In the most recent Jane Austen Society Annual Report of our sister society in the U.K., I shared some new findings on Cassandra Elizabeth Austen’s lifelong habit of copying images from popular prints.1 During the course of that research, I was approached by descendants of Charles Austen at the Jane Austen Society’s Southwest Branch in Exeter in January of 2024 about two examples of Cassandra’s art still in their family’s possession: “We think,” they had gently offered at the end of my presentation, “that we might have two more of what you are looking for.” Indeed! I reported how I was able to also trace their two artworks to the popular prints copied by Cassandra. When, after that article went to press, they shared my findings with their cousins, two further examples of Cassandra’s artwork came to light—which have also turned out to be copies of prints. In addition, the source of an unidentified print has now been located. The following pages therefore integrate all the now-known examples of copying prints by Cassandra and their sources, adjusting the resulting timeline and information accordingly.
In Sense and Sensibility, at the London home of Mrs. Jennings, Colonel Brandon finds the eldest Dashwood sister closely examining a print that she intends to copy for a friend: “on Elinor’s moving to the window to take more expeditiously the dimensions of a print, which she was going to copy for her friend, he followed her to it with a look of particular meaning” (318). The reader learns nothing further about the print or the unnamed friend destined to receive Elinor’s copy. Although this moment retreats quickly into Austen’s quiet realism, it likely reflects the practices and artistic habits of the author’s own older sister, Cassandra Elizabeth Austen.
As R. W. Chapman observed about the Austen family, “Cassandra and her drawing were not less interesting in their eyes than Jane and her writing” (17). Of Cassandra’s surviving artworks the most familiar to scholars and fans are her family portraits, especially the controversial “scratch” of her sister Jane that served as the source for the prettified Victorian-era engraving that found its way into reprintings of her novels and, more recently, onto the ten-pound note. Cassandra’s non-portraits, both in watercolor and pencil, have garnered less notice. It may therefore surprise even the most avid Janeite that the bulk of Cassandra’s surviving artworks are meticulous copies of popular prints. These survivors show that when Cassandra copied a print, whether a small detail or an entire composition, she did so with unflinching fidelity. These works do not riff on her sources to make a new composition out of an old, but instead are more like faithful facsimiles. Cassandra’s prowess at copy-work was a highly prized form of mastery in the age before the photograph. In irreverent modern terms, Cassandra was a human Xerox machine.
Romanticism’s strong push for imagination, however, downgraded this skill. As a result, Cassandra’s artistic fidelity has enjoyed a cursed legacy. Her lifetime coincided with a seismic shift away from mimesis in art. Born in 1773, Cassandra learned to draw during the heyday of publications like The Copper Plate Magazine, or Monthly Treasure for the Admirers of the Imitative Arts.2 In 1785, when Cassandra was twelve, she took instruction in drawing, along with little sister Jane, from the young watercolorist John Claude Nattes.3 Such instruction focused on faithfully copying art and nature. But by the time Nattes died in 1839, only invention qualified as true art, and museums had demoted his watercolors to map rooms, along with the printed views of many landscape artists, because they were too faithful—recordings rather than art (Barrell 9–12). Over the course of Cassandra’s long life (she died in 1845, aged seventy-two), full-blown Romanticism conspired with photography to demean all so-called “Imitative Arts.” This overarching aesthetic prejudice explains why Cassandra’s imitative art has received relatively little attention and, occasionally, has even been misidentified, as I will show.
Below, I walk through Cassandra’s known copyist work in a probable chronological order. The survivors of her work now tally eleven examples that show how she faithfully copied prints as a teenager and continued this practice well into her sixties—a lifelong habit. Not only do these copies modestly enlarge the inventory of print materials to which the Austen sisters had access, but by alerting the wider Janeite community to Cassandra’s habit, I hope additional examples of her copies of prints might come to light. The year 2023 quietly marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of Cassandra Elizabeth Austen. At a time when we now prepare to celebrate her sister’s quarter millennial with some fanfare, a reassessment of Cassandra’s work as an artist is overdue.
1792
Cassandra was nineteen when she supplied the thirteen heads of kings and queens for sister Jane’s The History of England. At least two of those illustrations have proved to be details lifted from popular prints. The soldier-turned-Henry-V can be spotted in The Relief (1781) by Henry William Bunbury (1750–1811), a popular artist whom Horace Walpole memorably described as “a second Hogarth” (Loxton 33). Similarly, her Edward IV is copied from a companion print in that same Bunbury series, which is titled Recruits (1780). As long ago as 1995, Jan Fergus reported Bunbury’s The Recruits as the source of Cassandra’s Henry V and Edward IV (ii–iv). In 2008 Adrienne Bradney-Smith identified Bunbury’s The Relief as the source of Henry V (130).4
Left, Cassandra’s “Henry the 5th” from The History of England (1792); British Library MS 59874.
Right, Henry W. Bunbury, The Relief (1781); British Museum J,6.48.
(Click here to see a larger version.)
Left, Cassandra’s “Edward the 4th” from The History of England (1792); British Library MS 59874.
Right, Henry W. Bunbury, Recruits (1780); British Museum J,6.47.
(Click here to see a larger version.)
The History of England manuscript, a fair copy executed in 1792 to which the portraits were presumably added last, reveals something further about Cassandra’s method. The circles around her portraits were made by drawing neatly around a coin in thin graphite.5 However, Cassandra did not trace her heads into the fair copy manuscript: the soldier in the original Bunbury print measures significantly larger than her hand-drawn copy.6 To fit him into her roundel, Cassandra shrunk the contemporary-soldier-turned-Henry-V. At nineteen, Cassandra was already “an adept copyist,” for digital imposition reveals that the head she copies from Recruits, also drawn in freehand, is an even neater match to his own Bunbury twin (Bradney-Smith 131). With a mock formality, Cassandra signs each of her tiny ten portraits “C E Austen pinx”—not unlike sister Jane’s authorly tone in the manuscript.
In spite of this evidence of copy-work, scholars have continued to push hard for originality when suggesting that Cassandra’s illustrations in The History of England reflect the faces of family members sketched “from life”—including family members named Henry and Edward (Upfal and Alexander, Introduction xxviii).7 Any push for originality feels like a Victorian-inflected attempt to rescue some measure of approved artistry, especially when these two documented examples lack evidence of facial customization. Instead, if two of the ten royals were faithfully copied by Cassandra after ordinary persons in popular prints, it seems more likely that the other eleven miniatures in the manuscript are sourced from prints too—and that the mundane sources behind these mock royals are part of the fun of the combined satirical efforts of the sister artists. By showing how dominant this approach was for Cassandra, I hope I can spur others to at least look for those eleven needles from The History of England in the haystacks of popular prints.8
1795
In possession of one descendant of brother Charles Austen, namely Priscilla (née Willan) Shepley, is an unsigned but dated drawing by Cassandra of two female figures copied from a print designed by Giovanni Battista Cipriani, R.A. (1727–1785) and engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A. (1727–1815).9 The now-faded pencil drawing retains some of its color in the cheeks of both women and the lips of the woman on the left. The original popular print was published individually and uncolored on 1 January 1786 but also circulated as the final and most complex plate in an influential manual for amateur artists entitled Cipriani’s Rudiments of Drawing. Twenty-two-year-old Cassandra might therefore have seen the plate as a loose item or as the concluding image in a sequence of instructional prints for young artists still honing their skills.10 Cassandra’s drawing looks to have been trimmed on at least three sides and is pasted onto a larger sheet of paper, around which colored line rule has been added as a framing device. This line rule is a bit crude but roughly matches the style of rule around two other surviving pictures by Cassandra, which both bear her initials (more about these in a moment); I therefore suspect this cropping and line rule to be the work of a family member aware of the other images by Cassandra. On the left, aggressive cropping has most likely resulted in the removal of the bearded figure shown in Cipriani’s plate. Slight discoloration and muddying of the paper on the bottom left allow that someone may have erased the remnants of the bearded man and adjusted the woman’s sleeve accordingly. In any case, what remains is a squarish composition (measuring roughly 17 by 17.5 cm) with a truncated inscription on bottom left that reads “[J?]une 1795.” Cassandra’s two female figures faithfully correspond in size to that same section from the larger original Cipriani plate. The absence of the bearded male figure neatly suits both family lore and Jane Austen’s growing reputation for writing about sisterly affection. In the Willan family, the framed drawing was affectionately referred to as “the sisters, Jane and Cassandra” although there is no evidence of deviation from, in this instance, Cipriani to imply facial customization.
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Left, Cassandra’s pencil sketch, courtesy of Priscilla Shepley. |
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1804
On 28 November 1972, Sotheby’s of London sold two watercolors that were identified at auction as copies by Cassandra Austen of two popular prints after George Morland, namely Alehouse Kitchen and Alehouse Door, prints originally published in 1801.
Left, print after George Morland, Alehouse Kitchen (1801); British Museum 1873,0510.2628.
Right, print after George Morland, Alehouse Door (1801); British Museum 1859,0709.776.
Click here to see a larger version.
Both auctioned watercolors by Cassandra were initialed and dated: “C.E.A. 1804.”11 That year, the Austens remained in Bath at Sydney Place, where Cassandra turned twenty-nine. Jane had just sold her first manuscript, eventually published as Northanger Abbey, in which a little boy by the name of George Morland makes a cameo appearance beside a cottage door.12 The sisters might still have been working side by side, one writing and the other drawing.
A buyer named W. O. Rosedale paid £35 for the pair at the 1972 auction. While no photographs are known to have been taken at this sale, Sotheby’s unillustrated catalogue entry expressly identified Morland’s plates as the sources of Cassandra’s designs. With the assistance of Sotheby’s New York office, I was able to reach the buyer’s grandson, who kindly canvassed the whole family—to no avail. Sadly, these two watercolor copies by Cassandra are now lost. I urge readers to keep an eye out, since at least one of her meticulous copies has, we shall see, been mistaken for a colorized print.
These Morlands and the earlier Bunburys share what Vic Gatrell terms the dominant “manliness of satirical prints” (111). Practically speaking, these must have been the types of prints that, in a house full of Austen men—plus occasional pupils and university friends—might be on hand. A smoking swain, ale-drinking men outside a tavern, and aspects of soldiering are surprising subjects for a young lady artist to copy. Perhaps that was Cassandra’s defiant point. If she originally included the bearded man in her version of the Cipriani print, it was duly removed. In parallel with her sister Jane’s rebellious juvenilia and epistolary satire Lady Susan, young Cassandra may have pushed the boundaries of acceptable subjects for lady artists.
1806
Also in possession of Priscilla (née Willan) Shepley is a watercolor and pencil drawing by Cassandra of a mother and child signed “C.E.A. 1806.” This image is her faithful copy of an engraving entitled Conjugal Love by Bartolozzi, again after a design by Cipriani, which was published as a loose print in October 1786. In raked light, parts of Cassandra’s penciled image look blueish while the hair and skin retain some watercolor pigment. Copying was not just a mark of friendship and artistic cooperation but, during strained economic circumstances, a domestic form of decoration. This is the earliest of three of Cassandra’s surviving copies from prints that date to the time when the Austen women formed a household with Frank’s wife, Mary Gibson, in Southampton. After the death of the Reverend George Austen on 21 January 1805, the two sisters and their mother experienced financial difficulties that resulted in several short-term moves to increasingly shabbier rented accommodations in Bath. By 1806, however, they were more comfortably settled with Frank’s wife at Castle Square in Southampton. Frank and Mary’s first child, Mary Jane, was born in their company in April 1807. The subject of this picture anticipates that birth and may have been created during Mary’s pregnancy.
Left, Cassandra’s pencil sketch and watercolor, courtesy of Priscilla Shepley. Right, Conjugal Love, engraved by Bartolozzi after Cipriani (1786); Instituto Centrale per la Grafica, Rome S-FC70120.
Click here to see a larger version.
The drawing extends to the very edges of the paper, without the loss of anything that exists in the Cipriani composition that it copies. In this case, the date and initials are inked on a second piece of paper—one to which this drawing has been pasted. Around that sits the hallmark frame of line rule that is found around three of the surviving pictures by Cassandra.
1808
Jane Austen’s House safeguards another watercolor by Cassandra, neatly signed “C.E.A. 1808” in the bottom left corner. It is a faithful copy of a stipple engraving by Peltro William Tomkins (originally published in 1792), which in turn reproduced a pastel by royal portraitist John Russell.13
Left, watercolor by Cassandra, signed “C. E. A. 1808”; Jane Austen’s House, JAH 183. Right, engraving by Peltro William Tomkins, after John Russell (1792); British Museum 1872,0511.291.
Click here to see a larger version.
The published stipple engraving—which survives in black or brown monochrome as well as in a hand-colored format—is entitled Maria and shows the famous character from Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) with her little dog Silvio and a flute.14 The heartbroken Maria, usually depicted sitting with her dog and instrument under a tree, was a ubiquitous sentimental subject, with versions manufactured as Jasperware by Wedgwood, as Staffordshire figurines by other pottery makers, and as popular prints after a range of visual interpretations by artists from Angelica Kauffmann to Joseph Wright of Derby. The dog and prop in Cassandra’s image, therefore, are just as recognizable a reference to Sterne’s story as the direct quotation spoken by the fictional namesake Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park (“‘I cannot get out, as the starling said”’ [116]). The work of both sisters familiarly references Sterne. The figure of Maria, a young woman who mourns the loss of her beloved husband with a profound sadness, may of course have had special resonance for Cassandra, who tragically lost her fiancé, Tom Fowle. The surviving label (from the back of the now-lost frame) states that the family always knew the identity of both subject and artist: “Water color [so spelled] Drawing / Sterne’s “Maria”/ by Miss C. E. Austen/ Sister of the Authoress.”15
Cassandra was so accurate in her copying of the Tomkins engraving that her precision and choice of muted colors fooled one historian into denouncing it as a mere color-washing of a bought monochrome print: “the professional finish of this picture makes it immediately suspect.” Faint praise concluded the de-attribution: “The talented amateur responsible for this watercolour was not, I think, capable of executing a copy which corresponds with the print so exactly” (Gilson 19). Ironically, the very fidelity of Cassandra’s duplication thus misled her sister’s cognoscenti.
Four tiny needle pricks at the corners of the inner line rule around the figure, as well as bigger pin holes towards the outer edges of the paper, allow that Cassandra might have achieved such accuracy by partly tracing an original print. Or perhaps she used a grid method. Whatever her meticulous approach, thirty-five-year-old Cassandra must have been in temporary possession of an exemplar of the published print to render it so exactly. Upon close inspection, watercolor and engraving are not a perfect match. Cassandra’s paper retains substantial margins but lacks a plate mark, with no evidence of cutting or pasting in this instance. Some of Cassandra’s border lines extend at the corners and the placement of her title’s letters do not match precisely any of the known versions of the published print. In placing her initials, Cassandra did not lay claim to the original design but, just like the engraver Tomkins whose name is on the published plate, to her transfer of the image.
Perhaps trompe-l’oeil was the intent. The Southampton years were fairly lean. Dated to 1808, this artwork is now sun-bleached from having been displayed and acid-bitten by a former frame (which does not survive). Cassandra’s Maria may have been, like Elinor’s copy, intended as a gift for a friend who displayed the lookalike as if a print. There were several Austen family members with names derived from Maria, and this picture’s provenance can be traced back to Mary Jane, the daughter born in 1807 to Frank Austen and Mary Gibson at Southampton.16 Cassandra may have made the drawing as a baby gift. Significantly, Frank was a talented artist in his own right, as his surviving sketches attest.17
Another signed watercolor by Cassandra, also dated 1808, came to scholarly light in 1993, when it was sold at a Berkshire auction. Its provenance can be traced back to Rear-Admiral Charles Austen (Gilson 17). Bibliographer David Gilson, who purchased and safeguarded the item, initially celebrated the find as “probably an imaginary scene” (17), although Adrienne Bradney-Smith set the record straight in 2008, showing that it was yet another copy of a Morland print. In this case, Cassandra copied Morland’s Pedlars (1790).
Left, Cassandra’s watercolor of peasants in a landscape (1808); Holburne Museum, Bath, 2022.3.
Right, engraving titled Pedlars after George Morland; British Museum 1859,0709.763.
Click here to see a larger version.
Frustratingly, the fact that her composition was a copy was interpreted as a further indictment of Cassandra’s “limited artistic talent” (Bradney-Smith 135). I was able to examine Cassandra’s watercolor at the Holburne Museum in Bath, where it now resides.18 A visual comparison with the Morland print readily confirms that she copied the print in freehand rather than by tracing—although, like Elinor, she may have taken the dimensions of the print and marked key locations in the composition. At 8 by 11 inches, Cassandra’s version of Pedlars is the largest of her known copies, which may explain the marked drift from the original print, which again roughly matches her image in size.19
1832, or thereabouts
Two further artworks by Cassandra remain with a different branch of the family of Charles Austen, namely Jenny and Brian Willan.20 The first of these is a striking watercolor of a woman in a historical costume, also signed “C. E. Austen” but captioned “England, 1450. / Reign of Henry VI.” As Cassandra’s caption hints, this watercolor also copies a print—in this case the first in a rare suite of thirteen plates about costumes worn by ladies and noblemen during roughly two centuries of the English court, from the reign of Henry VI through that of Charles I.21
Left, Cassandra’s undated watercolor of a lady in a historical costume; photo by Lucy Bond, courtesy of Brian Willan. Right, nineteenth-century print reproduced courtesy of David Brass Rare Books.
(Click here to see a larger version.)
Offered in London circa 1832, this group of thirteen historical costume plates was not officially published as part of any book, although they may have been planned that way. Because of the rarity of this series of plates, I was not able to source the image when I first published my findings—only to confirm that it came from a print.22 Fortunately, the staff of David Brass Rare Books, Inc. recognized the image as a plate bound together with a copy of Fancy Ball Dress (1831–32), by French artist André Leon Larue, known as Mansion (1785–1834).23 The unusual volume, which Brass sold a few years ago, had contained a large number of supplemental plates, including a suite of thirteen unsigned fashion plates of historical costumes from which Cassandra carefully copied the starting image (including its caption). The plate’s style resembles that of Mansion himself, who worked in England as a book illustrator for Ackermann and others, producing high-end costume plates.24 Two standout features of these plates are quality and color. The brightness gives a hint of what must have been the original vibrancy of Cassandra’s own color choices. Might the posh suite of historical costume prints have been borrowed from a subscription library for Cassandra to copy, or was the individual print loaned to her by a friend or wealthier family member?
1834
The second of Brian and Jenny Willan’s pictures by Cassandra is an undated and uncolored pencil sketch of a hunting scene captioned “Luring the Hawk / Reidinger” and signed “C. E. Austen.”
Left, Cassandra’s sketch captioned Luring the Hawk. Photo courtesy of Brian Willan.
Right, from The Penny Magazine, No.164 (October 25, 1834). Author photo.
(Click here to see a larger version.)
In this instance, Cassandra copied an old engraving that features in various sporting dictionaries as an illustration of how to hunt with hawks, thus allowing for multiple possible source texts. By including the name of the original artist in an unusual spelling, however, Cassandra provided a clue to her specific source.
In 1834 The Penny Magazine printed this same image, identifying it as “From Reidinger”—thus using her same unusual spelling for the surname of famous German animal painter and engraver Johann Elias Ridinger (1698–1767).25 In other reproductions his name can be either missing from the images or spelled differently. In my own dating of her image, I therefore assume The Penny Magazine to be Cassandra’s likely source. The size of the illustration in the weekly, too, is a good match for her own facsimile. As for context, The Penny Magazine’s article on hawking extended over several issues, describing a fifteenth-century book about this practice by a woman author. It explained that the keeping of hawks had followed a strict social protocol—with certain species of hunting birds reserved for the king, others for princes and priests: “And so it continues down to the sparrow-hawk for a priest, a musket for a holy-water clerk, and (last of all) a kestrel for a knave or servant.” The article contains two scenes after Ridinger, not just Luring the Hawk but also Casting-off the Hawk. Both images are captioned “From Reidinger” and the editor of the article refers to the details in “our engravings” as faithful to the practice because “so correct a delineator as Reidinger was not likely to make a mistake.”26
When Cassandra copied from the 1834 illustrations in The Penny Magazine, perhaps to give the picture to a niece or nephew, she would have been in her sixties. By then, the young Brontë siblings had also begun to copy plates from books and magazines, starting with volumes of Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds (yes, the same book that the heroine is caught reading in Jane Eyre) (Alexander and Sellars, esp. 22).
1836
Finally, there exists another small pencil drawing by Cassandra, roughly the size and stiffness of a modern postcard, that has been on loan to the Jane Austen Memorial Trust since 2003 from a distant relative of Admiral Francis Austen.27 The sketch of boats on choppy harbor waters is inscribed on the inside right corner “C.E. Austen.” Underneath, a centered caption reads “The Bourse and part of the Fortress from the Neva St Petersburgh.” The provenance suggests that Cassandra sketched this maritime subject for her sailor brother Frank, or a member of his family. Now badly foxed, the sketch is undated, and hitherto unsourced.
Despite Cassandra’s spelling variation, the image and caption match one of the twenty-five plates in Leitch Ritchie’s account A Journey to St. Petersburg and Moscow through Courland and Livonia, which in 1836 was offered as Heath’s Picturesque Annual.28 Even the size of the book illustration, which measures about 5¾ inches, matches Cassandra’s neat facsimile—as if, like Elinor, she took the precise dimensions of the print before sitting down to copy it.
Left, Cassandra’s pencil drawing “The Bourse and part of the Fortress from the Neva St Petersburgh,” inscribed “C.E. Austen”; Jane Austen’s House. Right, from Leitch Ritchie’s A Journey to St. Petersburg and Moscow through Courland and Livonia, in Heath’s Picturesque Annual for 1836; author photo.
(Click here to see a larger version.)
The plates were expressly commissioned in 1835 and thus could not have been copied before then. This late date suggests Cassandra continued to copy from engravings, whether loose or as illustrations in books and magazines, throughout her long life. It is a poignant coincidence that what survives of Cassandra’s modest artistic inventory ends with a naval subject, echoing her sister’s final novel, Persuasion.
As the above inventory already suggests, Cassandra enjoyed wide access to popular prints, which she copied throughout her life. When, in 1801, Jane writes to Cassandra of scouting houses for their impending move to the city of Bath, she mentions how her sister’s “own drawings” will come with them. She adds: “My Mother says that the French agricultural Prints in the best bed-room were given by Edward to his two Sisters. Do you or he know anything about it?” (5 January 1801). Jane’s details suggest that the Steventon rectory was already meaningfully, if sparsely, decorated with modest artworks—some home-grown and some gifted prints. While in Bath, Jane writes of a town visit to the Holders, and how she and Miss Holder “adjourned after tea into the inner Drawingroom to look over Prints & talk pathetically” (26–27 May 1801). During visits to their brother’s family in Kent, the sisters would have been surrounded by the types of materials that the fictional Mr. Knightley lays out for Mr. Woodhouse at Donwell Abbey in preparation for the strawberry picking: “Books of engravings, drawers of medals, cameos, corals, shells, and every other family collection within his cabinets” (E 393). By the time Frank Churchill joins the party, everyone is inside with Mr. Woodhouse and these treasures, discussing “some views of St. Mark’s Place, Venice” (394). Both sisters socialized frequently at The Vyne, the ancestral home of the Chute family in Sherborne St John, which boasted an extensive collection of historical prints. In 1817, the new generation of Chutes cut up many of the views of foreign locales found in that collection to paper the walls of a room.29 Values were shifting, and old prints were being repurposed in ways that reflected the new generation’s sinking attitudes towards imitative art.
NOTES
1See Janine Barchas, “Cassandra and the Art of Copying.” The content of that article is reworked and supplemented here with new information and additional findings, with permission from the editor, Hazel Jones.
2For more information on this ambitious magazine, which launched in 1774, see Gunn (esp. 63–65).
3See Le Faye (50) and Nokes (82). Le Faye records a payment by the Reverend Austen for a whopping £11.9s., presumably for drawing lessons to all the children and pupils at the Steventon rectory. See also the entry by Aidan Flood for “John Claude Nattes (c. 1765–1839), topographical draughtsman and watercolour artist,” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
4Fergus notes that “Mary Millard communicated her discovery to Juliet McMaster in 1993, who passed it on” (xi n.2). Bradney-Smith cites Fergus (144 n.7).
5Fergus credits Tom Holt for identifying the George III half-crown as “the most likely candidate" (iv, xi n.3).
6I am grateful to Sarah Boada-Momtahan, owner of the Sanders of Oxford printshop, for allowing me to take measurements of her copy of Bunbury’s The Relief.
7The revised version in Persuasions On-Line (Issue No 2 in Spring 2010) removes the phrase “from life” while still arguing that Cassandra drew “portraits of family members and friends as individual monarchs.” Neither version lists Bradney-Smith’s 2008 findings as a source, so Upfal and Alexander may not have realized that two of Cassandra’s portraits had been sourced to popular prints.
8For an example of such a valiant search, see Upfal (217–37). While I accept that the Austen family, including Jane and Cassandra, enjoyed print-culture humor considered coarse by Victorian standards, I do not find Upfal’s visual evidence of similarity compelling enough to yet identify the “source” for Cassandra’s image of Henry VIII.
9Priscilla Shepley (née Willan) is descended from Charles Austen. She is the youngest daughter of Henry Buckle Willan, the youngest son of Frances Cecilia Austen, who married Capt. Lawrence Peel Willan, RN in 1874. Ms Shepley recently gifted her two drawings by Cassandra to the cottage museum that is Jane Austen’s House in Chawton.
10In the Bodleian Library survives a 1793 set bound in marbled wrappers with the label of Mariano Bovi, whose shop was located at 207 Piccadilly, London (shelfmark Johnson a.105). In that Bovi copy, which recycles a few plates dated 1786, this print is tinted. Some copies of the large-format instructional booklet survive with pages of instruction in Italian and French, but others seem to have bundled Cipriani’s prints without any accompanying text. This collection was so popular that as late as 1805 it was also repackaged as Cipriani’s and Bartolozzi’s Drawing Book of Heads.
11Sotheby’s sales catalogue for Tuesday, 28 November 1972, describes lot 316 thus: “AUSTEN (CASSANDRA ELIZABETH, sister of Jane Austen) Two water-colour drawings by her (after designs by George Morland), each signed and dated ‘C.E.A. 1804’, size of each sheet approx. 14½ in. by 11 in., each mounted on contemporary card. These watercolours are based on a pair of designs by George Morland which were engraved by R. S. Syer and published in 1801 with the titles The Alehouse Door and The Alehouse Kitchen” (67).
12For a fuller account of Jane Austen’s habit of referencing visual artists in her fictions, including Morland and Reynolds, see Barchas’s “Artistic Names in Austen’s Fiction: Cameo Appearances by Prominent Painters.”
13The watercolor by Cassandra (museum number JAH183) was donated to the Jane Austen Memorial Trust in 1953 by Mrs. M. Purvis, widow of a great-grandson of Admiral Sir Francis Austen.
14The British Museum holds three such versions of the same “Maria” print: 1872,0511.291; 1940,1109.60; and 1940,1109.111.
15This label accompanied the watercolor when it was donated to the museum in 1953.
16Gilson recounts how the artwork came to the museum’s Mr. Carpenter from Mrs. Purvis “and so necessarily comes from Cassandra’s brother Admiral Francis William Austen (1774–1865), by way of his daughter Mary Jane (1807–36), who married George Purvis, RN” (17).
17See Toby R. Benis’s “A Sailor and An Artist: The Naval Drawings of Francis Austen.” In addition, Jane Austen’s House recently acquired an album of seventy-three topographical watercolors and pen and ink drawings by Admiral Francis Austen and his daughter Cassandra Eliza (1814–1849), who joined him aboard ship on some of his travels during the 1840s and who also shared the family talent for drawing.
18The Holburne Museum’s collections record the work as “Peasants in a landscape by Cassandra Elizabeth Austen, 1808” (museum number 2022.3).
19This copy by Cassandra stretches to the very edges of the paper, allowing that her watercolor (and possible caption) may have been trimmed.
20Brian Willan is also descended from Charles John Austen via Frances Cecilia Austen. Frances was Brian’s great-grandmother via her eldest son, Rear Admiral Leonard Lawrence Peel Willan, RN and his son Commander Derek Willan, RN. Brian inherited the two Cassandra drawings from his father, Derek Willan, who died in 2018.
21The surviving copies are unsigned and bear no publisher information. The image that Cassandra copied, captioned “England, 1450. Reign of Henry VI,” is the first of thirteen sequential costume plates. The rest are captioned as follows: “England, 1482. Reign of Edward IV”; “England, 1500. Reign of Henry VII”; “England, 1520. Reign of Henry VIII”; “England, 1520. Reign of Henry VIII”; “England, 1536. Reign of Henry VIII”; “England, 1550. Reign of Edward VI”; “England, 1577. Reign of Elizabeth”; “England, 1580. Reign of Elizabeth”; “England, 1614. Reign of James I”; “England, 1614. Reign of James I”; “England, 1640. Reign of Charles I”; and “England, 1640. Reign of Charles I.”
22The caption information had led to versions of the plate on both the Mary Evans Picture Library and Bridgeman Images websites, digital storehouses that were frustratingly unable to provide metadata for their original source. During the hunt, however, I did learn from costume experts that the plate is not very accurate about what was on trend in 1450.
23André Leon Larue, known as Mansion (1785–1834), is credited with Fancy Ball Dress (W. Spooner, 1831–32). That collection of thirty hand-colored lithograph plates depicts the regional costumes of Europe and Russia. The images of Fancy Dress Ball were variously printed by Engelmann & Co., C. Hullmandel, Lefevre & Co., and Meifred, Lemercier & Co. Although Mansion gets credit, only twenty-seven of its thirty plates are signed by him—with one signed by R. W. Buss and two unsigned.
24Mansion worked closely with Ackermann and was known for his images of costumes, including Letters upon the Art of Miniature Painting (1823), Fancy Ball Dress (1831–32), Costumes of the Royal Navy & Marines (1831–33), and Officers of the British Army (1833–36).
25See “Hawking.—No. II” in The Penny Magazine (25 October 1834).
26The extract in The Penny Magazine contains the two illustrations on pages 412 and 413, respectively. As it happens, Brian Willan remembers there being a second hawk image in the family, but sadly it has not turned up.
27Jane Austen’s House Museum, number JAH 334.
28The 1836 annual, published in London by Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, inserts an uncolored and uncaptioned version of the engraving between pages 118 and 119.
29The National Trust posted on Facebook on 2 July 2015: “The Print Room at The Vyne was created by Caroline Workman and her brothers in 1817 from historic prints that had been in a portfolio in the Oak Gallery.”
