Frontispiece for the 2d edition of Dr. J-----n's letters [graphic] / JS [monogram] f.

[London] : Publd. by Thos. Cornell, 7th April 1788.

1 print : etching with stipple ; plate mark 25 x 17.8 cm, on sheet 30 x 27 cm

laid paper.

Bequeathed by James Sayers to his sister and later given to Lord Eldon. Purchased from Christie's sale of Fine Books and Manuscripts, lot 305, 19 June 2012, with Lord Eldon's notebook (now LWL Mss Vol. 202).

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.

Frontispiece for the 2d edition of Dr. Johnson's letters

English

January 07, 2008

Catalogue of prints and drawings in the British Museum, v. 6, no. 7417