April 8, 1781

Luke Clennell (April 8, 1781 to February 9, 1840) was an English engraver.  He apprenticed with Thomas Bewick (1753 -1828). Bewick was an engraver who published his own books also, such as the popular A History of British Birds (1797), the first field guide.

Scenes of street life were a common motif for prints. Clennell, we read:

'... moved to London in 1804 as a young man, seeking a career as a painter and winning a major commission in 1816 from the Earl of Bridgewater to do portraits of more than four hundred guests at dinner in the Guildhall. The impossibility of getting all these subjects to sit for him drove Clennell to a nervous breakdown and he was committed to Salisbury Asylum. Although he recovered sufficiently to continue his career, he was afflicted with mental illness for the rest of his life and died in Newcastle Asylum in 1840.

'The distinctive quality of Clennell’s ".... Cries of the Seasons...["] in 1812, stands out among the hundreds of anonymous woodcuts published in chapbooks in the early nineteenth century by virtue of their lively texture and unapologetic, unsentimental portraiture.

'Clennell’s hawkers are never going to be framed on the parlour wall and they do not give a toss. They own their defiant uncouth spirit. They are a rough bunch with ready fists that you would not wish to encounter in a narrow byway on a dark night. Yet they are survivors who know the lore of the streets, how to scratch a living out of little more than resourcefulness, and how to turn a shilling as easily as a groat.'

The street peddlers offer food, flowers, a variety of wares. Among this astonishing variety, which makes us realize our own consumer options are different, is cat food, that is food for cats. Some peddlars were called cat's meat men, (and/or dogs meat, men). Here is Clennell's portrait of one:





Clennell first named his sets of prints, "London Melodies."