Lot 6: After Louis Philippe Boitard

The Covent Garden morning frolick oil on canvas 611/2 x 531/2 in. (156.2 x 136 cm.) NOTES This scene is set in Inigo Jones's elegant Covent Garden Piazza, early in the morning, in front of St. Paul's church. A woman in masquerade dress is carried in a sedan chair, whilst an inebriated rake sits on the roof and another, dressed in red and carrying an artichoke upon his shoulder, walks alongide. By the middle of the 18th century, most of the piazza's elegant town houses had been converted into taverns, coffee houses, gambling dens and turkish baths, many of which barely disguised their real function as brothels. John Thomas Smith (1766-1833), the first keeper of the British Museum, identified the characters in this scene in his biography of the sculptor Nollekens ( Nollekens and His Times ), published in 1829. He believed that the lady in the chair was Betty Careless, the notorious brothel owner, and that the man on the roof was one of her many lovers, Captain Montague. Smith also identifed the 'link boy' leading the procession as Little Cassey and the gentleman in the red coat as the artist Marcellus Laroon (1679-1772), who had lodgings locally. In terms of satirical works, William Hogarth's famous series The Four Times of the Day in 1738, pre-empted the spirit of Boitard's Frolick, 'Morning' is also set outside St. Paul's in Covent Garden. However the tradition for depicting Covent Garden Piazza goes back to the 1720s and is due, no doubt, to the high concentration of artists living in the area as well as the presence of Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, who commissioned and collected a substantial group of Covent Garden paintings. This painting is based upon the engraving by Louis Philippe Boitard which was published on 9 October 1747. Boitard (fl. 1734-1760), who worked in France and England, is known chiefly as an illustrator and engraver although a number of his engravings of genre subjects were translated into oils by other hands, for example, 'An exact representation of the game of cricket' (Tate Britain, N05853).