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Not because nonsense is not suited to making proselytes witness the Methodists, Moravians, Baron Swedenborg, and Loutherbourg the painter but it should not be learned nonsense, which only the literate think they understand after long study. Absurdity announced only to the ear and easily retained by the memory has other guess operation. Not that I have any objection to Mr.
Pepys's last night' A discussion of such subjects was by no means compatible with Miss More's notion of a good evening. What could have induced simple-minded Mr. De Loutherbourg to put trust in this arch-juggler?
'July 25th, 1798. Went with Geiseveiller to see the picture of the "Siege of Valenciennes" by Loutherbourg. He went to the scene of action accompanied by Gilray, a Scotchman, famous among the lovers of caricature; a man of talents, however, and uncommonly apt at sketching a hasty likeness. One of the merits of the picture is the portraits it contains, English and Austrian.
In proof of the regard in which he was held, it may be noted that the guardians of the De Quinceys deemed it worth while to pay De Loutherbourg a premium of one thousand guineas, to receive as a pupil William, the elder brother of Thomas De Quincey, who had given promise of skill in drawing. The young fellow died, however, in his sixteenth year, about 1795, in the painter's house at Hammersmith.
A more moderate sum had some years previously been demanded of Mr. Charles Bannister, the actor, for the art-education of his son John. For a payment of fifty pounds per annum for four years, it was agreed that John Bannister should be taught, boarded, and lodged. But the arrangement came to nothing. De Loutherbourg demanded the payment of the money in advance. He mistrusted the players.
That he should have aided in the art-training and forming of the greatest of landscape painters is a real tribute to the merits of De Loutherbourg. It is something to have been even the fuel that helped the fire of a great genius to burn the more brightly.
In 1780 he was elected an Associate; in the following year he arrived at the full honours of academicianship. Peter Pindar, in his 'Lyrical Odes to the Royal Academicians for 1782, finds a place for De Loutherbourg. Having denounced the unlikeness of Mason Chamberlin's portraits, he satirizes the style of art of the landscape painter:
By his landscapes exhibited at the Louvre, De Loutherbourg acquired fame in Paris, and in 1763 was elected a member of the French Academy of Painting, being then eight years below the prescribed age for admission to that distinction, say the biographers who date his birth from 1740.
De Loutherbourg, 'without so much crowding. Finally she exhorts the world at large to contribute generously to the promotion of these beneficial objects. But even at the date of Mrs. Pratt's pamphlet the tide was turning had turned. The nine days' wonder was over. The mania was dying of exhaustion.
De Loutherbourg complained bitterly that out of the thousands he professed to have cured, but few returned to thank him for the great benefits he had conferred upon them. He preferred to believe in the ingratitude of his patients rather than adopt the more obvious and reasonable course of questioning the perfect virtue of his curative powers, Mrs.
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