General Wolfe

‘The market for the print based on Schaak’s full-length portrait of Wolfe was sufficiently large to attract unscrupulous publisher/printsellers. A mezzotint copy that reverses Houston’s print, inscribed only with the words “Corbut fecit” appeared on the market. Corbutt was a pseudonym for the corrupt engraver and printseller Purcell. Judging from the number of extant examples, the pirated print, although lacking lettering indicating the portraitist’s name, did well in the market place. Another print, of which there are fewer surviving examples, which reproduces the head and shoulders of Wolfe from Houston’s mezzotint was engraved by Killingbeck of London in 1783. The inscription on Killingbeck’s print misrepresents the image as being after a sketch made by John Montresor. The name of John Montresor, a sub-engineer at Quebec in 1759, would have added an air of authenticity to the plagiarized image. … The “rage” for portrait prints among the English, a phenomenon identified by Horace Walpole in 1770, reached a frenzy in the mania for pictures of the late hero of Canada.’ (A. McNairn, Behold the Hero General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century, Quebec, 1997, pp.186-88)