Even the wall paintings, as Shakespeare describes them, are not invention. In the sixteenth century people loved to paint the story of the lost son on the walls of the tavern room, just as in the fifteenth century they pinned up little primitive woodcuts representing St. Christopher. Later we shall see a painter of talent like Hogarth not despise the decoration of taverns as below his genius and embellish with works of his brush the “Elephant Tavern” in Fenchurch Street, where he stayed for a time.

The name “Garter Inn,” pronounced “de Jarterre” by Doctor Caius, is historical, too. Later, in the times of Charles I, who added the star to the insignia of the order founded by Edward III in 1350, the “Star and Garter” appeared.

A true Renaissance sign we find again in the “Sagittary,” cursorily mentioned in “Othello” (i, i). The archer, the ninth sign of the Zodiac, was very familiar to the people from the old calendar woodcuts. Italian prints, as the beautifully illustrated “Fasciculus medicinæ” (Venice, 1500), represent him in classical fashion as an elegant centaur, very unlike the little philistine with round belly, such as he appears in the earlier “teutsch kalender” of Ulm, 1498. The common people did not call him “Sagittarius,” but “bowman” (Schütze). There is good historical evidence of a “Bowman Tavern” in Drury Lane, London. It is natural that Shakespeare, a true son of the Renaissance, should call him with the classical name, just as the first German composer of operas changed his good German name “Schütze” to the more pretentious form of “Sagittarius.”

In these “Bowman Taverns” the guilds of the archers used to come together; as, for instance, in the “Hotel de l’Arquebuse” in Geneva, where the Swiss archers had their joyous reunions after they had finished their outdoor sport to shoot the “papegex” (the parrot). Here the king of the archers who had done the master shot “sans reproche” and “sans tricherie” (without cheating), was celebrated in poetical speeches, according to the customs of the times:—

The most famous of all Shakespearean tavern signs is perhaps the “Boar’s Head.” Washington Irving has told us in his research, “the boar’s head tavern, Eastcheap” about his investigations on this important matter. “I sought, in vain, for the ancient abode of Dame Quickly. The only relic of it is a boar’s head, carved in relief in stone, which formerly served as a sign; but at present [Irving’s ‘Sketch-Book’ dates from 1820] is built into the parting line of two houses, which stand on the site of the renowned tavern.” To-day the relief, blackened by age and curiously looking like Japanese lacquer-work, belongs to the treasures of the Guildhall Museum in London. The place where the old tavern stood is marked by the statue of William IV, opposite the Monument Station of the subway. Merry souvenirs of good old England are suggested by the boar’s head, which used to be served on Christmas Day decorated with rosemary and greeted from the company with the half-Latin song:—

It will be a great disappointment to our readers when we have to confess that the unlucky fellows called literary critics have found out that the stage-direction, “Eastcheap. A room in the Boar’s Head Tavern,” is not Shakespeare’s own remark, since we do not find it in the early editions of “Henry IV.” Still more so when they hear that the relief in Guildhall bears the date 1668 and has been chiseled, therefore, fifty-two years after the poet’s death. A little consolation we find in the not improbable supposition that it is a copy in stone from the original wooden sign. Did not the famous fire, which raged from Pudding Lane to Pye Corner in the year 1666, destroy nearly all the Shakespearean London, with its old-fashioned frame houses? For greater security the new buildings were erected in stone and the old house emblems and carved tavern signs reappeared, too, in more substantial form. The Guildhall Museum furnishes quite a number of examples: “The Anchor” of 1669, “The Bell” of 1668, “The Spread Eagle” of 1669, and others.

And now let us follow Heinrich Heine on his voyage to Italy and hear from him how in his days the noble palace of the Capulets, Julia’s paternal home in Verona, was debased to a common tavern. Near the Piazza dell Erbe “stands a house which the people identify with the old palace of the Capulets on account of a cap (in Italian ‘cappello’) sculptured above the inner archway. It is now a dirty bar for carters and coachmen; a red iron hat, full of holes, hangs out as a tavern sign.” To-day this disgraceful sign has disappeared and a marble slab consecrates the popular myth as historical fact. This was then the house where Romeo for the first time saw his lady love:—

Romeo. What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand
Of yonder knight?

Servant. I know not, sir.

Romeo. O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!

Shakespeare’s geographical knowledge seems to have been very limited. If he could have gone, as the citizen of Stratford to-day, to the Carnegie library, how many shocking errors he had avoided! Here he could have learned that Bohemia has no seacoast, that Florence is not a port, and that the forest of Arden neither hides lions nor contains palms. But would this knowledge have increased his poetical feeling and his power of representation? Hardly. The northern land with its “sniping winds,” how well it is characterized; how simple and true to life his description of the mild climate of Sicily, crowned with temples, in the “Winter’s Tale” (iii, i):—

It was not yet the fashion to flee the winter and try to find eternal spring in the South. Every season is welcome to the poet who loves the peculiar charm of each one, as he says in “Love’s Labor’s Lost” (i, i):—

He probably never traveled far, but how intensely does he feel the curious sensations of all travelers, the weariness and yet the eagerness to see the new sights! How perfectly modern sound in the “Comedy of Errors” (i, i) the words:—

He possessed, like Schiller, who never saw Switzerland, and yet wrote “Tell,” the wonderful gift of filling the lack of distinct knowledge with the poetical power of imagination, or, as he calls it himself, “to make imaginary puissance” and “to piece out our imperfections with our thought.”

No doubt certain things, details of local civilization, cannot be imagined. One has to go and study them. We will therefore, to gain a fuller understanding of the hospitality of the sixteenth century, follow a contemporary of Shakespeare in his travels, Montaigne, a clear-sighted observer, who as grand seigneur had the good fortune to make extended voyages in France, Southern Germany, and Italy. Although himself rather a spoiled gentleman, he generally is full of praise for the comforts and elegance of the inns, especially in the south of Germany. Only once he had to complain about the “liberté et fierté Almanesque,” and this happened at Constance in the “Eagle.” The elegance of the Renaissance hostelries was indeed surprising and has hardly been surpassed in our days of luxurious traveling. Not only most of the beds were covered with silk, as in the “Crown” at Chalons, for instance,—“la pluspart des lits et couvertes sont de soie,”—but sometimes the table silver was richly and artistically decorated, as in the “Bear” at Kempten (Bavaria): “On nous y servit de grands tasses d’arjant de plus de sortes (qui n’out usage que d’ornemant, fort labourées et semées d’armoiries de divers Seigneurs), qu’il ne s’en tient en guière de bones maisons.” In many places still the wooden plates and cups were used, sometimes covered with silver; tin plates, which appear at the end of the fifteenth century, seem to impress Montaigne as a novelty. He notes at least expressly that in the “Rose” at Innsbruck he was served in “assiettes d’étain.” In the same very good “logis” he admired the beautiful laces which decorated the bed-linen—the pride of the German Hausfrau to the present day. The sheets had, he said, “quatre doigt de riche ouvrage de passement blanc, comme en la pluspart des autres villes d’Allemaigne.” Other things, on the contrary, which one finds to-day in the most modest lodging-house—as, a stairway carpet—seem to him very strange and a great novelty, although he used to stop only in first-class houses. The inn “Zur Linde” in Augsburg—“a l’enseigne d’un arbre nomé ‘linde’ au pais”—possessed this novel luxury, and Montaigne describes it in this detailed manner: “Le premier apprêt étrange et qui montre leur properté, ce fut de trouver à notre arrivée le degrés de la vis (spiral stairway) de notre logis tout couvert de linges, pardessus lesquels il nous falloit marcher, pour ne salir les marches de leur vis qu’on venait de laver.”

The linden tree was very popular in Germany as a tavern sign; under the shadow and in the sweet perfume of the village Linde, old and young loved to gather to dance and sing. How cozy the inn room looked at times we may see from his description of the “Crown” in Lindau. A great bird cage “à loger grand nombre d’oiseaus” was connected with the woodwork of the comfortable bench that used to surround the big stove. A look at Dürer’s engraving, “The Dream,” will help our phantasy to see and feel more clearly the “Gemütlichkeit” of such a stove-corner. Leaning back in soft cushions, a philistine in dressing-gown is peacefully dozing, while a beautiful young woman standing at his side seems to reveal a part of his dream.

The most luxurious hotel Montaigne ever stopped at was one in Rome, nobly called “Au Vase d’Or.” “As in the palace of kings,” the furniture was covered with silk and golden brocades. But he did not feel at home in his royal room, constantly fearing to injure the costly things, and to get a great bill against him for damages. So he decided to move to more modest quarters, not without dictating to his secretary: “M. de Montaigne estima que cette magnificence estoit non-sulement inutile, mais encore pénible pour la conservation de ces meubles, chaque lict estant du pris de quatre ou cinq çans escus.” Most of the Italian inns of his time stood in curious contrast to this royal sumptuosity. Often the windows were mere holes in the walls, simply closed with wooden shutters, which darkened the room completely if one needed to be protected against sun, wind, or rain. Such was the case of the “Crown” in Siena: “Nous lojames à la Couronne, assés bien, mais toujours sans vitres et sans chassis. Ces fenêtres grandes et toute ouvertes, sauf un grand contrevent de bois, qui vous chasse le jour, si vous en voulez chasser le soleil ou le vent; ce qu’il trouvoit bien plus insupportable et irremédiable que la faute des rideaux d’Allemaigne.” This lack of curtains in German hostelries was still, two hundred and fifty years later, for Victor Hugo a reason to complain about the “indigence des rideaux.” A real miserable time Monsieur de Montaigne had in Florence in the “hostellerie de l’ange,” where certain little creatures drive him out of bed and force him to sleep on the table: “J’etois forcé la nuit de dormir sur la table de la salle ou je faisais mettre des matelas et des draps ... pour éviter les punaises dont tous les lits sont fort infectés.” A similar experience he has in San Lorenzo, near Viterbo, the charming little town of countless fountains.

But we must take leave of our noble traveling companion and visit the painters’ studios of the time to see if we cannot find in their work pictures of the taverns and signs we have heard so much about.

CHAPTER VI
TAVERN SIGNS IN ART—ESPECIALLY IN PICTURES BY THE DUTCH MASTERS

Carlyle once complained that the artists preferred to paint “Corregiosities,” creations of their own fancy, instead of representing the historic events of their own times. Only the Dutch painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in so far as they keep clear of the Italian influence, may justly be called true historical painters, certainly with greater reason than the school of historical painting in the nineteenth century, which tried to reconstruct events of epochs long past with the antiquarian help of old armor, swords, costumes, and the like. We will find, therefore, in the works of the Dutch masters the truest historical documents for our modest sphere of investigation.

While Greek art reflected, as in a pure mirror, the harmony of worldly and religious life in Hellas, the mediæval art essentially served religious ideas, but in giving them a visible form used the worldly elements of contemporary costume and architecture. Great artists like Giotto, whose merits the proud words on his tombstone characterize, “Ille ego sum per quem pinctura extincta revixit,” proved themselves the best historians, because they possessed, besides deep religious concentration, the gift of true observation, thus introducing in their works valuable information about the life of their own time.

Not until the dawn of the Renaissance had freed the worldly spirit from ecclesiastical shackles did men imbued with a deep-rooted love of their country, like the Venetian Vittore Carpaccio, or the Florentine Benozzo Gozzoli, give us true pictures of home life. Out of the solemn walls of churches and cloisters they lead us into the animated and picturesque life of the streets, which were not, as some authors try to make us believe, above all the scene of wild and unbridled passions, but which we might compare with arteries filled with the red and healthy blood of social life. In his frescoes from the life of St. Augustine in San Gimignano, Benozzo shows us how parents present their little boy to the “magistro grammatice” in the street in front of the open schoolroom. Little Augustine, crossing his arms over his breast in an attitude of deference, looks rather inquisitively at his future master, while in the parents’ faces we read the earnest hope that the son will make “ultra modum” great progress, and never deserve such shameful public punishment as we see administered to the little good-for-nothing on the right side of the picture. But we do not observe a schoolmaster sign hung out, such as have come down to us from the German sixteenth century. The Italian painter still delights, above all, in the architectural beauty of his native city. In the same way Carpaccio shows us the piazzas and canals of his beloved Venice in the splendor of processions, solemn receptions of foreign ambassadors, and the like, decorated with flags and Oriental carpets. The humble inn of the people does not yet attract the eye of the artist, who delights in the elegance of palaces and the grandeur of public buildings.

The early artists of the Netherlands, too, represent the street, not filled with the noisy, everyday life of the people, but as a quiet stage, on which the holy procession of saints solemnly move, as in Memling’s picture of St. Ursula’s arrival in Rome. In quiet, elegant rooms the noble donors kneel before the holy virgin, saints unite in a “santa conversazione,” far from the world. Here and there only a window looks out on a tiny landscape, with rivers and bridges, roads, and fortified towns on distant hills, beyond which our “Wanderlust” draws us. This little section of nature slowly grows larger, the narrow limitations of architecture fall; crowned only with the glorious light of heaven, Mary sits in the open green fields, which give good pasture to the tired donkey. Thus Jan van Scorel has painted the holy family in a charming picture of the collection Rath in Pest. Out of pious seclusion the way leads into free nature, to meadows and brooks, to clattering mills, and finally, for a rest after the long walk, to the peasant’s inn.

Even earlier, before the Dutch painters, a pupil of Dürer, Hans Sebald Beham, one of the “godless painters of Nuremberg,” who were exiled from their native town on account of socialistic tendencies, has taken us along this road. In one of his larger engravings he pictures the different stages of a rustic wedding, and for the first time shows us the signboard, hanging on a long stick, from a dormer window of the tavern. We might date the painted sign from the invention of oil painting on wooden panels by the brothers Van Eyck, an art which was introduced in Italy through Antonello da Messina as late as 1473. The signs of earlier date we have to imagine as either sculptures, closely united with the architecture of the house, or as mural paintings such as we still see to-day in Stein-on-the-Rhine, for instance, on the house “Zum Ochsen.”

Master Dürer himself once hung out the little tablet with his famous monogram as a tavern sign over the fantastic ruin, in which he places the birth of Christ in his beautiful engraving of the year 1504, proud to have prepared such a cozy inn for Our Lady and her God-given Child.

But the whole wealth of signs, from the natural simple form of the speaking sign to the most elaborate examples of signs painted or artfully wrought in iron, reveals itself to us later in the realistic pictures of the Dutch painters.

The earliest representation of a speaking sign, where the merchandise itself is still hung out, I have seen in a woodcut illustrating a book printed in Augsburg in 1536: “Hie hebt an das Concilium zu Constanz.”

It is a baker’s sign: large “brezels” on a wooden stick, a primitive precursor of the artful baker’s sign we observe in Jan Steen’s charming picture “The baker Arent Oostwaard” in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. In more modern times the real merchandise is sometimes supplanted by an imitation of the different loafs in wood and neatly painted in natural colors, such as we see in an amusing sign from Borgo San Dalmazzo, a picturesque mountain town near Cuneo in northern Italy.

A similar evolution may be noted in other trade signs: first the real boots, and later a copy in wood, painted red if possible; first the big pitcher and the shining tin tankard decorated with fresh foliage, later the imitation in a wreath of iron leaves. Everywhere in the tavern and kermess scenes painted by Dutch masters, we see real pitchers and tankards hanging over the doors as speaking signs inviting the peasants to enter and partake of a refreshing drink. In northern Germany the “Krug” (pitcher) was so popular as a sign that the landlord was called after it, “Krüger,” to this day a widely spread family name.

Unfortunately the Dutch artists loved the interior of the tavern still better than its façade, otherwise we should find still more of the old signs in their pictures. Jan Steen, a genius in the art of living as well as in the art of painting, was a brewer’s son and occasionally he played the landlord himself, in 1654, in the tavern “Zur Schlange,” and in 1656 “In der Roskam,” both in Delft. In his latter days, when he had returned to his birthplace, Leyden, where he once was enrolled as a student of the university, he obtained a license from the city fathers “de neringh van openbare herbergh.” Who could deny æsthetic influence to tavern rooms bedecked with genuine Steens? Other artists like Brouwer paid their tavern debts in pictures, and thus created an artistic atmosphere in which young artists like Steen himself felt most naturally at ease.

In a picture in Brussels, “The Assembly of the Rhetoricians,” the president of a debating society reads the prize poem to the peasantry assembled outside a tavern, the speaking sign of which, pitcher and tankard, is hanging out on a large oaken branch. More frequent than this bush is the wreath—known to us already as a sign in antiquity—surrounding the jolly pitcher as we see it in Du Jardin’s sunny picture “The Trumpeter before a Tavern,” in Amsterdam.

David Teniers gives the preference to the half moon and rarely omits to place a pitcher above the signboard. Sometimes he decorates his moon tavern with the escutcheon of Austria and the imperial eagle; for instance, in a picture in Vienna. In his great painting in the Louvre we see a mail-stage-driver’s horn, a kind of hunting-horn, although the master, who died in 1690, did not live to see the mail-coach introduced.

In the representations, then so popular, of corporations assembled at festive meals, we sometimes remark in the background, through an open window, the stately guild-houses crowned with their signs; the little lamb with the flag, for instance, in Bartholomæus van der Helst’s superb banquet of the city guard in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. But perhaps no other artist has given us a more vivid impression of the beauty of the street with its various glittering signs than the brothers Berkheyden in the picture of which we reproduce a section in our Frontispiece. The street itself has been the painter’s real object, the play of light and shade on its various architectural features fascinates him more than the people passing through it, who once acted the principal rôle and are now treated as mere accessories valuable for accenting the perspective of the picture. Gerrit Berkheyden has painted the same market-place of Harlem again in his sunny picture of 1674 in the London National Gallery, but this time the street, gayly decorated with signs, is more distant and lost in shadow.

Fifty years later Hogarth gave us a picture of London streets and their fantastic signs, but not in the Dutch spirit of naïve truthfulness. There is hardly an engraving among his numerous productions representing a street scene, without a tavern sign. All forms are represented, the detached signpost characteristic of England, such as the “Adam and Eve” sign on the large engraving “The March to Finchley,” or the sign of “The Sun” hung out on a bracket in his engraving of “The Day,” dated 1738; again, a painted board, fastened against the wall, as we see it over the door of the Bell Tavern, in one of his earliest prints dated 1731 in the cycle “A Harlot’s Progress.” In the same plate we notice over another tavern door a large chessboard, familiar to us from the old Roman taverns. Usually this cubistic pattern decorates the signpost standing in front of the alehouse, as seen in our design of the sign-painter from the engraving “The Day.” Hogarth’s sarcastic mind was inclined anyway to distort life’s pictures like a comic mirror, and it will be difficult to determine how much further he has caricatured the actual signs he saw in the streets of London which, themselves, were very often the creations of a cartoonist. Most of his signs seem true copies from life; others, like the barber sign in the engraving “The Night,” or the above-mentioned “Good Eating,” I am inclined to think exaggerations or fanciful inventions, although, to be sure, the carved frame around the gruesome pitcher of St. John the Baptist’s head shows a distinct historic style, somewhat plainer and of more recent date than the richly carved Renaissance frame of the Adam and Eve signboard.

While to Hogarth the sign seemed to be an excellent medium wherewith to increase the bitterness of his satire, the German romantic artists of the nineteenth century, Moritz von Schwind and Spitzweg, loved to introduce it in their pictures as a fairy element. The golden pattern of a star sign is woven into the soft lines of their compositions: “The Farewell,” by Spitzweg, and the famous “Wedding Journey,” by Schwind, in the Schack Gallery at Munich. A friendly star is twinkling over both the lovers who part with tears, and those who are starting upon their journey in the dewy morning of life.

CHAPTER VII
ARTISTS AS SIGN-PAINTERS

Good old Diderot, who to-day sits so peacefully in his armchair of bronze on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and observes with philosophical calm the restless stream of Parisian life passing him by day and night, was once a severe critic. We might call him the father of critics, since he reviewed the first French Art Exhibition arranged in the Salon carré of the Louvre. From this salon the modern French Expositions in Paris derive their name, although they have grown into bewildering labyrinths of art and have long ago lost the intimacy and elegance inherent in a salon. When Diderot intended to hurt the feelings of an exhibiting artist, he used to call him a “peintre d’enseigne,” and he was cruel enough to use this term rather frequently with those painters “qui ne se servent de la brosse que pour salir la toile.” In the famous encyclopædia which, together with d’Alembert, he edited in 1779, and which brought them the honorary title of “Encyclopédistes,” he gives two definitions of the French word for sign, “enseigne”: first, a flag; and second, condescendingly, “petit tableau pendu à une boutique.” As we see, the great critic did not appreciate sign-painters and their works very highly; and in this respect he only shared the general opinion of the public, which liked to poke fun at these “artistes en plein vent.”

Charlet, who usually celebrates in his lithographs the soldiers of the great Napoleon, is the author of an amusing cartoon on our poor sign-painters. “J’aime la couleur” is the title of the spirituel design which leaves us in doubt which color the sign-artist really prefers—the red on his large palette or the red of the wine in the glass he is holding.

In similar vein Hogarth represents him as a poor devil in rags and as a conceited fellow evidently very proud of his mediocre work. Like his French colleague he loves a drink in this cold, windy business of his; at least the round bottle hanging on the frame of the signboard contains to our mind, not varnish, but something in the Scotch whiskey line.

To the “Musée de la rue” his immortal works were dedicated, said a malicious Frenchman; but after all, was this really so degrading at a time when excellent artists did not hesitate to exhibit their work in the open street? Monsieur Georges Cain, the director of the Carnavalet Museum, who knows all the “Coins de Paris” so well and with whom it is so entertaining to promenade “à travers Paris,” tells us that in the days before the Revolution the young artists who were not yet members of the official academies used to show their paintings on the Place Dauphine, once situated behind the Palais de Justice. If Jupiter Pluvius did not interfere, the exhibition was arranged on the day of the “petite Fête-Dieu.” Great linen sheets were pinned over the shop-windows and formed the background for paintings of such eminent artists as Oudry, Boucher, Nattier, or Chardin, works of art which to-day are considered treasures of the Louvre, as “La Raie,” exhibited by Chardin for the first time in 1728 in this museum of the street. “Quel joli spectacle,” says Cain in his “Coins de Paris,” “devaient offrir la place Dauphine, les façades roses des deux maisons d’angle et le vieux Pont-Neuf—décor exquis, pittoresque et charmeur—encombrés d’amateurs, de badauds, de critiques, de belles dames, d’artistes, d’aimables modèles en claire toilette, se pressant affairés, babillards, enthousiastes, joyeux, par une douce matinée de mai, devant les toiles fraîches écloses des Petits Exposants de la Place Dauphine!”

Our respect for the “artistes en plein vent” can but increase, when we hear that three famous painters have begun their career with the composition of a sign: Holbein, Prud’hon, and Chardin. All kinds of tavern anecdotes are in circulation regarding Holbein, who was rather a gay bird in his youth. According to one of them he once got so tired of painting the decoration of a tavern room that he concluded to deceive the landlord, watching eagerly his work, by counterfeiting himself standing on a scaffold before the wall busily engaged in his work. Thus he was able to skip out and have a good time in another tavern, while the good landlord, every time he looked through the door, was pleased to see him ever diligently working. One of Holbein’s earliest works was a sign for a pedagogue representing a schoolroom; this is still preserved in the Museum at Basle.

Who would have thought that Prud’hon—the artist who dwelled in romantic dreams, and whose wonderful creation of Psyche, borne away by loving wind-gods, lives on, a pleasant fancy in our minds—had begun his artistic career by painting a sign for a hatter in his native town? This, we suppose, was the first and last time that he painted such an unpoetical thing as a hat. Like Holbein he was just fourteen years old at the time when he produced this picture, which likewise has come down to us; at least it still existed when the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris arranged a Prud’hon Exhibition in 1874.

The third great artist who gained his first success by means of a sign was Chardin. A friend of his father, a surgeon, who did not disdain to play the barber as a side issue had given him the order. It was not unusual for doctors to hang out a pretty sign; if they were poetically inclined, they ventured a little rhyme on it, as shown by this Dutch example:—

For this respect the barber and hair-dressing artists showed no less talent, as this French verse will sufficiently prove:—

Well, our “chirurgien-barbier” followed the general custom of his time and ordered a sign. Naturally he expected Chardin to paint on it all his knives, his trepan, and other instruments of torture, and was not a little surprised to find something very different. The proportions of the signboard, which was very long, twelve feet long by three feet high, had suggested to the young artist an animated composition which he styled “les suites d’un duel dans la rue” and for which all the members of his family had been obliged to pose as models. Only one part of the picture, where the wounded was carried to a surgeon’s office, referred to the business of his father’s friend. Fearing, therefore, a possible objection on his part, the artist took the precaution to fasten the sign in the night to the doctor’s house, who was awakened in the morning by a big crowd assembled before it, evidently admiring the chef d’œuvre. Unfortunately this early work of Chardin’s no longer exists. His paintings, so much more serious and solid than the frivolities of Boucher and Lancret, the idols of the public of his time, have only recently, in our democratic times, received fully the appreciation they deserve.

But the most famous of signs painted by a great artist is without doubt the one which Watteau, in 1720, shortly before his death, made for the art dealer Gersaint, in three days, “to limber up his stiff old fingers.” It is one of the most beautiful things Watteau ever produced and is now in the possession of the German Kaiser. French critics, however, think that it was executed by a pupil, from the original sketch of the master, which has been found and which shows more “loose qualities,” to use an artist’s term. However that may be, the picture that Frederic the Great purchased through his art agent in Paris is a beauty. A good friend of Watteau’s, a Monsieur de Julienne, the first possessor of the sign, and owner of another painted by Watteau for Gersaint’s art shop, entitled “Vertumnus and Pomona,” was very proud of this new possession, as we might judge from the fact that he asked the engraver Aveline to engrave it with this inscription:—

These words refer to a picture gallery in Gersaint’s shop which Watteau carefully reproduces in the sign, but which to our modern eyes is less fascinating than the elegant customers, ladies and gentlemen, and the amusing eagerness and enthusiasm of these aristocratic connoisseurs.

Another sign by Watteau, the loss of which we have to deplore, was the property of a “marchande de modes.” No doubt it tempted many a “Parisienne” to buy rather more of the charming Watteau costumes than were strictly necessary.

A modern French artist who sometimes has been honored with the name “Watteau Montmartrois,” the illustrator Willette, has produced in our days the sign for the famous cabaret, the “Chat Noir” prototype of all cabarets in France and elsewhere. Two other signs by his master-hand, “À l’image de Notre Dame” and “À Bonaparte,” may still be seen in Paris on the Quai Voltaire and on the corner of the Rue Bonaparte and the Rue de l’Abbaie.

Other great French artists have painted signs occasionally: Greuze did the “Enseigne du Huron” for a tobacco merchant—which may remind us of the wooden Indian, guarding similar American shops in the old days; Carle Vernet and his son Horace Vernet; Géricault, the great sportsman, whose career as an artist was cut short by a violent fall from a horse, is the author of the “Cheval blanc,” which once adorned a tavern in the neighborhood of Paris; Gavarni, the great lithographer, painted a sign, “Aux deux Pierrots,” and drew it later on stone; Carolus Duran’s “enseigne brossée vigoureusement sur une plaque légèrement courbée” was first exhibited in the Salon de la Société Nationale before it was placed over the door of a fencing-school; and many others.

Among the French sculptors Jean Goujon, perhaps the greatest of them, the creator of the Fontaine des Innocents in Paris and its charmingly graceful figures, is mentioned as the author of a sign, “La chaste Suzanne,” which once embellished a house in the Rue aux Fêves. To-day a plaster cast has been substituted for the original, bought by an art collector. In the old streets of Paris we may still discover here and there sculptured signs of artistic charm, such as “La Fontaine de Jouvence” in the Rue de Four Saint-Germain, 67, and the fine relief of the “Soleil d’or” in the Rue Saint-Sauveur. The little Bacchus riding so gayly on a cask, who once decorated the “Cabaret du Lapin blanc,” spends to-day a rather dull existence, together with other retired colleagues of his, in the Musée Carnavalet. Our little “Rémouleur,” from the Rue des Nonains d’Hyères, who does not fail to amply moisten his grindstone, is not only a suggestive symbol, but in his dainty rococo dress a very amusing piece of sculpture.

We cannot end our chat on signs by French artists without mentioning the name of Victor Hugo, to whom we owe so much information about the wealth of signs that still existed at his time in France and the countries bordering on the Rhine. He was himself a clever draughtsman and occasionally sketched “des dessins aux enseignes enchevêtrées,” reminiscences of the real signs he used to admire on his wanderings. The following quotation may show how great was his love for signs: “À Rhinfelden, les exubérantes enseignes d’auberge m’ont occupé comme des cathédrales; et j’ai l’esprit fait ainsi, qu’ à de certains moments un étang de village, clair comme un miroir d’acier, entouré de chaumières et traversé par une flotille de canards me régale autant que le lac de Genève.”

Among the great Dutch masters Paulus Potter, Albert Cuyp, and Wouwerman are cited as occasional sign-painters. Even Potter’s famous “Jonge Stier” in The Hague is claimed as a butcher’s sign. It would perhaps seem like doing too much honor to the art of sign-painting if we numbered this remarkable work of the twenty-two-year-old artist among them. And what beautiful white horses, bathed in mellow sunlight, Cuyp may have painted for the “Rössle” taverns! Another Dutch artist, Laurens van der Vinne (1629-1702), is even called the Raphael among sign-painters. We do not know much about his work, but I am afraid he did not take this title as a compliment.

To find Rembrandt’s great name in connection with our art seems stranger still, but there is a tradition that copies of his pictures—we may think of his good Samaritan arriving with the wounded man before an inn—were used as signs. As we shall see later, his own portrait was occasionally hung out by a patriotic and art-loving landlord over the tavern door.

Among English artists Hogarth, whom we already know as a keen observer of London signs, deserves the first place. He is supposed to be the author of a sign, not very gallant to the fair sex, called “A man loaded with mischief.” It represents a wife-ridden man. All kinds of delicate allusions hidden in the background of the composition seem to hint at the sad fact that this impudent woman on his back holding a glass of gin gets sometimes “drunk as a sow.” I doubt if Hogarth engraved this plate himself; it is signed “Sorrow” as the engraver and “Experience” as the designer. It would do little honor either to Hogarth the man or the artist.

All satirical art has this great deficiency, that it is hard for the public to judge whether the satire means to combat seriously the vices and errors of men or whether the smile of the satirist is not a smile of complacency. But such doubts must not detain us from visiting with good humor an exhibition of signs, the spiritual promoter of which Hogarth seems to have been. At any rate, he contributed quite a few of his own works under the transparent pseudonym “Hagarty.”

Bonnell Thornton, who, after a brilliant journalistic career as editor of “The Connoisseur,” “The St. James’s Chronicle,” and other publications, received the greatest honor accorded to Englishmen, a final abode in Westminster Abbey, was the originator of this curious exhibition. Hogarth was at least on the “hanging committee.” The fact that the gates of the Signboard Exhibition were opened in the spring of 1762, at the same time as the official Exhibition of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, provoked the anger of the “Brother Artists” and was the signal for a perfect storm among the newspapers. Furious articles stigmatized the enterprise as “the most impudent and pickpocket Abuse that I ever knew offered to the Publick.” “The best entertainment it can afford is that of standing in the street, and observing with how much shame in their Faces People come out of the House. Pity it will be, if all who are employed in the carrying on this Cheat, are not seized and sent to serve the King.” In those days, “to serve the King” was evidently a severe punishment. The sign-painters in their turn hurried to protest their innocence and to refute “the most malicious suggestion that their Exhibition is designed as a Ridicule on the Exhibition of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. They are not in the least prompted by any mean Jealousie to depreciate the Merits of their Brother Artists, ... their sole View is to convince Foreigners, as well as their own blinded Countrymen, that however inferior this Nation may be unjustly deemed in other Branches of the Polite Arts, the Palm of Sign-Painting must be universally ceded to Us, the Dutch themselves not excepted.” The committee even reprinted the articles and letters abusive of the Exhibition, “thanking the critics for so successfully advertising their efforts.”

No doubt, this exposition was a rare treat. Not only were all the painted signs “worse executed than any that are to be seen in the meanest streets, and the carved Figures,” as one of the curious who visited the show tells us, “the very worst of Signpost Work, but several Tobacco Rolls, Sugar Loaves, Hats, Wigs, Stockings and Gloves, and even a Westphalian Ham hung round the room.” “The Cream of the whole Jest,” or, as the French would say, the “clou de l’exposition,” were two boards behind blue curtains with the warning inscription: “Ladies and gentlemen are requested not to finger them, as blue curtains are hung over in purpose to preserve them.” Since it was the custom in those days to hide pictures of too indelicate a nature in this fashion, the ladies, of course, did not dare to gratify their curiosity. But lascivious gentlemen who did not hesitate to lift the curtains found only the mocking words: “Ha! Ha! Ha!” and “He! He! He!”

The amusing catalogue of this extraordinary Exhibition has been published in full in the Appendix of Larwood and Hotten’s “History of Signboards.” It mentions many of our old acquaintances like “The Salutation, or French and English manners”; others are new to us, as “The Barking Dogs,” “a landscape at moonlight, the moon somewhat eclipsed by an accident.” The peruke-maker’s sign, “Absalom hanging,” is again an old friend of ours. But the rhyme underneath—