Maria Ines Aliverti_The Miniatures of Jean Louis ... - Acting Archives

AAR Acting Archives Essays Supplement 10 – April 2011
1773 the fame of these little prints was at its peak, and that the more widely known
Grignion was happy to see his name linked to that of an unknown Swiss.
Nevertheless, even if no other engraver is mentioned in Sayer and Bennet’s Catalogue
entries, considering the poor quality of the anonymous prints initially edited by Sayer
and Smith, we have to be cautious about this attribution of all the prints to Grignion,
which is likely to be due to commercial purposes.
During these years Faesch continued to produce and sell his miniatures. Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg attests to the diffusion and success of Faesch’s miniatures and
Sayer’s ‘small pictures’ in the letters written during his stay in the English capital. 46
It is therefore quite plausible that Faesch continued to visit London at least until
the end of 1775, or even that he preferably settled there, drawn by the profits
ensured by the market in theatrical images, which was growing much faster than in
France. His final return to Paris must have come in around 1775. The 1775-1776
theatre season was the last of the great Garrick, his protector. Business may also have
begun to fall off, due to the competition created by the lively market and the
enterprising spirit of new publishers, the most important of whom was the energetic
John Bell. In 1773 Bell began to publish his numerous popular and well-publicized
theatrical editions, and in 1775, undoubtedly inspired by the success of Faesch’s
vignettes, he launched the third edition of the ‘acting’ Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s Plays,
1775-1778), followed immediately by Bell’s British Theatre (1776-1781), in which the
plays were accompanied by portraits of actors in costume and stage poses. In these
series, right from the beginning, Bell also employed Charles Grignion, the French
engraver who had worked on Faesch’s vignettes. 47
Bell’s tendency to monopolize this popular market, well described by Burnim and
Highfill Jr. in their monograph on the theatrical production of the highly successful
publisher, can, I believe, be taken as one of the causes, perhaps not the only one, of
Faesch’s retirement from the promising English market. It would not be hazardous
to surmise that Grignion’s new commitments, especially in the years 1775 and 1776
when Bell’s illustrated theatrical series were launched, must have deprived Faesch of
consisting of Forty-five Portraits of the most capital Actors, in the principal Scenes of these Theatres, chiefly from original
drawings of De Fish, and beautifully engraved by Mr.Grignion, in one neat Pocket Volume, price 10 s. 6 d., neatly
coloured, 1l. 1s.
46 Letter from London on 30 November 1775. See Lichtenberg’s Visit to England as described in His Letters
and Diaries, ed. by Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrel, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1938, p. 25.
Another passage (in a letter from London on 29 January 1775) is refferred by John Cavanagh to
Faesch’s gouaches. See [John P. Cavanagh], The Drama Delineated: A Source Collection of Original Drawings
of the French 18th Century Stage, Collection 2/81, Mottisfont Abbey (Romsey), Motley Books, [1981], a
ten-page cyclostyled typescript: title page, pages [1]-4 numbered + five pages [5-9] not numbered.
Lichtenberg, a passionate theatregoer and an acute observer of playing actors, had apparently
purchased some of these miniatures representing Garrick as Abel Drugger.
47 On the employment of this great engraver by Bell, I refer to the information gathered in the
excellent monograph of Kalman A. Burnim and Philip H. Highfill Jr., John Bell, Patron of English
Theatrical Portraiture: A Catalog of the Theatrical Portraits in His Editions of Bell’s Shakespeare and Bell’s British
Theatre, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. As underlined by
Burnim, the third edition of the ‘acting’ Shakespeare (36 plays) relied heavily on the work of Charles
Grignion (p. 21), who contributed 16 plates ‘and probably he contributed a number of the fifteen
plays with no engraver’s name inscribed’ (p. 25). Grignion was also the principal engraver of another
series published by Bell (Bell’s Poets) which began in 1776. In Bell’s British Theatre (1776-1781),
Grignion’s involvement was more limited, since the engraving of most of the plates was entrusted to
James Thorntwaite (active 1770-1797).
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