German tales
The title-page of the Historische Kalender in the previous post is not the only representation of the story of William Tell in Douce’s collection. A series of plates entitled Wilhelm Tell. Nach...
View ArticleDouce’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...
View Article“To the friend of curious and interesting things”
Among Douce’s portraits of artists, there is a silhouette of the Swiss engraver, publisher, and art dealer Christian von Mechel (1737-1817): The print is annotated with Mechel’s dedication to Douce: I...
View Article“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...
View ArticleA tale for Christmas 1779
On 15 January 1821, Douce wrote in his Book of Coincidences that he “had had a strange dream about Lady Craven”. Elizabeth Berkeley (1750-1828), who would become margravine of...
View ArticleA medley print
Medley prints like the one below really capture the sense of mixture, the hotchpotch quality, and the endless referencing that characterize Douce’s folders: Unlike the impression in the BM, Douce’s...
View ArticleThe cook’s oracle
In December 1826, Douce wrote to his friend George Cumberland: If you will write a book of cockery for your Bristoldians & other gormandizers, you will get as rich as Dr Kitchener, who told me...
View ArticleGrinding fools
Many of Douce’s prints of fools are emblems from Dutch and German books, like the etching below: The scene is set in a watermill, where an elegantly dressed man is startled at the sight of batches of...
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