Lot Essay
Surprisingly for an artist who was capable of a picture of this quality, Crawford is little known. Living at a series of addresses in London, he exhibited at the Royal Academy (1859-73), the British Institution (1861-67), Suffolk Street (1859-71), and elsewhere. He specialised in genre scenes and seems to have travelled, finding subjects in Ireland and the Levant, but historical genre was his forte. His exhibited pictures included scenes from the lives of Isaac Walton, Gainsborough, Mozart and Rousseau, as well as such titles as A Poor Author of the 16th Century and The Good Old Times, a Hundred Years Ago. His work is now rare; only one example, The Childhood of Mozart, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873 and on the market in 1977, appears in his Witt Library file.
Our picture, which is undated and does not seem to have been exhibited, shows Ben Jonson (1573-1637) relating to his fellow poet, William Drummond, Laird of Hawthornden (1585-1649), how he had killed an actor, Gabriel Spencer, in a duel. The incident had occurred on 22 September 1598, when Jonson was twenty-five. He was currently under contract to write for Philip Henslowe, the proprietor of the Rose Theatre, Bankside, but finding this too limiting, he had offered plays to two other companies, Every Man in His Humour to the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the Curtain Theatre, and The Case is Altered to the Children of the Chapel Royal at Blackfriars. Both plays proved successful, and feelings against Jonson at the Rose ran high. No-one considered himself more aggrieved than Gabriel Spencer, a member of Henslowe's company whom Jonson had met in the summer of 1597 when they had both found themselves in the Marshalsea prison following the suppression of a play which had been condemned as treasonable by the Privy Council. Jonson received a formal challenge from Spencer, a man of violent temper who had already killed an opponent in a brawl, and they met at Hogsden Fields, Shoreditch. Spencer was killed, and Jonson was committed to the Old Bailey for manslaughter. To save his neck he claimed benefit of clergy as a man who could 'read like a clerk', and was condemned to lose his goods and to be branded on the thumb with the Tyburn 'T'. This, however, seems to have been a formality. Indeed the incident was soon forgotten, Jonson and Henslowe patching up their differences and Jonson resuming his career as a successful playwright.
Jonson visited Scotland in 1618, at the age of forty-five, and spent two or three weeks at Drummond's house at Lasswade, seven miles from Edinburgh, before Christmas. The two poets held a series of conversations in which they discussed literary topics and Jonson told his host much about his colourful life - his drinking bouts, petty animosities, womanising and criminal record. Drummond's account of Jonson's duel reads as follows: 'since his coming to England [i.e. after a spell of fighting in the Netherlands], being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversarie, which had hurt him in the arme, and whose sword was 10 inches longer than his; for the which he was emprissioned, and almost at the gallows'. In Crawford's picture Jonson is seen making the point that Spencer's sword was ten inches longer
than his own, but the artist seems to have been unaware that the conversation took place in winter; the room is flooded with sunlight, and a blue sky and green creeper are glimpsed through the window.
Although Drummond's private impression of Jonson was not favorable, he made careful notes of their conversations and they subsequently corresponded in effusive terms. The notes were among the manuscripts which Dr Abernethy Drummond, the husband of William Drummond's last lineal descendant, presented to the Scottish Society of Antiquaries in 1782, and in 1827 they and other extracts from the papers were published by David Laing in Archaeologia Scotica, vol. 1V. The 'Conversations with Jonson' were reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1842, and this may have been Crawford's source.
Our picture, which is undated and does not seem to have been exhibited, shows Ben Jonson (1573-1637) relating to his fellow poet, William Drummond, Laird of Hawthornden (1585-1649), how he had killed an actor, Gabriel Spencer, in a duel. The incident had occurred on 22 September 1598, when Jonson was twenty-five. He was currently under contract to write for Philip Henslowe, the proprietor of the Rose Theatre, Bankside, but finding this too limiting, he had offered plays to two other companies, Every Man in His Humour to the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the Curtain Theatre, and The Case is Altered to the Children of the Chapel Royal at Blackfriars. Both plays proved successful, and feelings against Jonson at the Rose ran high. No-one considered himself more aggrieved than Gabriel Spencer, a member of Henslowe's company whom Jonson had met in the summer of 1597 when they had both found themselves in the Marshalsea prison following the suppression of a play which had been condemned as treasonable by the Privy Council. Jonson received a formal challenge from Spencer, a man of violent temper who had already killed an opponent in a brawl, and they met at Hogsden Fields, Shoreditch. Spencer was killed, and Jonson was committed to the Old Bailey for manslaughter. To save his neck he claimed benefit of clergy as a man who could 'read like a clerk', and was condemned to lose his goods and to be branded on the thumb with the Tyburn 'T'. This, however, seems to have been a formality. Indeed the incident was soon forgotten, Jonson and Henslowe patching up their differences and Jonson resuming his career as a successful playwright.
Jonson visited Scotland in 1618, at the age of forty-five, and spent two or three weeks at Drummond's house at Lasswade, seven miles from Edinburgh, before Christmas. The two poets held a series of conversations in which they discussed literary topics and Jonson told his host much about his colourful life - his drinking bouts, petty animosities, womanising and criminal record. Drummond's account of Jonson's duel reads as follows: 'since his coming to England [i.e. after a spell of fighting in the Netherlands], being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversarie, which had hurt him in the arme, and whose sword was 10 inches longer than his; for the which he was emprissioned, and almost at the gallows'. In Crawford's picture Jonson is seen making the point that Spencer's sword was ten inches longer
than his own, but the artist seems to have been unaware that the conversation took place in winter; the room is flooded with sunlight, and a blue sky and green creeper are glimpsed through the window.
Although Drummond's private impression of Jonson was not favorable, he made careful notes of their conversations and they subsequently corresponded in effusive terms. The notes were among the manuscripts which Dr Abernethy Drummond, the husband of William Drummond's last lineal descendant, presented to the Scottish Society of Antiquaries in 1782, and in 1827 they and other extracts from the papers were published by David Laing in Archaeologia Scotica, vol. 1V. The 'Conversations with Jonson' were reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1842, and this may have been Crawford's source.