at Baden.

The bathing girl, the naked emperor and the bundle of green boughs are all duly represented in this etching from Douce’s collection:

Bequeathed by Francis Douce, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Are Douce’s Bohemian green boughs a regional version of the more ordinary fig leaves? Were they indeed a fashionable bath accessory? The answer might be hidden somewhere in Peter Lambeck’s notes to his catalogue of the Imperial Library mentioned by Douce. No more green boughs appear among the rest of the images kept in his folders. What matters, however, is how these prints and drawings evince the wonderful oddity of the ‘everydayness’, so central to Douce’s antiquarian pursuits.

Bequeathed by Francis Douce, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Posted in Baths, Everyday life, Letters | Comments Off

Douce and William Godwin

Posted on October 3, 2011 by mercedes-c

You may have read the review of Pamela Clemit’s edition of William Godwin’s letters (recently published by OUP) in last month’s LRB. The reviewer, John Barrell, refers to an online resource provided by the Bodleian Library, which I have just added to this blog’s favourite links.

From the digital edition of Godwin’s diary, we know that, between 1800 and 1834, Godwin and Douce occasionally met and corresponded. In 1833-4, Godwin called on Douce four times and they had tea together at least once.

Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of William Godwin, 1795 (photo: The British Museum)

Douce and Godwin had, however, met before 1800, probably through Richard Twiss, whose younger brother Francis is often mentioned by Godwin in the same years. In September 1795, the elder Twiss suggested that Douce paid Godwin a visit on his way to Pentonville, where he was running errands on his behalf:

Godwin lives at Nº 25 Charles St. Sommertown; you might see him en passant.

In another letter to Douce dated April 1797, Twiss announced that ‘Caleb Williams is married to the Rights of Woman for certain’, thus referring to Godwin’s recent wedding to Mary Wollstonecraft.

Review

William Godwin

Mary Wollstonecraft

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Baron Munchausen

Posted on September 30, 2011 by mercedes-c

Reading Francis Douce’s correspondence sometimes feels like playing six degrees of separation. Douce, for instance, knew Twiss, whose friend Alexander Jardine corresponded with Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, one of Goya’s patrons. Twiss’s letters are a particularly rich source of information to reconstruct this sort of indirect relationships. My favourite case of remote acquaintance is Rudolph Erich Raspe (1737 – 1794), whom Twiss mentions in a letter to Douce dated 29 November 1788:

I have found the Italian Philicolo, & Saladino’s Novels, & shall copy the passages I want on Tuesday at 11 o’clock. Then I shall go to Mr. Thorkelin (to whom I have now written a note) from thence to Mr. Raspe, from whom I shall pick up something else & then to you.

Raspe’s name appears again in Twiss’s letters in May 1789, shortly before the German author travelled to the Hebrides ‘to explore some mines for the Duke of Argyll’. According to his first biographer John Carswell, Raspe was an adventurer and an opportunistic rogue, now best remembered as the author of the Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, published anonymously in 1786. Munchausen’s name was soon being used to ridicule the hyperactive imaginations of armchair travellers, experimental farmers and over-ambitious rulers:

Thomas Rowlandson, Friends & foes-up he goes-sending the Corsican Munchausen to St Cloud's, 1813 (photo: The British Museum)

The author of this satirical print, Thomas Rowlandson, also signed the illustrations to a spurious Surprising adventures of the renowned Baron Munchausen, published by Thomas Tegg in 1809. Douce enjoyed Rowlandson’s raucous sense of humour and he acquired many of his lively drawings, which are now part of the Ashmolean’s collection.

Munchausen’s name could also be used to satirise the perils of what the editor of the Farmer’s Magazine called ‘analogical reasoning’. As he explained in his footnote to a communication entitled ‘The Baron Munchausen, greeting!’ sent by an anonymous contributor in 1803:

We apprehend the intention of our present correspondent […] to ridicule […] that abuse of analogical reasoning, from which wonderful conclusions are often speciously inferred, or asserted directly as facts, though not warranted by their fair verification of actual experiment.

Less well known is Raspe’s work for the Scottish medallionist James Tassie. In 1791, Raspe published A Descriptive Catalogue of a General Collection of Ancient and Modern engraved Gems, Cameos as well as Intaglios, taken from the most celebrated Cabinets in Europe; cast in coloured Pastes, white Enamel and Sulphur, by James Tassie, Modeller. Douce knew Tassie’s nephew William, who took over the business in 1799, and he probably owned a copy of the catalogue. Interestingly, in the preface Raspe refers to the connections between what he calls ‘the Lapidary’s art’ and engraving, which lead him to write at length on the origins of printmaking.

James Tassie, Portrait of Rudolph Erich Raspe, 1784 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinbugh)

Posted in History of printmaking, Letters, Satirical prints | Comments Off

Hungry caterpillars

Posted on September 19, 2011 by mercedes-c

Since 1788, Francis Douce kept a lively correspondence with the travel writer Richard Twiss (1747-1821). A typical letter from Twiss, as Douce explained to his friend George Cumberland years later, would be like ‘an omnibus on twenty or more subjects’, including chess, toys, mechanics, music, botany, entomology, prints, rare books, arithmetic and antiquities.

Mary Dawson Turner after George Henry Harlow, Portrait of Richard Twiss, 1814 (Hope Collection, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Twiss’s queries were often accompanied by entertaining comments and by explanatory sketches in pencil. His letters show how the exchange of objects and information contributed to his and to Douce’s research, as well as to the formation of their collections. Parcels containing books, prints, seeds and other ‘specimens’, as Twiss called them, were circulated regularly between his house in Bush Hill, Edmonton, and Douce’s address in Gower Street.

On 5 November 1793, Twiss wrote to Douce:

I wrote to you yesterday, I have just rec.d your favoured, & now return the book with thanks, & the caterpillars, they have done feeding, you must put them in a cup or jar with some very dry powder’d Earth, where they will make their nests.

Caterpillars seem to have been a subject of continued interest for both friends, since the following spring Twiss writes about them again:

I have some curious caterpillars &c why won’t you come & look at them? You might spare a Sunday. & then you shall see how we catch Butterflies by means of a squirt with water, shot above them while flying: this will do for all flying insects & does not injure them: it will also do for humming birds, but alas! we have none here.

Another caterpillar was delivered to Douce with detailed care instructions in September 1794:

The caterpillar (the large one I sent last) must have some soft moist Earth to make its pod in; if it is dead, I have two more; & likewise a fine cymps Rosa, & the sixlegg’d Greb of the stagbeetle which the plough has just turn’d up, but I suppose will die with cold tho’ I have put it in a box of Earth.

These caterpillars were not only properly fed and looked after, but also carefully observed and classified according to the Linnaean system. Twiss’s letters abound in bibliographical references to standard works, such as The Aurelian, or Natural History of English Insects, Snails, Moths, and Butterflies, together with the Plants on which they feed (London, 1766), whose author, Moses Harris, was the subject of a caricature in which the locks of his wig are replaced by curling caterpillars:

The Aurelian Macaroni, published by Matthew Darly, 1773 (photo: The British Museum)

In Douce’s case, caterpillars also became the subject of some outlandish etymological speculations, which prompted Twiss to reply:

I do not like your Etymol. of Butterfly, because it is not true, neither that of chattepeleuse (which is also in Johnson). A caterpillar resembles a cat in being alive & having eyes, legs & guts, & that is all. We might as well compare a wasp to a wheelbarrow.

Douce’s interest in the systems of classification used by entomologists and botanists was not unusual among contemporary antiquaries, who often adopted a similar approach to the arrangement of their collections. Such exchanges were favoured by the close links between the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society, whose President (and Douce’s correspondent) Sir Joseph Banks was depicted as a caterpillar turned into butterfly in a satirical print by James Gillray, dated 1795:

James Gillray, The great South Sea caterpillar, transform'd into a Bath butterfly, 1795 (photo: The British Museum)

Posted in Collections and Collectors, Letters, Natural history | Comments Off

Magic and music

Posted on September 14, 2011 by mercedes-c

Music is a subject often mentioned in Francis Douce’s correspondence. He was a keen amateur, interested in both contemporary music and the technical development of musical instruments throughout the centuries. A vast amount of images of different types of drums, lutes, harps, horns, trumpets, pipes, violins, etc. can be found in his portfolios.

On 7 December 1832, Douce wrote to George Cumberland about a peculiar musical night out:

Tricks are certainly not musick & the many now played to delight stupid audiences, keep me from musick exhibitions; but I certainly did go twice, for the first time I was almost suffocated & could hear little, to hear that wonderful fellow Paganini, whose person & gesticulations amused me even more than his performance. His Benevento witchcraft musick has something supernatural.

Le Streghe, or ‘Witches’ Dance’, was the ‘witchcraft music’ to which Douce refers in his letter. It was inspired by a piece of Italian lore concerning the annual convocation of witches around the walnut tree of Benevento, in Naples. A music song-sheet published in London in the early 1830s shows Paganini sitting under the tree surrounded by witches and demons:

C Burton, Paganini's Dream, lithograph, c. 1830-5 (photo: The British Museum).

According to contemporary reviews, Douce’s reaction to Paganini’s performance was not unusual: an article on the musician published in the Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée in October of the same year focused on his ‘witchery’ and described him as ‘an incarnation of one of those wild and unaccountable fantasies engendered only in highly-excited imaginations’.

Apart from the music itself, the subject of Paganini’s piece may have had a special appeal for Douce, who collected a large number of prints and drawings depicting witches, demons and goblins. More intriguingly, in 1826 he chose what he described as ‘an old picture [exhibiting] a long forgotten superstitious practice of a diabolical nature’ to decorate one of the bedrooms of his home.

Posted in Music, Witchcraft | Comments Off

Douce’s London

Posted on August 30, 2011 by mercedes-c

It is Bank Holiday Monday and, apart from Notting Hill where thousands of people have gathered for the carnival, London seems much quieter than usual. So I set off early to visit some of the addresses where Francis Douce lived between 1779 and 1834.

My first stop is High Street Kensington. Around the corner from the tube station, I find Kensington Square -between 1821 and 1825 , Douce lived in no. 34, a pretty four-storey house built in 1736-7 that had just been refronted.

34 Kensington Square, London

According to William Jerdan, one of Douce’s neighbours at this address was the political writer and farmer William Cobbett (1763-1835). Cobbett’s experiments with Indian corn in his back garden were regarded by Douce as the cause of the invasion of his own vegetable patch by snails and a great quarrel ensued, as Jerdan recounts:

It was indeed a sight to behold the philosophic Dry-as-Dust, at early morn, in night-gown and slippers, gathering up the [snails] into arsenals of flower pots, to be hurled en masse, with malignant aim, into the very heart and interior of his enemy’s maize; and, at dewy eve, the stout bucolic reformer of governments and agriculture, collecting all he could find to re-discharge into the hostile territory.

This must surely be apocryphal. From Kensington Square I go to Gray’s Inn, where Douce lived since 1779 until his marriage to Isabella Price in 1791:

Benjamin Green, after Samuel Wale, Gray's Inn, 1761 (photo: The British Museum).

After visiting Gray’s Inn and its empty courtyards and gardens, I walk to buzzing Bloomsbury. In 1807, Douce lived at no. 32, Tavistock Place (next to the cheerfully painted hotel):

32 Tavistock Place, London

A very similar house in nearby Charlotte Street was occupied by Douce shortly after leaving his job -and his draughty rooms- in the British Museum (the ‘temple of the winds’, as he described it in a letter to George Ellis):

36 Charlotte Street, London.

I was looking forward to seeing Douce’s favourite home -he loved the house at 13 Upper Gower Street (later 116 Gower Street) where he settled just after getting married and he returned to spend the last years of his life there. The designs for its garden have been published by R. Todd Longstaffe Gowan in his article ‘Proposal for a Georgian Town Garden in Gower Street: The Francis Douce Garden’ (Garden History, vol. 15, no. 2, 1987, if you are interested). But the house does not exist any more: it disappeared as UCL expanded towards the south side of Gower Street. This was Douce’s prediction regarding Henry Brougham’s plans for the university (from a letter to George Cumberland dated 3 December 1826):

The projectors of the London University have erected an immense barrier in my Northern neighbourhood, but I prognosticate that they will not effect their purpose & this will hereafter turn out another bubble & be called Brougham’s folly.

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Holy towel

Posted on August 24, 2011 by mercedes-c

I have finally finished working on Douce’s portfolios of religious prints -over 900 images classified, like the rest of the collection, by subjects, including ‘Trinity’, ‘Images of the Madonna’, ‘Sudarium’ and ‘Relics’.

To mark this milestone, I popped in the British Museum, where I saw their exhibition Treasures of Heaven:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/treasures_of_heaven.aspx

Gleaming in the dark was the Mandylion of Edessa, lent by the Vatican:

Mandylion of Edessa, Vatican.

As you know, the Mandylion is a fringed white cloth bearing Christ’s face. The scenes on the margins of this etching (probably 16th century) belonging to Douce tell us the story of King Abgar of Edessa, to whom Christ was said to have sent the ‘holy towel’ from Jerusalem:

Sanctissimus Christi Vultus, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

In The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, Herbert Kessler discusses the relationship between the Mandylion and the copies made after it. Prints like this might have been regarded as partaking of the holiness attributed to the original image, but they ended up transformed into collectable curiosities and museum exhibits. Why did Douce acquire them? On the verso of an etching by Jean Lepautre that shows a crowd of worshippers kneeling before an image of the Virgin in a Parisian street, Douce wrote:

An idolatry less rational than that of Jupiter and Diana and as stupid as that of the Chinese Joss.

Douce considered his prints of relics and other religious imagery as examples of what Robert Southey, one of his correspondents, called the ‘epidemics of the mind’ -the elements of irrationalism and superstition that could be found in all systems of beliefs. This does not mean he was not religious (after a fashion), as he wrote to his friend George Cumberland when discussing the ‘Catholic question’ in 1827:

It is of no importance to you or to me whether the state be Catholic or Protestant so long as we enjoy what no person or tyrant can take from us, an independent & uncontrollable mind. That is to make a concord not with them, but with the being to whom we owe our existence & every thing else that is good.

Posted in Museums, Relics | Comments Off

Douce on holiday

Posted on August 19, 2011 by mercedes-c

Francis Douce was a man of habit. For many years he spent his summer holiday in Box Hill, near Dorking, enjoying what he called ‘the paradise of England’. But in 1795, he was advised to travel to Ramsgate for health reasons. At the time of Douce’s visit, Ramsgate was undergoing major building works: only one year earlier, the architect Samuel Wyatt had been appointed Surveyor and Civil Engineer to the harbour and the lighthouse that he designed in the Neoclassical style -‘the prettiest of Wyatt’s lighthouse designs’, according to J. M. Robinson- had just been completed.

On 4 September, Douce wrote to a friend, the travel writer Richard Twiss (1747-1821), from the seaside town:

I was impelled to come to this place by no other motive than the use of its warm salt water baths which I was advised to try for my complaint, the irritation I told you of. I was completely disgusted before I had been here three days in the course of which I saw […] several faces which I would have travelled to the other extremity of the kingdom to have avoided.

Benjamin West, The Bathing Place at Ramsgate, c. 1788, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Douce did not seem to be having a very good time:

The most remarkable thing here is the pier […] -the other places of resort are the assembly rooms, coffee rooms and as they call them here the libraries which in the evening are filled with people who come to do every thing but read. Instead we are all idlers of the first class and I am as compleat a one as any body for I cannot read at home for the noise -to walk out is not pleasant as the country is too open to be rural and you are either exposed to a burning sun or to be wet through if it rains both which pleasures I have enjoyed.

Hall's Library at Margate in 1789, probably very similar to the library frequented by Douce in Ramsgate (Photo: The British Museum).

He complained of the price of fish:

Ramsgate [has now] become truly disagreeable, much of the same kind as […] any other of those […] places which exhaust the capital of their worst inhabitants during the summer months. Every necessary of life is exhorbitantly dear from the vast population and boundless extravagance of the frequenteers of these places. Even fish is dear and you are asked 5 shillings a pair for soles when above 10 inches long.

Of the scarcity of interesting specimens of natural history:

Frequent walks by the seaside have afforded me very little amusement in insects or other branches of natural history […] -the only marine insect I have yet seen is the omiscus, nor have I yet taken any land insect that seems curious or uncommon -the flies I cannot lay hold of for want of a proper apparatus. The shells are neither rare or numerous & generally too much injured by the sea water to be worth preserving.

And of the sailors:

The Russian fleet was at anchor off this coast when I first came down but as I heard that both men and ships were covered with lice I did not chuse to go on board them -indeed I have no relish for sea ships or sailors and saw in my way here in the dockyard at Chesham as much of shipping as will content me for a great while.

He concluded, in characteristic Doucean style:

I have not found a reasonable creature in this place nor is there a single person with whom I can hold any conversation. I shall return home the middle of next week.

Posted in Letters, Travel | Comments Off

Health advice

Posted on August 16, 2011 by mercedes-c

From a letter sent by Douce to George Cumberland on 4 February 1826:

I read no book on health -they only hip one. I have lately lost my truly valuable & excellent friend & physician Dr. Fryer who could not save himself & admitted to me, as did Dr. Beddoes & Dr. Willar that physicians were profound ignoramuses.

If you covet a long life, & who does not combined with health?

take moderate exercise

eat & drink moderately

avoid spirituous liquors

clothe yourself warmly in winter

avoid through airs or draughts of wind

avoid heated rooms, & never leave them suddenly to go into cold air

keep your feet warm & head cool

keep the skin clear by ablutions in warm water, unless you are under 40 and then use cold water.

Do all this, or as much of it as you can, & you will live to 100.

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Douce’s prints

Posted on June 13, 2011 by admin

When told of Douce’s bequest to the Bodleian Library, Sir Frederic Madden predicted that, as a consequence, his late friend’s collections would ‘sleep on… undisturbed above once in a lustre by some prying individual of antiquarian celebrity’. He would have been surprised to see that, at present, Douce’s prints and letters are ‘disturbed’ almost on a daily basis -not by any renowned antiquary, but by myself and by my colleagues in the Department of Western Art of the Ashmolean Museum. Students, researchers and members of the public interested in a wide range of subjects, from witchcraft and pilgrimage to angling and musical instruments, have also rummaged through his portfolios in the past few months.

This might not have been foreseen by Douce who, in his letters, seems a bit wary when discussing the afterlife of private collections turned public. Thus in January 1824, he tells off his friend and fellow collector George Cumberland for his misplaced generosity:

I wish you would not give amulets (or any thing else) to Museums where they are literally buried, because they are hid.

One year later, he returns to the same subject. After praising the King of Sardinia for his purchase of a collection of Egyptian antiquities, he regrets that

our Museumites are letting their collections rot in damp cellars where no one that is prudent can look at them.

Notwithstanding of this wariness, in his will, Douce bequeathed his books, manuscripts, prints, drawings and coins to the Bodleian Library and his private papers to the British Museum (with the proviso that they should not be looked at until 1900). The latter were given to the Bodleian by the Trustees of the British Museum in 1933.

All original single-sheet drawings and most of the prints were transferred to the Ashmolean Museum in 1863. Some prints were, however, returned to the library in 1915: these included over 20,000 prints of every age, school, quality and size, arranged by subject and kept either in Douce’s original wooden boxes:

Or in large nineteenth-century portfolios:

A third group consisted of bound volumes, such as Pinelli’s costume plates and Goya’s series of Caprichos and bull-fighting scenes, or Tauromaquia. It was only in 2003 that the whole print collection was finally reunited in the Ashmolean Print Room, where it can be consulted by visitors to the museum.

We will be focusing mainly on Douce’s prints, but if you wish to know more about other aspects of his collections, I recommend the catalogue of the exhibition organised by the Bodleian Library to commemorate Douce’s bequest in 1984:

Posted in Collections and Collectors, Museums, Prints | Comments Off