Charles G. Harper

SIGNS PAINTED BY ARTISTS

In the “good old days,” when an artist was supposed to be drunken and dissolute in proportion to his genius, and when a very large number of them accordingly lived up to that supposition, either in self-defence or out of their own natural depravity, it was no uncommon thing to see the wayside ale-house sporting a sign that to the eye of instructed travellers displayed merits of draughtsmanship and colour of an order entirely different from those commonly associated with mere sign-boards.

Fresh from perusing the domestic records of the eighteenth century, you have a confused mental picture of artists poor in pocket but rich in genius, pervading the country, hoofing it muzzily along the roads, and boozing in every village ale-house. You see such an one, penniless, offering to settle a trivial score by painting a new sign or retouching an old one, and you very vividly picture mine host ungraciously accepting the offer, because he has no choice. Then, behold, the artist goes his way, like the Prodigal Son, to his husks and his harlots, to run up more scores and liquidate them in the like manner; and presently there enters, to your mental vision, a traveller whose educated eye perceives that sign, and discovers in its yet undried and tacky oils the touch of a master. He buys that masterpiece for golden guineas from the gaping and unappreciative innkeeper, whose score was but a matter of silver shillings; and he—he is a Duke or something in the Personage way—takes that “Barley Mow” or “Ship and Seven Stars,” or whatever the subject may be, tenderly home to his palace and places it, suitably framed, among his ancestral Titians, Raphaels, or Botticellis.

That, I say, is the golden, misty picture of Romance presented to you, and, in sober fact, incidents of that nature were not unknown; but that they happened quite so often as irresponsible weavers of legends would have us believe, we may take leave to doubt.

Artists of established repute sometimes, even then, painted inn-signs from other motives. Hogarth, for example, that stern pictorial moralist, was scarcely the man to be reduced to such straits as those already hinted; but he was a jovial fellow, and is said to have painted a number of signs for friendly innkeepers. The classic example of those attributed to him is, of course, the well-known sign of the “Man Loaded with Mischief,” the name of a public-house, formerly 414, Oxford Street.[6] The name was changed, about 1880, to the “Primrose,” and the painted panel-sign removed. In its last years it—whether the original or an old copy seems uncertain—was fixed against the wall of the entrance-lobby. The picture was one of crowded detail. The Man, another Atlas, carried on his back a drunken woman holding a glass of gin in her hand, and had on either shoulder a monkey and a jackdaw. In the background were “S. Gripe’s” pawnshop, the “Cuckold’s Fortune” public-house, crowned with a pair of horns, two quarrelling cats, a sleeping sow, and a jug labelled “Fine Purl.” This scathing satire, peculiarly out of place in a drink-shop, was “Drawn by Experience” and “Engraved by Sorrow,” and was finished off by the rhyme:

A Monkey, a Magpie, and a Wife
Is the true Emblem of Strife.

A somewhat similar sign exists at the present time at Madingley, near Cambridge.

THE “MAN LOADED WITH MISCHIEF.”

The correctness, or otherwise, of the Oxford Street sign being attributed to Hogarth has never been determined, but it is quite characteristic of him, and all through Hogarth’s works there runs a curious familiarity with, and insistence upon, signs. You find the sign of the “Duke of Cumberland” pictorially insisted upon in his “Invasion of England,” although it is merely an accessory to the picture; and in “Gin Lane,” “Southwark Fair,” the “March to Finchley,” and others, every detail of incidental signs is shown. This distinguishing characteristic is nowhere more remarkable than in his “Election: Canvassing for Votes,” where, above the heads of the rival agents in bribery is the sign of the “Royal Oak,” half obscured by an election placard. In the distance is seen a mob, about to tear down the sign of the “Crown,” and above the two seated and drinking and smoking figures in the foreground is part of the “Portobello” sign. A curious item in this picture is the fierce effigy of a lion, looking as though it had been the figurehead of a ship, and somewhat resembling those still existing at the “Star” inn, Alfriston, and the “Red Lion,” Martlesham.

The classic instance of the dissolute artistic genius, ever drinking in the wayside beerhouse, and leaving long trails of masterpieces behind him in full settlement of paltry scores, is George Morland. He painted exquisitely, for the same reason that the skylark sings divinely, because he could not do otherwise; and no one has represented so finely or so naturally the rustic life of England at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, as he. His chosen companions were “ostlers, potboys, pugilists, moneylenders, and pawnbrokers”—the last two classes, it may be suspected, less from choice than from necessity. He painted over four thousand pictures in his short life of forty-one years, and died in a “sponging-house” for debtors, leaving the all-too-true epitaph for himself, “Here lies a drunken dog.”

He lived for a considerable time opposite the “White Lion” inn, at the then rural village of Paddington, and his masterpiece, the “Inside of a Stable,” was painted there.

Morland was no neglected genius. His natural, unaffected style, that was no style, in the sense that he showed rustic life as it was, without the “classic” artifice of a Claude or the finicking unreality of a Watteau, appealed alike to connoisseurs and to the uneducated in art; and he might, but for his own hindrance, have been a wealthy man. Dealers besieged him, purse in one hand and bottle in the other. He paid all debts with pictures, and in those inns where he was known the landlords kept a room specially for him, furnished with all the necessaries of his art: only too pleased that, in his ready-made fame, he should settle scores in his characteristic way.

Oddly enough, although Morland is reputed to have painted many inn-signs, not one has survived; or perhaps, more strictly speaking, not one of the existing paintings by him has been identified with a former sign.

Morland died in 1824, and twenty years later one “J. B. P.,” in The Somerset House Gazette, described how, walking from Laleham to Chertsey Bridge, and sheltering at the “Cricketers,” a small public-house there, he noticed, while sitting in the parlour, a painting of a cricket-match. The style seemed familiar, and he at last recognised it as Morland’s. Questioning the landlord, he learned that forty-five years earlier the inn was the “Walnut Tree,” and that a “famous painter” had lodged there and painted the picture. It grew so popular with local cricketers that at last the name of the house was altered.

The stranger offered to buy, but the landlord declared he would not sell. It seemed that he took it with him when he set up a booth at Egham and Staines races, “an’ cricket-matches and such-like.” It was, in fact, his trade-mark.

Mine host thought in shillings, but the stranger in guineas.

“How,” he asked, “if I offered you £10 10s.?”“Ah, well!” rejoined the publican: “it should go, with all my heart,”—and go it did.

Thus did the purchaser describe his bargain: “The painting, about a yard in length and of a proportionate height, is done on canvas, strained upon something like an old shutter, which has two staples at the back, suited to hook it for its occasional suspension on the booth-front in the host’s erratic business at fairs and races. The scene I found to be a portrait of the neighbouring cricket-green called Laleham Borough, and contains thirteen cricketers in full play, dressed in white, one arbiter in red and one in blue, besides four spectators, seated two by two on chairs. The picture is greatly cracked, in the reticulated way of paint when much exposed to the sun; but the colours are pure, and the landscape in a very pleasing tone, and in perfect harmony. The figures are done as if with the greatest ease, and the mechanism of Morland’s pencil and his process of painting are clearly obvious in its decided touches, and in the gradations of the white particularly. It cannot be supposed that this freak of the pencil is a work of high art; yet it certainly contains proof of Morland’s extraordinary talent, and it should seem that he even took some pains with it, for there are marks of his having painted out and re-composed at least one figure.”

The appreciation of Morland in his lifetime is well shown by a story of himself and Williams, the engraver, tramping, tired, hungry, thirsty and penniless, from Deal to London. They came at last to “the ‘Black Bull’ on the Dover Road”—wherever precisely that may have been—and Morland offered the landlord to repaint his faded sign for a crown, the price of a meal. The innkeeper knew nothing of Morland, and was at first unwilling; but he at length agreed, and rode off to Canterbury for the necessary materials.

The friends eventually ran up a score a few shillings in excess of that contemplated originally by the landlord, and left him dissatisfied with his bargain. Meanwhile, artist and engraver tramped to town, and, telling the story to their friends in the hearing of a long-headed admirer of Morland’s work, he rode down and, we are told, purchased the “Black Bull” sign from the amazed landlord for £10 10s.

The story is probably in essentials true, but that unvarying ten-guinea price is inartistic and unconvincing.

Richard Wilson, an earlier than Morland, fought a losing fight as a landscape painter, and “by Britain left in poverty to pine,” at last died in 1782. Classic landscape in the manner of Claude was not then appreciated, and the unfortunate painter sold principally to pawnbrokers, at wretched prices, until even they grew tired of backing him. He lived and died neglected, and had to wait for Fame, as “Peter Pindar,” that shrewdest and best of art-critics, foretold,

He painted at least one inn-sign: that of the “Loggerheads” at Llanverris, in Denbighshire; a picture representing two jovial, and not too intellectual, grinning faces, with the inscription, “We Three Loggerheads Be.” The fame of this sign was once so great that the very name of the village itself became obscured, and the place was commonly known as “Loggerheads.” Wilson’s work was long since repainted.

But what is a “loggerhead,” and why should the two grinning faces of the sign have been described as “three”? The origin of the term is, like the birth of Jeames de la Pluche, “wrop in mistry”; but of the meaning of it there is little doubt. A “loggerhead” is anything you please in the dunderhead, silly fool, perfect ass, or complete idiot way, and the gaping stranger who looks inquisitively at the two loggerheads on the sign-board automatically constitutes himself the third, and thus completes the company. It is a kind of small-beer, fine-drawn jape that has from time immemorial passed for wit in rustic parts, and may be traced even in the pages of Shakespeare, where, in Act II. Scene 2 of Twelfth Night, it is the subject of allusion as the picture of “We Three.”

The “Mortal Man” at Troutbeck, in the Lake district, once possessed a pictorial sign, painted by Julius CÆsar Ibbetson, a gifted but dissolute artist, friend of, and kindred spirit with, Morland. It represented two faces, the one melancholy, pallid and thin, the other hearty, good-humoured, and “ruddier than the cherry.” Beneath these two countenances was inscribed a verse attributed to Thomas Hoggart, a local wit, uncle of Hogarth, the painter:

First went the heads, and at last the verses also, and to-day the “Mortal Man” has only a plain sign.

John Crome, founder of the “Norwich School” of artists, known as “Old” Crome, in order to distinguish him from his son, contributed to this list of signs painted by artists. It is not surprising that he should have done so, seeing that he won to distinction from the very lowest rungs of the ladder; leaving, as a boy, the occupation of running errands for a doctor, and commencing art in 1783 as apprentice to a coach-, house-, and sign-painter. One work of his of this period is the “Sawyers” sign. It is now preserved at the Anchor Brewery, Pockthorpe, Norwich. Representing a saw-pit, with two sawyers at work, it shows the full-length figure of the top-sawyer and the head and shoulders of the other. It is, however, a very inferior and fumbling piece of work, and its interest is wholly sentimental.

J. F. Herring, afterwards famous for his paintings of horses and farmyard scenes, began as a coach-painter and sign-board artist at Doncaster, in 1814. He painted at least twelve inn-signs in that town, but they have long since become things of the past.Charles Herring never reached the heights of fame scaled by his brother, and long painted signs for a great firm of London brewers.

However difficult it might prove nowadays to rise from the humble occupations of house- or coach-painter, to the full glory of a Royal Academician, it seems once to have been a comparatively easy transition. All that was requisite was the genius for it, and sometimes not very much of that. A case in point is that of Sir William Beechey, who not only won to such distinction in 1793 from the several stages of house-painter and solicitor’s clerk, but achieved the further and more dazzling success of knighthood, although never more than an indifferent portrait-painter. A specimen of his art, in the shape of the sign-board of the “Dryden’s Head,” near Kate’s Cabin, on the Great North Road, was long pointed out.

The painting of sign-boards, in fact, was long a kind of preparatory school for higher flights of art, and indeed the fashion of pictorial signs nursed many a dormant genius into life and activity. Robert Dalton, who rose to be Keeper of the Pictures to George the Third, had been a painter of signs and coaches; Gwynne, who first performed similar journey-work, became a marine-painter of repute; Smirke, who eventually became R.A.; Ralph Kirby, drawing-master to the Prince of Wales, afterwards George the Fourth; Thomas Wright, of Liverpool, and many more, started life decorating coach-panels or painting signs. Opie, the Cornish peasant-lad who rose to fame in paint, declared that his first steps were of the like nature: “I ha’ painted Duke William for the signs, and stars and such-like for the boys’ kites.”

The Royal Academicians of our own time did not begin in this way, and as a pure matter of curious interest it will be found that your sucking painter is too dignified for anything of the kind, and that modern signs painted by artists are usually done for a freak by those who have already long acquired fame and fortune. It is an odd reversal.

Thus, very many years ago, Millais painted a “George and Dragon” sign for the “George” inn, Hayes Common. There it hung, exposed to all weathers, and at last faded into a neutral-tinted, very “speculative” affair, when the landlord had it repainted, “as good as new,” by some one described as “a local artist.” Now even the local painter’s work has disappeared, and the great hideous “George” is content without a picture-sign.

The most famous of all signs painted by artists is, of course, that of the “Royal Oak” at Bettws-y-Coed, on the Holyhead Road. It was painted by David Cox, in 1847, and, all other tales to the contrary notwithstanding, it was not executed by him, when in sore financial straits, to liquidate a tavern score. David Cox was never of the Morland type of dissolute artist, did not run up scores, paid his rates and taxes, never bilked a tradesman, and was just a home-loving, domesticated man. That he should at the same time have been a great artist, supreme in his own particular field, in his own particular period, is so unusual and unaccountable a thing that it would not be surprising to find some critic-prophet arising to deny his genius because of all those damning circumstances of the commonplace, and the clinching facts that he never wore a velvet jacket, and had his hair cut at frequent intervals.

SIGN OF THE “ROYAL OAK,” BETTWS-Y-COED.

The genius of David Cox was not fully realised in his lifetime, and he received very inadequate prices for his works, but he was probably never “hard up,” and he painted the sign-board of the “Royal Oak” merely as a whimsical compliment to his friend, Mrs. Roberts, the landlady of the house, which was still at that time a rural inn.

The old sign had become faded by long exposure to the weather, and was about to be renewed at the hands of a house-painter, when Cox, who happened then to be on one of his many visits to Bettws, ascended a short ladder reared against the house and repainted it, then and there. The coaching age still survived in North Wales at that period, and Bettws was still secluded and rustic, and he little looked for interruption; but, while busily at work, he was horrified by hearing a voice below exclaim, “Why, it is Mr. Cox, I declare!” A lady, a former pupil of his, travelling through the country on her honeymoon, had noticed him, and although he rather elaborately explained the how and the why of his acting the part of sign-painter, it seems pretty clear that it was from this source the many old stories derived of Cox being obliged by poverty to resort to this humble branch of art.

In 1849 he retouched the sign, and in 1861, two years after his death, it was, at the request of many admirers, removed from the outside wall and placed in a situation of honour, in the hall of what had by that time become an “hotel.”

The painting, on wooden panel, is a fine, bold, dashing picture of a sturdy oak, in whose midst you do but vaguely see, or fancy you see, His Majesty, hiding. Beneath are troopers, questing about on horseback. It is very Old Masterish in feeling, low-toned and mellow in colour, and rich in impasto. It is fixed as part of a decorative overmantel, and underneath is a prominent inscription stating that it “forms part of the freehold of the hotel belonging to the Baroness Howard de Walden.” Sign and freehold have now descended to the Earl of Ancaster.

Behind that inscription lies a curious story of disputed ownership in the painting. It seems that in 1880 the then landlady of the “Royal Oak” became bankrupt, and the trustees in bankruptcy claimed the sign as a valuable asset, a portion of the estate; making a statement to the effect that a connoisseur had offered £1,000 for it. This at once aroused the cupidity of the then Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, owner of the freehold, and an action was brought against the trustees, to determine whose property it was. The trustees in the first instance, in the Bangor District Court of Bankruptcy, were worsted by Judge Horatio Lloyd, who held that it was a fixture, and could not be sold by the innkeeper. This decision was challenged, and the question re-argued before Sir James Bacon, who, in delivering judgment for the trustees, said the artist had made a present of the picture, and that it belonged to the innkeeper as much as the coat or the dress on her back. He therefore reversed the decision of the Judge in Bankruptcy; but the case was carried eventually to the Supreme Court, and the Lords finally declared the painting to be the property of the freeholder.

Their decision was based upon the following reasoning: “Assuming that the picture was originally what may be called a ‘tenant’s fixture,’ which he might have removed, it appeared that he had never done so. Therefore, the picture not having been removed by the original tenant within his term, on a new lease being granted it became the property of the landlord, and had never ceased to be so.”In these days of the revival of this, of that, and of t’ other, you think inevitably of that very wise saying of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”

SIGN OF THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” WARGRAVE-ON-THAMES.
Painted by G. D. Leslie, R.A.

The most readily allowed excuse for anything in such times as these is the plea that it is a revival of something that existed of old. That at once sets upon it—little matter what it be—the seal of approval. Of late years there has in this way been a notable revival of inn-signs painted by artists of repute.

The oldest of these moderns is perhaps that of the “George and Dragon” at Wargrave-on-Thames: a double-sided sign painted by the two Royal Academicians, G. D. Leslie and J. E. Hodgson. In a gossipy book of reminiscences Mr. Leslie tells how this sign came to be painted, about 1874: “It was during our stay at Wargrave that my friend Mr. Hodgson and I painted Mrs. Wyatt’s sign-board for her—the ‘George and Dragon.’ I painted my side first, a regular orthodox St. George on a white horse, spearing the dragon. Hodgson was so taken with the idea of painting a sign-board that he asked me to be allowed to do the other side, to which I, of course, consented, and as he could only stop at Wargrave one day, he managed to do it on that day—indeed, it occupied him little more than a couple of hours. The idea of his composition was suggested by Signor Pellegrini, the well-known artist of Vanity Fair. The picture represented St. George, having vanquished the dragon and dismounted from his horse, quenching his thirst in a large beaker of ale. These pictures were duly hung up soon after, and very much admired. They have since had a coat of boat-varnish, and look already very Old Masterly. Hodgson’s, which gets the sun on it, is a little faded; but mine, which faces the north, towards Henley, still looks pretty fresh.”

SIGN OF THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” WARGRAVE-ON-THAMES.
Painted by J. E. Hodgson, R.A.

Goring-on-Thames has a now very faded pictorial sign, the “Miller of Mansfield,” painted by Marcus Stone, R.A. The Thames-side villages are indeed especially favoured, and at Wallingford the sign of the “Row Barge,” by G. D. Leslie, is prominent in a bye-street. The inn itself is a very modest and very ancient place of entertainment. A document is still extant which sets forth how the licence was renewed in 1650, when, owing to the puritanical ways of the age, many other houses in the same town had to forfeit theirs, and discontinue business. Once the property of the Corporation of Wallingford, it seems to have obtained its unusual name from having been the starting-point of the Mayor’s State Barge. With these facts in mind, the artist painted an imaginary state barge, pulled by six sturdy watermen, and containing the Mayor and Corporation of Wallingford, accompanied by the mace-bearer, who occupies a prominent position in the prow. G. D. Leslie also painted the sign of the “King Harry” at St. Stephen’s, outside St. Albans, but it has long been replaced by a quite commonplace daub.

THE “ROW BARGE,” WALLINGFORD.
Painted by G. D. Leslie, R.A.

THE “SWAN,” PRESTON CROWMARSH.

This does not quite exhaust the list of riverside places thus distinguished, for “Ye Olde Swan,” Preston Crowmarsh, has a sign painted by Mr. Wildridge. It overlooks one of the prettiest ferries on the river.

THE “WINDMILL,” TABLEY.

THE “SMOKER” INN, PLUMBLEY.

Two modern artistic signs in Cheshire owe their existence to a lady. These are the effective pictures of the “Smoker” inn at Plumbley and the “Windmill,” Tabley. They are from the brush of Miss Leighton, a niece of the late Lord de Tabley. The “Smoker” by no means indicates a place devoted with more than usual thoroughness to smoking, but is named after a once-famous race-horse belonging to the family in the early years of the nineteenth century. On one side of the sign is a portrait of the horse, the reverse displaying the arms of the De Tableys, supported by two ferocious-looking cockatrices.

The sign of the “Windmill” explains itself: it is Don Quixote, tilting at one of his imaginary enemies.

THE “FERRY” INN, ROSNEATH.

In 1897 the Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, designed and painted a pictorial sign for the “Ferry” inn at Rosneath. It is only remarkable as being the work of a Royal Princess. The three-masted ancient ship, or galleon, is the heraldic charge known as a “lymphad,” borne by many Scottish families, among them the Campbells, Dukes of Argyll.

Some three years later Mr. Walter Crane enriched the little Hampshire village of Grayshott with a pictorial sign for the “Fox and Pelican,” a converted inn conducted on the principles of one of the feather-brained nostrums of the age.

THE “FERRY” INN, ROSNEATH.

The name of the house commemorates Fox, the great Bishop of Winchester, whose device was “A Pelican in her Piety.” It represents a pelican guarding a nest of three young birds, and feeding them with blood from her breast. The device is painted on one side of the board, and the name of the house is inscribed on a scroll on the other.

THE “FOX AND PELICAN,” GRAYSHOTT.

Many other pictorial inn-signs have of late years replaced the merely lettered boards, and although the artists are not famous, or even well-known, the average merit of the work is high. A particularly good example is the double-sided sign of a little thatched rural inn, the “Cat and Fiddle,” between Christchurch and Bournemouth; where on one side you perceive the cat seated calmly, in a domestic manner, while on the other he is reared upon his hind-legs, fiddle-playing, according to the nursery-rhyme:

Serious antiquaries—a thought too serious—have long attempted to find a hidden meaning in the well-known sign of the “Cat and Fiddle.” According to some commentators, it derived from “Caton fidÈle,” one Caton, a staunch Protestant governor of Calais in the reactionary reign of Queen Mary, who could justly apply to himself the praise: “I have fought the good fight, I have kept the Faith,” while in the rhyme it has been sought to discover some veiled political allusion, carefully wrapped up in nursery allegory, in times when to interfere openly in politics, or to criticise personages or affairs of State was not merely dangerous, but fatal. Ingenious people have discovered in the wild jingle an allusion to Henry the Eighth and the Disestablishment of the Monasteries, and others have found it to be a satire on James the Second and the Great Rebellion. Given the requisite ingenuity, there is no national event to which it could not be compared; but why not take it merely for what it is: a bundle of inconsequent rhymes for the amusement of the childish ear?

THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR CHRISTCHURCH.

THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR CHRISTCHURCH.

From every point of view the revival and spread of the old fashion of artistic sign-boards is to be encouraged, for it not only creates an interest in the different localities, but serves to perpetuate local history and legend.

A remarkable feature of the “Swan” at Fittleworth is the number of pictures painted by artists on the old panelling of the coffee-room.

Caton Woodville painted a sign for this house, but it has long been considered too precious to be hung outside, exposed to the chances of wind and wet, and perhaps in danger of being filched one dark night by some connoisseur more appreciative than honest. It has therefore been removed within. It represents on one side the swan, ridden by a Queen of the Fairies, while a frog, perched on the swan’s tail, holds a lantern, whose light is in rivalry with a star.

On the other side a frog, seated in a pewter pot, is observed contentedly smoking a “churchwarden” pipe while he is being conveyed down stream.