Engraved card printed within black mourning border, illustrated above title with an image of Prince Leopold leaning mournfully over his wife Princess Charlotte’s tomb, which is adorned with her portrait and topped with an urn. Sixteen lines of verse are engraved at the bottom.
File 56 C47 817On No.2
Acquired November 2022
“Interior of a kitchen showing servants at leisure: a stout woman dances with a black man in the centre accompanied by a man with a wooden leg who sits playing a violin on the left; watched by others on the right, a young woman standing on a chair and supported by a young man, while a seated man wearing a tricorn smiles and points at her and an elderly woman stands with her arms folded under her apron, a dog at her heels; two posters pasted on the wall behind, shelves, bellows and other kitchen implements in the background.”–British Museum online catalogue, description of a print of the same design.
770.00.00.103+
Acquired November 2022
File 52 C149 757++
Acquired November 2022
Full-length portrait of a soldier, in profile to the left, a rifle with bayonet resting against his left shoulder.
Drawings R79 no. 20 Box D207
Acquired November 2022
Print shows a Gretna Green marriage in an open-fronted smithy. Erskine, disguised in woman’s dress with a huge feathered bonnet over a barrister’s wig, holds the right hand of a demure-looking woman, modishly dressed and apparently pregnant. He holds a paper: ‘Breach of Promise’. With them are three young children. The smith wears Highland dress; he holds a red-hot bar on the anvil and raises his hammer, saying, “I shall make a good thing of this Piece at last.” Erskine says: “I have bother’d the Courts in London many times, I’ll now try my hand at the Scotch Bar–as to Miss C– she may do her worst since I have got my Letters back.” The woman says: “Now who dare say, Blacks the White of my Eye.” In the background (right) a young woman rushes down a slope towards the smithy, shouting, “Oh Stop Stop Stop, false Man, I will yet seek redress tho you have got back your letters–” Beside her is a sign-post pointing ‘To Gretna Green’. A little boy with Erskine’s features, wearing tartan trousers, stands on tip-toe to watch the smith; on the ground beside him is a toy (or emblem), a cock on a pair of breeches. A little girl stands by her mother nursing a doll fashionably dressed as a woman, but with Erskine’s profile. Another boy with a toy horse on a string stands in back view watching ‘Miss C’. Behind the smith is the furnace; on the wall hang many rings: ‘Rings to fit all Hands.’
819.02.04.01+
Acquired November 2022
“Caricature with a family of a working man, his wife and daughter dressed in fashionable clothes, with a cottage and pig on a dung-hill in the background.”–British Museum online catalogue.
A satire on the aspirations of the working classes. The affluently dressed dustman’s wife asks her husband if he has seen the latest issue of ‘La Bells Ass-emblee’ (John Bell’s La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine).
824.00.00.64
Acquired November 2022
Full-length portrait of a woman, likely to be Mary Anne Clarke, wearing a white neoclassical dress and standing on a balcony with a curtain drapped from the left corner.
Drawings B922 no. 1
Acquired November 2022
File 64 Al452 819
Acquired November 2022
A gentleman leads a young woman and her mother (or chaperone) to the door of a carriage, held open by the coach driver who wears a top hat and a peculiar grin. In the background is a house or inn with a partially drawn figure (in ink) watching or emerging from the door. On the verso, pencil sketches of two men in top hats, and a smaller figure lightly sketched with a top hat in black ink.
Drawings C889 no. 9 Box D115
Acquired November 2022
“Caricature with Caroline as Boadicea in a chariot riding over her accusers, followed by a crowd of supporters.”–British Museum online catalogue.
820.11.00.03+
Acquired November 2022