Category Archives: Paintings

A print by Cosway

Douce was a friend and executor of the painter Richard Cosway (1742-1821). Many works by him and by his wife Maria can be found among Douce’s prints and drawings -this nymph carrying Cupid on her shoulders is a good example: … Continue reading

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Interior design

The drawing below was made by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, an artist renown, among many other things, for getting his props right: Like other history painters working in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Ingres would have appreciated Douce’s … Continue reading

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We are five

I have just started cataloguing Douce’s prints of fools -the engraving below belongs to the popular type depicting a group of foolish figures that numbers one fewer than the title, so that the viewer makes up the total: On the … Continue reading

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“The Puck of Commentators”

One of Douce’s most assiduous correspondents in the 1790s was the Shakespeare scholar George Steevens (1736-1800), of whom the DNB says that “his wit and the associated learning […] earned him the name of the Puck of Commentators”: From his … Continue reading

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Douce’s Persian manuscripts

Among Douce’s portraits of ‘Learned Foreigners’ there is a plate from the European Magazine depicting the traveller Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahani (1752-1806): Douce wrote under the portrait: “This gentleman paid me a visit in Gower Street”. Their meeting must have … Continue reading

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Douce’s Annunciation

When told of Douce’s acquisition of a View of Clifton Ferry with a Holiday Party and Bristol Fair by Rolinda Sharples (1793-1838), his friend George Cumberland wrote that they had been ‘sold at an auction to Mr Douce who knows nothing … Continue reading

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