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Painters and Paint at the Pantheon Opera, 1790–1792

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Judith Milhous
Judith Milhous
Affiliation:
Judith Milhous is Distinguished Professor of Theatre Studies, City University of New York, Graduate Center
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Extract

The importance of scene painters to English theatre increased markedly toward the end of the eighteenth century—in part a response to the contributions of Philip James De Loutherbourg at Drury Lane in the 1770s. Advertisements began routinely to record the name of what we would now call the scene designer. Gaetano Marinari was identified as principal painter and machinist at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket between 1785 and 1789, when the old opera house burned. Thomas Greenwood held the equivalent position at Drury Lane, John Inigo Richards at Covent Garden, and Michael Angelo Rooker at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. For particular productions the names of assistant painters might also be advertised. On 20 December 1785, for example, Covent Garden listed Richards, Carver, Hodgins, Catton Jun., and Turner as the crew that executed scenery for the travelogue Omai, which turned out to be De Loutherbourg's last designs for the London theatre.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 54 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1999

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References

Notes

1. Except for this single engagement, De Loutherbourg ceased to work in the theatre after his election to the Royal Academy in 1781. For convenient summaries of information about him and other painters, see Highfill, Philip H. Jr., Burnim, Kaiman A., and Langhans, Edward A., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–1993)Google Scholar; Rosenfeld, Sybil and Croft-Murray, Edward, ‘A Checklist of Scene Painters Working in Great Britain and Ireland in the 18th Century’, Theatre Notebook 19 (1964–1965), pp. 6–20, 49–64, 102–13, 133–45Google Scholar, and 20 (1965–6), pp. 36–44, 69–72, and 113–18; and Waterhouse, Ellis, The Dictionary of British 18th Century Painters in Oils and Crayons (n.p.: Antique Collectors' Club, 1981).Google Scholar Performance information not otherwise credited comes from The London Stage, Part 4: 1747–1776, ed. George Winchester Stone, Jr., and Part 5: 1776–1800, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale, Ill.: Southem Illinois University Press, 1962, 1968).

2. Rosenfeld, Sybil, Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

3. The Bedford Opera Papers are now housed at Woburn Abbey. Documents from this collection will be cited by number in parentheses. I am grateful to the Marquess of Tavistock and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates for permission to use the papers and to Bedford Archivist Ann Mitchell for generous assistance.

4. See Price, Curtis, ‘Italian Opera and Arson in Late Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 42 (1989), pp. 55–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Milhous, Judith, ‘Dancers’ Contracts at the Pantheon Opera House, 1790–1792’, Dance Research 9 (1991), pp. 51–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Price, Curtis, Milhous, Judith, and Hume, Robert D., The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791, vol. i of Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1995).Google Scholar

5. In The Life and Works of William Hodges (New York: Garland, 1979), Isabel Combs Stuebe surveys the career in detail. For a more skeptical assessment, see Joppien, Rüdiger and Smith, Bernard, The Art of Captain Cook's Voyages, vol. ii: The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, 1772–1775 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with the Australian Academy of Humanities, 1985).Google Scholar

6. Joseph Farington reported that after Hodges left training in 1765 he ‘passed 3 or 4 years in the country, chiefly at Derby, where He painted some Scenes’ (Stuebe, Hodges, pp. 12–13).

7. See Price, Curtis, Milhous, Judith, and Hume, Robert D., ‘A Plan of the Pantheon Opera House, 1790–2’, Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991), pp. 213–46.Google Scholar

8. Bedford Opera Papers 4.A.35. Versions of the standard clauses dealing with closure for fire or ‘the death of princes’ and breach of contract (£50 penalty) are not transcribed here. In all transcriptions in this essay, I have silently expanded abbreviations, converted dates and money from words to figures, and added minimal punctuation as necessary.

9. As written, this clause appears to demand that Hodges have written authorization to paint each design. I suspect it is an ill-phrased version of a standard prohibition that prevented an employee of one theatre from working at a rival theatre without permission. The ‘said Intended Opera House’ probably means the King's Theatre in the Haymar-ket, then in process of rebuilding after the 1789 fire.

10. For puffs, see the Pantheon Scrapbook of unidentified newspaper clippings in the Mander and Mitchenson Collection (hereafter, M&M Pantheon), p. 11, dated in MS 26 January 1791; the 11 February Morning Chronicle; and the 18 February Diary.

11. See Milhous, Judith and Hume, Robert D., ‘Opera Salaries in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993), pp. 26–83, esp. pp. 51–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Bedford Opera Papers 2.B.12 and 4.A.20.

13. M&M Pantheon, p. ii.6, and Harvard Theatre Collection TS326.1F, another scrapbook of unidentified newspaper cuttings (hereafter, HTC Pantheon), p. 106. Both items are dated in MS 28 March 1791.

14. HTC Pantheon, p. 102, and M&M Pantheon, p. ii.4, dated in MS 4 March 1791. Advertisements credit John Inigo Richards, R.A., with execution as well as design of most of the scenery for The Woodman (26 February 1791).

15. HTC Pantheon, p. 106, dated in MS 28 March 1791. Ironically, the Bedford Opera Papers show that Hodges was paid at least five-sixths of his contract fee, part of it after O'Reilly had resigned (2.B.12; 4.B.4; 3 Misc., no. 6.n.s.).

16. Bedford Opera Papers 4.D.66.a and b. The undated bill lists ‘6 chasis a £1 10 Scheling par chasi’, £9; ‘une forme Comptée pour 6 chasis idem’, £9; ‘un fond et un chasis oblique Vallents trois chasis idem’, £4 10s.; ‘4 plafonds evalueé a 6 chasis idem’, £9; and ‘un Banc de Gazon’, 10s. After a subtotal comes the addition of £3 3s. ½ d. for the bill from ‘le tapissier’ whom Dauberval had already paid to carpet the grassy bank. Dauberval acknowledged the total of £35 3s.½d. on a printed receipt. In ‘Turner at the Pantheon Opera House, 1791–2’, Turner Studies 7 (1987), pp. 2–8, Curtis Price mistakenly dates the start of Moench's regime from this bill, which is the earliest mention of the other designer in the Bedford Opera Papers.

17. The shortest possible time for an S.O.S. to Paris and for Moench to travel to London was about a month.

18. The rental, documented only in a 1798 letter (6.F.29), could have been entered as a miscellaneous expense under Housekeeping or the Painting Room.

19. The libretto for Idalide and the advertisement in the World on 15 April 1791 listed Hodges as designer.

20. Nos. 5576, 17437, and 22832 in Sartori, Claudio, I Libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800, 7 vols. (Milan: Bertola & Locatelli Editori, 1990–1994).Google Scholar Moench's birth in Stuttgart is dated 1746 in the Thieme-Becker Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler, correcting a typographical error in François Guyot de Fère, Statistique des lettres et des sciences en France, 2 vols. (Paris: chez l'auteur, 1834–35) ii, p. 165. Pagination problems in BL 820.g.14 suggest that these pages were incorrectly added from a different setting of Guyot de Fère.

21. Among salaries for the quarter from 21 February to 20 April is the listing, ‘Mr Munick… not Guaranteed… £50’ (4.B.4). If that was a quarterly rate, he was presumably paid the same for the third quarter, but that payment cannot be documented, nor is his beginning date recorded.

22. Fère, Guyot de, Statistique, ii, p. 165.Google Scholar

23. Bedford Opera Papers 2.L.23. A bill for copywork shows that it was drawn up on an unspecified date in October 1791 (2.C.21.a). Omissions, elisions, and misspellings show that it was hastily written and not carefully read.

24. In 1790–1 Hodges was scheduled to receive £350, Bénard £340, and Tresham £200, fees totalling £890, not to mention what was paid to Moench (2.B.19, 4.A.20, 6.F.29, and 2.B.24).

25. HTC Pantheon, p. 116 and p. 127, both dated in MS 19 December 1791. A paragraph in M&M Pantheon, ii.18, dated in MS 12 December 1791, reports that by then ‘very few remains of Hodge's pencil’ were ‘to be traced’.

26. Schwarz, L. D., London in the Age of Industrialization: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. I take the term ‘occasional painter’ from Rosenfeld, Georgian Scene Painters, p. 8.

28. Rosenfeld and Croft-Murray show that Thomas Frederick Luppino's three-year agreement with Drury Lane was not renewed when it expired in April 1783 (‘Checklist’, 112). He was later an assistant painter at the Pantheon.

29. The only other trace of Luigi de la Rovere in the Bedford Opera Papers is a reference in the Borghi letter of 1798, note 18 above; his list appears to derive from the Times roster. If de la Rovere ever materialized, he did not outlast the Hodges regime. Nothing is known of Mons. Maroteau.

30. M&M Pantheon, p. ii.6, and HTC Pantheon, p. 106, both dated in MS 28 March 1791.

31. Assistant scene painters were paid more than £555 the first quarter and just over £267 up to 16 April, the end of Hodges's involvement (2.B.6,19, and 22; 4.B.19).

32. Daylight varied through the seasons, but in the second week of June one atypically long work day at the Pantheon went on for twelve hours (4.C.9.C.). The bills include no other references to time.

33. For example, £1 overcharged on 29 November was deducted from Marinari's next bill, but the actual overcharge was £1 7s. 5d.; and on 12 December he undercharged the theatre by £2, an error that was not caught (2.C.45.a, 2.C.51.a).

34. The labourer Darbo often benefited from such miscalculations, whereas the occasional painter Holland suffered twice. The men presumably did not see these figures.

35. The Pantheon budget will be discussed in Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, vol. ii, ch.10, forthcoming.

36. See Biographical Dictionary, p. xiv.259, and Water-house, Dictionary, whose Royal Academy dates for Stephan-off differ.

37. Moench paid his staff a total of £503, Hodges £592, despite the longer time at issue (2.B.6; 4.B.19). For a conservative figure I calculate 24 weeks' work at the painter's regular salary, plus what he made under Moench.

38. See Biographical Dictionary, p. iv.427–28. His career at the King's Theatre must have begun by ca.1781 or he would not have been eligible to sign the deed of trust preserved as P.R.O. C107/66 in the summer of 1783.

39. See Biographical Dictionary, ix, pp. 384–6. The T. Lupino who co-signed The Case of the Opera House Disputes (1784) was probably not the painter (cf. Rosenfeld and Croft-Murray, ‘Checklist’, 112). Even if employed by the King's Theatre at the time (which is not clear), the painter was not head of his department, whereas the costumer Thomas Luppino was.

40. See Biographical Dictionary, xvi, pp. 360–1, and Rosenfeld, Sybil, Temples of Thespis (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978), pp. 20–1.Google Scholar

41. On Holland, see the Biographical Dictionary, vii, pp. 376–8. A formal apprenticeship begun when Marinari arrived in late 1785 would have been up in 1792, but their arrangement was probably much looser. These bills do not indicate that Marinari was collecting Holland's pay. The second Pantheon season is their earliest independently-documented connection.

42. On the assumption that the rate of pay for each man stayed stable, I deduce the unlabelled extra time for Maroteau on 4.C.1 from the 10s. per diem listed for him on other bills. I cannot resist the speculation that Moench brought Maroteau with him.

43. The sources listed in note I above give no entries for Soutais (also written ‘Joudais’) and Metane. Spitzer, who worked at various London theatres between 1794 and 1801, is first recorded at 10s. 6d. per diem. Between 1790 and 1793 one Emmanuel/Emanuel/Imanuel painted for private theatres, and in 1792–3 for Covent Garden, but there has been no previous record of a second painter by this name. See Biographical Dictionary, p. xiv.225–26 and v.91.

44. See Rosenfeld, and Croft-Murray, , ‘Checklist’, p. 142Google Scholar, and Biographical Dictionary, xii, pp. 358–62.

45. These rates are based on payments to Richards, Hodgins, McQuoid, Bromley, Milbourne, Luppino, and Phillips recorded in British Library Egerton MSS 2286–2292. See also Rosenfeld, and Croft-Murray, , ‘Checklist’, p. 62.Google Scholar The fuller documentation early in the 1794–5 season shows higher rates and more painters, to cope with the new theatre (Egerton 2293).

46. British Museum, Prints and Drawings, Michael Angelo Rooker, MM6, no. 33.

47. See 2.E.1.3 and P.R.O. E 112/1824, no. 7585, Sheldon v. Wigstead, first schedule. Wigstead billed by the foot and the number of coats of paint. House painters, as opposed to scene painters, are also documented in the Egerton MSS, but without any indication of rates.

48. See Gallon, Frank Wallis, The Tailoring Trade, vol. i of Select Documents Illustrating the History of Trade Unionism (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), p. xlvi.Google Scholar However, by 1768 some master tailors were paying variable wages.

49. Bedford Opera Papers 2.A.31, 2.G.12, and Vol. III not in Boxes.

50. Waterhouse, Dictionary, lists a J. or S. de Girardy (fl. 1784) as a flower painter.

51. BL Egerton MS 2286, fol. 72r. According to Waterhouse, Dictionary, the landscape painter William Turner (1763-c. 1816) studied at the Royal Academy Schools in 1785 and exhibited intermittently from then until 1816. He would have been 28 in 1791.

52. Price, ‘Turner at the Pantheon Opera House’, note 16 above.

53. Price interprets O'Reilly's name on Turner's bills as meaning that O'Reilly paid Turner in person. However, the handwriting is not that of the manager, and the names are only in the standard debtor/creditor positions. O'Reilly did not handle cash for the most part and is less likely to have done so this late in the season, when he was under close scrutiny and about to be pushed aside.

54. The 1785–6 Covent Garden account entry presumably concerns the pantomime Omai but gives no rate of pay.

55. Second edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), chapters 3, 4, and 5. Finberg notes, ‘Before the summer of 1795 we have found no signs in his work of a new vision or a new form of expression; no promise of anything more than a rapid and orderly development of the commonplace virtues of topographical art’ (29). Finberg also presents much evidence that all his life Turner was socially awkward. He does not seem a likely hanger-on for the rather fast set in which O'Reilly and Hodges moved.

56. The scene inventory lists ‘A Park Cloth done by Mr Hodges & alterd by Mr Munick’ (6.F.37.b). Price says that Moench painted new scenery for La bella pescatrice (‘Turner’, 4), but the ‘New Decorations’ part of the advertisement and the praise for the ‘uncommonly splendid’ scenery apply to the première of the ballet, Le Siège de Cythère, not the opera. See the 9 May 1791 Diary and Morning Post, and the cutting dated in MS 10 May 1791 in M&M Pantheon, p. ii. 10.

57. In mid-September 1790, O'Reilly mentions the need to pay ‘Hodges's people’ (2.A.49). The inventory done at the beginning of the second season shows that both Moench and Hodges provided garden cloths and woods (Hodges three of them), and Hodges also did two ‘Stormey Hor[i]zon’ cloths and two ‘small seas & Beach’ settings (6.F.37.b). Despite these overlaps, the Hodges list does not include enough scenery for everything in the repertory when he left, which suggests that during the remainder of the first season more than one of his designs was painted over.

58. The Pantheon gloire malfunctioned at the premiere but worked at subsequent performances. On Vestris, see Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, i, pp. 614–15.

59. Charged at 6d. on 4.C.4.C, turned in on 14 May 1791. That the chimney in a knocked-together room behind the original Pantheon should already be sooted up seems curious, but the item was not challenged.

60. In P.R.O. C12/1721/31, Peter James Thomas Crawford claimed that he was one of several colourmen who supplied the Pantheon with ‘Colours Brushes Dutch metal foil and other articles’, for which he was still owed over £221 at the end of the first season.

61. Wolcott, John R., ‘The Scene Painter's Palette: 1750–1835’, Theatre journal 33 (1981), pp. 477–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62. See Harley, Rosamond D., Artists' Pigments, c. 1600–1835, 2d edn. (London: Butterworth Scientific, 1982).Google Scholar

63. As a familiar and trusted employee, Marinari entered colours without explanation of where they were bought: no receipts for these small purchases have been preserved.

64. In ‘The Progress of Theatrical Pageantry’, J. R. Planché contrasts native and imported scene designers, to the disadvantage of the latter, represented by Marinari (Era Almanack, 1874, 65–67). In this context his ‘perfect recollection’ of Marinari's ‘unnatural blue trees’ must be treated with some scepticism. Cf. Rosenfeld, Georgian Scene Painters, 102.

65. For an illustration of nineteenth-century colours sold in bladders, see Harley, , Artists' Pigments, p. 46.Google Scholar The entry on this bill indicates a tiny quantity at a high price.

66. See Harley, , Artists' Pigments, pp. 143–6 and 225Google Scholar, n. 189, for the use of ‘pink’ to designate what we call yellow.

67. These figures do not include an undated bill for colours that lists ‘a pound of Blue Verd, 5s. / For light earth, 2s. / For black colour, Is. / For three pounds of red earth, 2s. 3d.’ (5.E.11). The two ‘earth’ colours are probably variants on the ochre-sienna-umber range. Whether purchased before or after the fire, the amounts are too small to change anything.

68. After the turn of the century, though demoted to short engagements, he continued to work. His last known employment was in Scott's, WalterKing Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, A New Grand Chivahic Entertainment (London: John Miller, 1834)Google Scholar, for which he was third in the list of painters.

69. According to Edwards, Edward, Anecdotes of Painting (London: Leigh and Sotheby, et al., 1808), p. 176Google Scholar, where his death is misdated ‘before the year 1790’. Stephanoff was about 46 at the time.