possessions and extravagant lifestyle; de Quincey, his fellow contributor, was not convinced by this showiness:
(He) could not conceal the ostentatious pleasure which he took in the luxurious fittings-up of his rooms, in the fancied splendour of his bijouterie, &c. Yet it was easy for a man of any experience to read two facts in all this idle etalage (display); one being, that his finery was but of a second-rate order; the other, that he was a parvenu, not at home even amongst his second-rate splendour.
Wainwright’s striving for effect in his essays makes some of them quite difficult to read today, though his
1. Carew Hazlitt also attributes to Wainewright two articles in the London signed “Egomet Bonmot Esq.” which Hazlitt added to the known works as he detected a similarity of style. This attribution has recently been disputed by Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, who says they are probably the work of another contributor, Edward Gandy. “Some passages” in the Life &c of Egonmet Bonmot, Esq. The Vanity Press of Bethnal Green. 2000.
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criticisms of artistic exhibitions are easier. Turner, for instance, “has great dashing faults which would sink an ordinary artist”; He was almost reverential about his friend Sir Thomas Lawrence, the leading portraitist of his day and president of the Royal Academy, whose “breadth, richness and depth” he praised. The poet Swinburne called Wainewright the finest English art critic before John Ruskin, whose monumental five-volume Modern Painters defined the way Victorians thought of art.
But the other essays are mainly self-referential whimsy, showing off his knowledge and with more than a dash of parody, and it is likely that Scott recruited him to the London to leaven the otherwise serious content of the magazine. “Clever, but very fantastical essays as a relief from the more serious papers of his other friends”, said Cornwall.
As Wainewright said in his first essay, he had agreed with Scott that he should be allowed to be as profound or as flighty, as serious or as comical, as he pleased. Friends like Clare thought his contributions “very entertaining” and Lamb referred to him as “Kind light-hearted Wainwright (sic)...a genius of the Lond. Mag.”
By the time his last essay, The Weathercock Steadfast for Lack of Oil appeared in January 1823, the magazine was on the downward slope. Poor Scott had not lived to see much of its short-lived success. A bitter literary feud with a contributor to another magazine led to a duel by moonlight at 9pm on February 27, 1821. A bullet went through his intestines and he died nine days later at his lodgings in Covent Garden. Wainewright was to write melodramatically that he was with
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him towards the end. “I feel...round my neck the heart-breaking, feeble, kindly clasp of his fever-wasted arm - his faint whisper of entire trust in my friendship (though short)”.
As his literary efforts petered out, he turned much more to his painting, which flowered between 1821 and 1825, when he exhibited six paintings at the Royal Academy, then based in Somerset House in the Strand, where the summer exhibition was one of the highlights of the London social season.
In 1821 he showed the Romance from Undine, one of his favourite subjects. That year’s show was caricatured by Isaac and George Cruickshank in their etching “A shilling well laid out” which shows the fashionable crowds thronging the Great Room
The Royal Academy summer exhibitions at Somerset House were one of the social highlights of Georgian and Regency London. This Cruickshank caricature is of the 1821 exhibition in which Wainewright’s work was first shown.
British Museum
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looking at the pictures; Wainewright’s effort is not among those displayed.
He then showed in the following year Paris in the Chamber of Helen, then The Milkmaid’s Song (1824), and two in 1825, Sketch from La Gerusalemme Liberata and Scene from Der Freischűtz. Two of them were indebted to the German Romantic movement that he admired so much.
The Milkmaid’s Song, was praised at the 1824 exhibition by William Blake who declared it “very fine”. All were hung where lesser artists were displayed, well “above the line”. This was a wooden moulding running around the Great Room at Somerset House at a height of about eight feet. Large works and those of celebrated artists’ works sat on the line.
None of Wainewright’s exhibits is known to survive. Despite having exhibited six pictures and applied for one of the three vacancies to become an Associate Member of the Academy, he failed to receive a single vote. This is surprising, given his closeness to Sir Thomas Lawrence and the Academy’s Professor of Painting and Keeper, the Swiss-German artist John Henry Fuseli. Indeed, he was in a special carriage with Lawrence in the funeral procession as they followed Fuseli’s lead-lined coffin to St Paul’s Cathedral.
Wainewright was a passionate admirer of Fuseli, whose 1782 painting of Gothic horror The Nightmare - a study of a supine woman upon whom is seated a malevolent imp - created a sensation, as did many of his later supernatural works. Wainewright was so close to Fuseli that one of the
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Abercromby sisters - it is not known which - sat in his studio in the cellars of Somerset House for his 1821 painting Undine Comes into the House of the Fishermen, a less-than flattering depiction of a rather gawky-looking young girl in white entering a dark, threatening room.
The event was recorded by an American artist, Mary Balmanno, in her reminiscences, Pen and Pencil. As Mrs Fuseli moved forward to talk to her husband “two very pretty girls sprang forward and saluted her; they were the sisters Helen and Madeleine (sic), one of whom had been sitting for the portrait of Undine.” Helen would have been 11 at the time, Madalina a year younger.
The picture, which has Fuseli’s dark notes of the supernatural, is based on a German fairy tale in which Undine, a water spirit, meets the knight, Huldebrand in the fisherman’s house and marries him so that she can gain a soul. The tale also fascinated Wainewright, two of the pictures he exhibited at the Academy - in 1821 and 1823 - were based upon the story.
Fuseli also produced highly-erotic drawings, as did other Regency artists, including J M W Turner.2 Wainewright’s own sepia line and wash Lady passing two lovers on a bank embracing is
2. The prissy art critic John Ruskin, Turner’s executor, going through the artist’s effects in 1858, was horrified to discover a large number of highly erotic paintings and drawings. He maintained that he had made a bonfire of them as Turner was obviously insane when he did them. However in 2005 large numbers of them were identified in the Tate Britain archive.
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in the Print Room of the British Museum.3 The Dictionary of National Biography refers to it sniffily
