Dr. Johnson at Cave’s, the Publisher, 1854. Oil on canvas, 197/8 x 2313/16 inches (50.5 x 60.5 cm). Private collection.
This is one of the earliest examples of Wallis being influenced by works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The colour and texture of the painting, as well as the careful observation of detail, point to the impact of their work upon Wallis. When the painting sold at the Collection of Sir David and Lady Scott at Sotheby's in 2008 Christopher Newall noted:
Henry Wallis’ subject, showing the impoverished Dr Johnson being given an impromptu meal when visiting his publisher Edward Cave, was inspired by a note by Edward Malone in the third edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, published in 1799. This describes how Johnson was living a hand-to-mouth existence in the period before he gained a professional reputation. Wallis shows him as prematurely aged (he was only in his mid-thirties at this time), and with worn and badly repaired clothes. He peers myopically (he had poor eyesight as a result of contracting scrofula as a child) at the writing slope at which he works, and appears not to be happy to be interrupted by the arrival of the young servant who brings food to him. [96]
This visit to Edward Cave, in fact, represented a turning-point in Johnson’s career, because it was from Cave that he received the commission to write a series of pieces for the Gentleman’s Magazine, of which Cave was the founder and proprietor. The esteem in which these articles were held eventually led to Johnson becoming one of the most eminent literary figures of the day.
This was the first painting Wallis exhibited at the Royal Academy. The critic for The Art Journal didn’t particularly like the wok and felt the subject depicted was inappropriate:
Dr. Johnson at Cave’s, the publisher; Johnson, too ragged to appear at Cave’s, has a plate of victuals sent to him behind the screen.’ Johnson is here labouring with his pen; he casts his eye from his paper to the plate, which a perking maid servant sets at the edge of the table. Beyond the screen appears one of the party who are seated at table. The picture is carefully wrought, but the life of Johnson is full of incident of a much more agreeable and not less telling character. The subject is unsuited to Art and ought not to have been painted. Its selection is not creditable to the artist. [161]
The reviewer for The Athenaeum criticised the fact that Johnson was represented as being too elderly for the time the incident occurred:
Mr. H. Wallis sends a cleverly conceived picture, which he calls Dr. Johnson at Cave’s the Publisher’s (176). The indomitable Johnson is seated writing at a desk, placed near a window, behind a screen, that separates him from Urban’s more fashionable company. A pretty, smart servant, evidently recently culled from the upper classes of a parish school, is bringing him a plate of meat, with a contemptuous air and up-turned nose. He is eyeing it in an abstracted purblind way, as if he wondered what it could possibly be. The servant’s impertinence would have been better given, we think, by representing her turning away, and not lingering as if she either pitied or wished to insult the learned but shabby stranger. Dr. Johnson is made rather too old, for the incident illustrated happened at a very early stage of Johnson’s London life. Although carefully and firmly painted, the shadows of the Doctor’s face are rather too hot. [560]
The greatest praise for the picture came from William Michael Rossetti in The Spectator:
We are glad to meet Mr. Wallis in a subject of some importance, ‘Johnson, too ragged to appear at Cave’s table, has a plate of victuals sent to him behind the screen; and glad to find him treating it, in its mean essentials, well. There is nothing caricaturish in it. If you look into the Doctors coat, you will see it is ragged; if behind the screen, you discover that some one is at dinner there; if at the servant-maids head, that it has a saucy toss as well as an air of pity half-way between scorn and interest. But none of this is made obtrusive; Mr. Wallis renders an incident in life, and not a smart scene in a comedy. Johnson’s massive face, though of too advanced an age, is decidedly good in the same sensible spirit; he looks off from his work to the plate with a mingling of surly disdain, fortitude, and abstraction, which you perceive to be indicative of fixed character rather than belonging to the moment. The picture is cleverly lighted. [544]
This painting is historically significant because it is in connection with this work that Wallis is mentioned for the first time as being a member within the wider Pre-Raphaelite circle. Dante Gabriel Rossetti writes in a letter of May 14, 1854, to the Belfast collector Francis McCracken:
"I have once seen a small picture by the H. Wallis you ask about, and should venture to say that any work of his must have some degree of value if not a very high one, at any rate something preferable to any 'Mill' by any 'Brandard', to any 'vacant' thing whatever by 'John Bridges' or even to anything I could suppose likely to fall under Redgrave’s notice while 'returning from Church'…Hughes could tell you more than I could about Wallis and his works, as he knows him well I believe. I see by notices of the R.A. that he has a picture there from the life of Dr. Johnson, which seems to attract some attention" (Fredeman, Rossetti Correspondence, letter 54.46, 350).
Bibliography
“The Royal Academy.” The Art Journal VI (June 1, 1854): 157-172.
“Fine Arts. Royal Academy.” The Athenaeum, No. 1384 (May 6, 1854): 559-61.
Lessens, Ronald and Dennis T. Lanigan. Henry Wallis. From Pre-Raphaelite Painter to Collector/Connoisseur. Woodbridge: ACC Art Books, 2019, cat. 10, 78-79.
Newall, Christopher. Pictures from the Collection of Sir David and Lady Scott. London: Sotheby’s, November 19, 2008, 92-93.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Formative Years, 1835-1854. Ed. William E. Fredeman. Volume 1. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002.
Rossetti, William Michael. “Fine Arts. Royal Academy Exhibition.” The Spectator, XXVII (May 20, 1854): 543-44.
Last modified 17 October 2022