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John Harris the Pen-and-Ink Facsimilist
by Toshiyuki Takamiya, Keio University
One of John Harris's facsimile pages, folio 224
verso (signature ii2 verso)
Facsimiles of pages missing from printed
books were often inserted in the 19th century to make up for missing
original leaves. Most facsimilists were anonymous, and remain unidentified
to this day. Only one has reached a degree of fame so that, with
greater or lesser justification, the phrase ‘facsimiles by
Harris’ frequently occurs in library and sale catalogues of
rare and early printed books. Nevertheless, not very much is known
about ‘Harris’.
John Harris was a master of the short-lived art
of pen-and-ink facsimile, which flourished during the 19th-century 'bibliomania'
- a term coined by Thomas F. Dibdin for a book which he published in 1809.
Dibdin encouraged a passion for books among rich collectors in England
and Scotland who acquired incunables and other rare books on an unprecedented
scale. Many collectors of the period, not happy with the imperfect condition
of a book for which they had paid a large sum of money, wanted to have
missing pages supplied in facsimile. Thus the way was paved for Harris
to emerge as a facsimile artist of unparalleled skill.
There were actually three John Harrises, but
the one with whom we are now concerned was the second, and the most
famous. He was born on 17 November 1791, in Kensington, into an artistic
family. In 1811 John was reputedly introduced to Henry Fuseli, the
Swiss artist, and was admitted to the Royal Academy schools as a student
specialising in miniature portraits, but he soon developed an interest
in producing facsimiles of early typographical pages and woodcuts.
From 1815 until about 1820 Harris worked for
John Whittaker, a printer and bookbinder. Harris recollected in 1851: ‘It
was about the year 1815 that I was first employed by the late Mr John
Whittaker, of Westminster, an eminent bookbinder at that period; and
I believe the idea of having ancient books of the early printers, &c.,
perfected by fac-similes, was suggested to him by the late Earl Spencer,
for whom many books were so done; and numerous specimens are preserved
of some of the rarest productions of the press in the library of Althorpe’ (and
can be seen today at the John Rylands University Library in Manchester.
About the time of his marriage in 1820 his independent
work for Earl Spencer may have given him the idea of leaving Whittaker’s
firm to find other employment as a facsimilist. Janet Ing Freeman,
in her article in the Missing Persons volume of the Dictionary
of National Biography, identifies him with the British Museum reading room attendant
of that name, who started work there in 1821. This suggests a much
deeper association with the Museum than as just a facsimilist, although
there is no extant record to suggest that he was employed on a full
time basis.
Harris went blind in 1857 and died impoverished
in December 1873. His son, John Alfred Harris, for a time continued
his father’s business of supplying facsimiles.
The fame of Harris’s skill in the British
Museum was attested by Robert Cowtan, for many years an assistant in
the Department of Printed Books and a personal friend. Cowtan wrote
in his Memories of the British Museum published in 1872:
Mr Harris is not so much distinguished as an artist as he is famous
for his wonderful facsimile reproductions of early
wood-engraving and block-printing to supply deficiencies in imperfect
books. In this curious
art he is probably unrivalled, and the specimens
that he has produced after Faust [sic], Schoeffer, Caxton, Wynkyn
de Worde, Pynson, and
other early printers, are marvelous and unique. Some
of the handsomest and rarest volumes in the libraries of Lord Spencer,
Mr Grenville,
the British Musuem, and other collections, have been
made complete by the ‘cunning’ of his ‘right hand’;
and some of the leaves that he has supplied are so perfectly done
that, after
a few years, he has himself puzzled to distinguish
his own work from the original, so perfect has the fac-simile been,
both in paper and
typography.
Antonio Panizzi, then Keeper of Printed Books at the
British Museum, was keen on the idea that imperfect
copies of important books in the Museum should be made
good with facsimiles, regarding it as part of his duty
to provide books to readers in a perfect or perfected
condition. He persuaded the Museum Trustees that £40
or £50 over three years would enable Harris to
supply facsimiles to complete all the copies of important
books that had been detected as imperfect.
Cowtan tells of an amusing episode at this time in
which Panizzi and two other librarians, failing to
detect facsimiles in one of the perfected books, called
in Harris to point out the leaves he had supplied;
and it was only after considerable examination that
he was able to detect them. Following this incident,
on 8 July 1843, Panizzi persuaded the trustees of the
Musuem to order that Harris in future sign any leaf
he recreated with the formula, ‘This is by J.H.—A.P.’ One
can also encounter other signatures such as ‘F.S.
by I.H.’, ‘by H’, and ‘Harris
jur.’ used on facsimiles. His faint signature
sometimes escaped the notice even of the most experienced
eye, as in the case of Harris’s facsimile of
Caxton’s device in the Doctrinale of Sapience (IB.55129) which for many years was reproduced by the
British Museum as genuine, despite the presence of
his minute signature in the bottom line. This oversight
resulted in the distorted dating of Caxton’s
later work which depended on progressive damage to
that line. It should be emphasized that Harris’s
intention of making facsimiles was entirely innocent
and honourable.
Few would remain unimpressed by the highly deceptive
quality of Harris’s facsimile reproduction, and
one might well wonder how he did the work. Fortunately,
when he exhibited his facsimiles at the Great Exhibition
in 1851, he made a brief sketch of his technique, which
was printed in the 1852 Reports of the Juries. Here
he described four methods of making facsimiles in which
he was involved from time to time. While Harris claimed
to have used a method of making tracings from the originals
using soft ink, transferring this to thin paper and
then retransferring the image to the facsimile itself,
he apparently did not, according to Bernard Middleton,
follow the endeavour of Whittaker, his first employer,
of having replicas of early founts of type engraved
or cut.
Dr Lotte Hellinga has detected a number of copies
of early printed editions, particularly English incunables,
now in the British Library, in which missing leaves
have been supplied in pen-and-ink facsimiles by John
Harris and other facsimilists. Harris made good the
following British Library copies by Caxton: Dicts
and Saying I (IB.55005), Golden Legend I (C.11.d.8),
Royal Book (C.10.b.22), Doctrinal of
Sapience (IB.55129)
and Christine de Pisan, Fayts (C.10.b.11). The Grenville
copy of the second edition of Canterbury Tales (IB.55094),
bequeathed to the British Museum in 1846, has the
missing leaves (i7; p1; all ii; A1; B2-3; all K;
L3-4)<each linked to the appropriate folio> supplied
in facsimile by Harris. Even on digital images, only
a careful examination of the letters, paper and impression
will betray them as Harris’s reproduction.
Tell me more:
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References
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Robert Cowtan, Memories of the British Museum (London,
1872) |
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Janet Ing Freeman, 'John Harris 1791-1873', Dictionary
of National Biography: missing persons, edited by C.S.
Nicholls, (Oxford, 1993) |
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Barry Gaines, 'A Forgotten Artist: John Harris and the Rylands
Copy of Caxton's Edition of Malory' |
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Horst Buzellos, 'Köln und England 1468-1509' |
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P. R. Harris, A history of the British Museum Library
1753-1973 (London, 1998). |
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Catalogue of Books printed in the XVth Century now in
the British Museum (Library), vol. xi., ed. Lotte Hellinga,
forthcoming. |
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Fake? The Art of Deception, edited by Mark Jones,
(London: British Museum, 1990) with a contribution by Nicolas
Barker on John Harris pp. 223-24 |
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Bernard C. Middleton, 'Facsimile Printing for Antiquarian
Books |
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[William Roberts], 'John Harris, Facsimilist' |
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Philip J. Weimerskirch, 'John Harris, Sr., 1767-1832: A Memoir
by his son' |
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