Handel, George Frederic. (1685-1759)
Autograph Signature with a Contemporary Framed Portrait
Engraved portrait of the composer trimmed to oval size and set in a black wooden frame with brass fittings, measuring 15 x 18 cm. Autograph signature "George Frideric Handel" on a paper measuring 10 x 4 cm affixed to verso, below the signature, on a separate sheet, in a closely contemporary hand, is inscribed “This was written by himself in a subscription book in [B]ath Coffee House AD 1750.” Mounted above the inset portrait is a gilded brass triangle with numbers and the word "Harmologon." The three numbers at the top are 15, 12 & 20 and the three numbers across the bottom are 9, 25 & 16. The signature has strokes of a darker, but also old early, ink over the letters 'e-o-r' and part of 'g' in the first name and the mostly faded 'c' in 'Frideric' has been altered in the same darker ink to form a 'k.' The entire original assemblage archivally preserved in a double-sided wooden table-top frame under UV-plexiglass.
The English physician and composer, Henry Harington (1727-1816) was mayor of Bath and founded the Harmonic Society there. He appears in a 1799 portrait with a similar geometric diagram also inscribed "Harmologon Trivnvm" (see image), a symbol which is also inscribed on his memorial in Bath Abbey (see also Lightwood 'Hymn Tunes and Their Story', p. 358: "a tablet was erected to his memory in Bath Abbey, on which is a curious mathematical figure highly suggestive of a proposition in Euclid, but which is really a design showing the ratios of the vibration numbers in the various intervals of the major scale.")
Handel traveled to Bath in 1749 and in 1751, as he was increasingly afflicted with failing eyesight. One of England's major health resorts, it was a place he evidently enjoyed and to which he returned on multiple occasions. The assembly of the autograph sheet with the frame baring the above discussed Harmologon symbol associated with Harrington suggests that the subscription book autograph may have been discovered by someone associated with the Harmonic Society of Bath at the end of the 18th century, possibly by Harrington himself. Donald Burrows, in Handel and the Chapel Royal (Oxford, 2005), pp. 427-428, quotes Harington writing to Samuel Arnold while personally examining the papers of John Christopher Smith Jr. and recognizing important autograph Handel scores. In other words, Harington was a figure closely familiar with Handel's autographs and while it is impossible to say with certainty, given the fittings of the frame, it at least seems plausible that he was the original collector and assembler of the artifact as we now see it.
The overwriting of the letters in signature may have been accomplished around this time: the spelling of Handel's name confounded his contemporaries and though the composer himself never spelled his name with a K, it is not unusual that a contemporary would have 'corrected' his name in this way. The date of 1750 in the note should be understood to be an approximate time frame as the signature itself is undated (for one thing, the English calendar in this year would have run from March 30 1750 to March 30 1751) and was likely accomplished in either 1749 or 1751, years in which Handel is know to have traveled to Bath.
The portrait line engraving is trimmed from a larger full sheet, published 1786, and is by Francesco Bartolozzi (1727 - 1815), after Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727 - 1785).
We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Handel scholar, Ellen T. Harris in the cataloguing of this document.
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