Four sketches depicting scenes from accounts published in periodicals of the early 1820s, including The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, volume I, 1822-23. The drawing ‘Janvier About to Kill the Indian Who had Relieved His Hunger’ illustrates the tale of Charles Janvier, which was was first published in John Long’s Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, 1791. The Mirror published an abridged version in November 1822. Janvier and two other servants had been sent by their master, Mr. Fulton, to catch supplies of meat and fish. Saved from hunger by a passing native Canadian who gives them food, Janvier kills and eats the stranger, a fate he later inflicts on one of his fellow servants. Volume I of The Mirror also recounts the story of the ‘Rescue of the Emperor Basilius Maredo’, the final sketch in this volume. The Emperor, snagged by a stag whilst hunting, is saved by the sword of a servant who is subsequently sentenced to death for drawing his sword in the presence of the Emperor. The tale of the first sketch, ‘Sultan Mahamoud punishing a Ravisher’, is told in Knapp and Baldwin’s Newgate Calendar, 1824. The final sketch, ‘A Miser Distracted’, appears to be a depiction of Aesop’s fable ‘The Miser and his Gold’, in which a miser concentrates all his wealth into one lump of gold which he buries before it is stolen from him.

 

• Title: [Four naive watercolors depicting scenes from accounts published in periodicals of the early 1820s] [art original].
  
• Production: [England], [ca. 1823]

Catalog Record

75 A2 823

Acquired July 2020