Jan Steen . . . was first placed in a brewery at Delft, where not succeeding, he became an alehouse-keeper, in which occupation he was himself his best customer, and having drank his cellar dry, took down his sign, and went hard to work at his profession of painting, till his vintage was renewed; and for a long time his works were only to be found in the hands of dealers in wine.

We have previously met Samuel Ireland (1744?–1800) as the author and illus­trator of a series of Picturesque Views on the best-known English rivers: Thames, Medway, Wye, Avon. For more about him, see those titles, especially the first and last. The four rivers (a fifth, the long-promised Picturesque Views on the River Severn, never materialized) were preceded by this, his first venture into the picturesque.

The Picturesque Tour takes the form of a series of letters addressed to the book’s dedicatee, antiquary Francis Grose. Today Grose (1731–1791) is best remembered as the author of such useful books as A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, though in Australia he may be better known as the father and namesake of the not very successful governor Francis Grose.

In some travel books of similar vintage the letters are, at least in part, real correspondence addressed to people that the author knew well: Mary Woll­stonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, Patrick Brydone’s Tour of Sicily and Malta, C. P. Moritz’s Travels in England. But here I tend to doubt the Letters are anything but a literary convention.

Illustrations

As in all of Samuel Ireland’s books, the illustrations are made from his own drawings. The Preface explains that he originally planned to do his own etching as well. But in the end he went with Dutch-born Cornelis or Cornelius Apostool (1762–1844), who trained in Amsterdam but lived in England from 1786 to 1796. Apostool will also be responsible for Ireland’s Picturesque Views on English rivers. The British Museum says telegraphically:

From 1807 settled in Amsterdam becoming first director of the Royal Museum there in 1808. In charge of returning looted Napoleonic art in 1815 with CH Hodges and C Josi.

For that, it was probably worth returning to the Netherlands.

Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations had one of two captions, not individually shown in the ebook:

The text in each volume’s List of Prints may be slightly different from the actual Plate caption. In particular, the engraver seems to have disliked punctu­ation of all kinds.

Language

Reading between the lines, Gerard Douw—of “I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Douws and Zoffanies” fame—enjoyed higher esteem in 1790 than he would a century later.

In the author’s vocabulary, “police” is the word now rendered “policy”, while an artist’s palette is spelled “pallet”. Linguistic trivia: The words “pallet” and “palette” have a shared origin (“palate” is unrelated). It took a while for their respective spellings to settle.

The possessive is consistently written “it’s”. There’s not a thing I can do about it.

Dutch names that are now spelled with -ij- are often rendered with “y” instead, as in “Rembrandt van Ryn” and even the river Y (now Ij). In the text—but not in captions—the spelling “Haerlem” is used consistently.

Throughout the book, especially in the latter part of Volume II, all French words and longer passages have been left as printed. That includes the diacritics, though I have grave—or even acute—doubts about some of them.

Formalities

This ebook is based on the 1790 London edition: Volume I, Volume II.

Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups and are listed again at the end of each Letter.