Accession number
PML 146857.92
Creator
Sayers, James, 1748-1823.
Published
[London] : Publ. by Thos. Cornell, 7th April 1788.
Credit line
Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987.
Notes
Verse in two columns below caption title: Madam! my Debt to Nature paid ... 'll pay you for your Ale.
Item no. 92 of a collection of prints by James Sayers (PML 146857); formerly part of an album of mounted prints, now disbound.
Item no. 92 of a collection of prints by James Sayers (PML 146857); formerly part of an album of mounted prints, now disbound.
Description
1 print on laid paper : etching; image: 196 x 164 mm; plate mark: 250 x 178 mm; sheet: 277 x 205 mm
Inscriptions/Markings
In pencil at foot: Mrs. Piozzi92.
Provenance
From the library of Gordon N. Ray.
Summary
A satirical print rebuking the many writers who profited by writing memoirs of Samuel Johnson. On the left, Mrs. Piozzi is seated at her writing desk in her study. With a look of astonishment. she looks behind her at the ghost of Samuel Johnson in a night shirt who with his right hand points to the portraits of James Boswell and Sir John Hawkins on the wall and in his left hand holds a money purse. Another portrait on the far right depicts John Courtenay with a pen in his hand looking toward a bust of Prisian. On her desk is a letter "D Johnson ... Letters Dear Lady", implying that she has been concoting Johnson's letters to her. Immediately above her desk in the middle of the wall of books, a violin, an allusion to her second husband a musician, obscures the portrait of her first husband Henry Thrale.
Classification
Catalog link
Department