Figure 1William Wynne Ryland, after Allan Ramsay. Portrait of George III, 1760. Engraving. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

p. 23 In 1769, William Wynne Ryland (a London-based artist and sometime engraver to King George III) concocted a scheme to ship an assortment of misattributed paintings to India and raise capital on the credit secured by their specious valuations. Bankrupted by the scheme’s failure, Ryland returned to artistic practice, and thirteen years later forged a series of East India Company (EIC) bills of exchange. Both ventures were unsuccessful, the latter spectacularly so: It led to Ryland’s arrest, trial, and public execution at Tyburn on August 29, 1783.

As evidenced by Ryland’s execution, the forgery of financial instruments generated extensive anxiety in eighteenth-century London stemming from recognition of the inherent instability of a monetary token’s relationship to its purported value. This problem was felt most acutely in private credit markets where participants had to evaluate if nonstandardized documents inscribed by human hands truly indexed transactions backed by real capital, if their grounding was dubious, or worse still, fabricated by nefarious actors. This precarity, described by literary historian Mary Poovey as a “problematic of representation,” evokes perennially raised art-historical questions about the illusive relationship between manifest content and its referent.¹ Yet, it also raises less savoury questions about the mercenary marriage of authorship and value. As in the art market, where authorship determines cost, the origins of a credit instrument (indicated by the signatures it bore) determined how easily it could circulate and at what discounts it traded. Rather than dwelling on the aesthetic stakes of such inquiries, this article considers their entanglement in the life and crimes of William W. Ryland, whose forgeries, as speculator and art dealer, stand astride their conceptual stream.

Ryland’s 1769 and 1782 schemes sought to exploit the maritime relay connecting the credit markets of London and Bengal. Those schemes reveal why the deceptiveness of graphic meaning-making was at the heart of British society’s anxiety regarding the legitimacy, security, and functional reality of imaginary capital—that is, credit. Far from obscuring p. 24 the material objects—prints, paintings, paper currency—in which he dealt, Ryland’s story directs our attention to the embeddedness of things in the seemingly airy business of financial speculation, revealing how the abstract value of commodities and credit instruments remained stubbornly dependant on the objects that carried them. Through this lens, encompassing forged Raphaels and EIC bills of exchange, we can see how a coterie of opportunistic picture dealers tried to profit off the structural vulnerabilities of the British credit market.

Ryland has traditionally been treated as a marginal character in the history of British engraving, best known for his professional alliance with Angelica Kauffman, whose paintings he popularized in a series of successful prints in the 1770s.² He is also credited with pioneering the stipple engraving method in Britain, a technique borrowed from the French crayon manner whereby shading is achieved through an accretion of dots incised in the printing matrix.³ Yet, little has been made of Ryland’s extraordinary forgery schemes or their relationship with his practice as a printmaker and picture dealer. This article will demonstrate how Ryland’s training in the French Académie and subsequent appointment as the Royal Engraver enabled his fraudulent credit schemes and how these criminal forays were ultimately continuous with his professional practice. After all, Ryland’s machinations adhered to the printmaker’s market mandate to profit off the canny reproduction of images. Rather than aberrations, they were, by one light, merely excessive (i.e., criminal) expressions of one of the printmaker’s fundamental value propositions, a turn too far of the imitative screw, from avowed reproduction to willful deception.

A significant body of scholarship has chronicled the development of printmaking techniques as anticounterfeiting measures in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the aesthetics of trustworthiness, fluidity, and fungibility with which currency designers sought to imbue their work.⁴ However, prior to the development of such mechanized security, monetary authenticity was often made to reside in singularity: in the traces of a debtors’ hand inscribed on a one-of-a-kind bill.⁵ Ryland’s story is about the aesthetics of such artifactual currency and the currency of art as artifact—about how the art dealer developed a fatal appreciation for the plasticity of credit during his disastrous purveyance of paintings as speculative assets.

“An Unjust Design”

Ryland’s career was launched by an uncommonly good education. Following an apprenticeship to François Ravenet, he traveled to the French Académie in the early 1750s where he studied figure drawing p. 25 under François Boucher and printmaking under Jacques Phillipe le Bas.⁶ Dominating the European print trade in the mid-eighteenth century, French printmakers like le Bas had established, among other trends, a market for highly finished reproductions of painted portraits.⁷ When the Scottish painter Allan Ramsay sought an engraver for his portrait of the young George III (then still Prince of Wales) he therefore looked to the Englishmen working across the Channel. He initially offered the fortuitous commission to Robert Strange, but after Strange declined, turned to his second choice, William W. Ryland, who returned to London in 1758 to accept the offer.⁸

The commission propelled Ryland to the forefront of British engraving. In 1761, he was appointed as the new king’s engraver, a role carrying with it a pension of £200 per annum for eight years, a period during which he was also empowered as a buyer for the royal collection. In 1763, he received a further £100 per annum from George III’s wife, Queen Charlotte of Mecklinburg-Strelitz. Via this endowment, Ryland was able to open his own printshop across from the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, taking on his father’s former apprentice, Henry Bryer, as a business partner. They named their shop the Kings Arms, as an allusion to Ryland’s royal patronage and soon became the most prolific publishers of contemporary prints in London.⁹ In 1770 the Royal Academy nominated Ryland to the Committee for Conducting the Academy; however, he declined the “honour” replying in a letter to the Academy’s secretary, William Woollet, that “my business will not permit me to attend properly” to the role.¹⁰ Having recently come to the end of his lucrative eight-year appointment as the royal engraver, Ryland was busy raising vast sums of money borrowed against the speculative value of fraudulently listed paintings.

The scheme was conceived in September of 1769 when Charles Mears, Captain of the East India Company’s ship Egmont, approached Bryer at the Kings Arms with the intention of buying a small parcel of prints and paintings to take with him for resale in the East Indies.¹¹ He bought dozens of prints and two full-length portraits, one of Queen Charlotte and the other of the Nawab of Arcott, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, paying £210 for each painting and £400 4s. 6p. for the prints.¹² Enticed by Mears’s confidence that there was money to be made by transporting pictures to Bengal, Bryer suggested that he take an even greater number, but they could not immediately come to an agreement. Mears was initially cautious. As historian John Smail writes regarding the hazards of eighteenth-century commerce, “to enter into a partnership was to put one’s credit—encompassing both assets and reputation—into the hands of another person.”¹³ If Mears was going to make an agreement with p. 26 Ryland and Bryer, he would need to be confident of their trustworthiness and propensity to pay their debts—the currency of their reputation. Apparently a charmer, Ryland did the persuading.¹⁴ He had been abroad, “collecting and buying” paintings in Italy, France, and “other foreign parts.” After returning to London in the fall of 1769, Ryland convinced Mears by his “recommendations and assurances” to transport several more parcels of paintings, presumably comprising these recent acquisitions.¹⁵

On January 25, 1770, while the Egmont was moored on the Thames preparing for its voyage to Bengal, Ryland and Bryer signed a contract with Mears, dictating terms under which the EIC captain would buy, transport, and sell £5,982 worth of paintings, separately from the initial £820 4s. 6p. purchase. Through an insurantial trick, no money changed hands in the sale. Mears insisted on paying with respondentia bonds—financial instruments given in exchange for a loan secured on a ship’s cargo—allegedly saying “that it was the manner in which he paid for all the goods and effects he took out with him on the said voyage and that he could not do it otherwise.”¹⁶ A respondentia loan must be repaid upon the safe arrival of its associated cargo, but the risk of the journey is borne by the lender, meaning if a ship’s goods are lost or damaged in transit the bond becomes worthless. It is, therefore, a form of maritime insurance, highly favorable to the insured party, who receives a provisional indemnity that may need to be returned with interest but is instantly theirs if, “by an act of god,” the goods are made unsalable.¹⁷ In this case, Mears seems to have used that provisional indemnity to buy the wares upon which the loan had been secured in the first place. This allowed Mears to offload his risk, insuring the paintings through the very mechanism of their purchase. The agreement also stated that Ryland and Bryer would bear the risk for Mears’s possible failure to sell them for a 50 percent profit. Ryland and Bryer would only make two-thirds of whatever remained of the profit, the last third going to Mears. In other words, Mears agreed to buy the paintings and try to resell them only if he assumed the risk neither for their destruction, nor for their failure to sell, in which case Ryland and Bryer were obligated to buy them back for 150 percent of their initial sale price. This guaranteed Mears £8,973 in revenue—£2,991 in profit (roughly equivalent to £270,000 in 2023) after subtracting the money owed on the bonds.

Mears issued fifteen bonds to Ryland and Bryer on January 24, 1770.¹⁸ On the same day he noted in his captain’s journal that he “took on board some private trade”—probably the several parcels of paintings listed in the articles of agreement.”¹⁹ A sample of Ryland’s inventory, replete with rare, marketable Old Masters and at least one fashionable contemporary artist hints at the inauthenticity of the lot: p. 27

1. A View in Italy with the Launching of a Boat, by Joseph Vernet —£31.10 …
2. A Shipwreck by Joseph Vernet—£31.10 …
3. King David playing on the harp, large as life, attended by angels, by Dominichino—£150 …
4. A Boarhunting, by Snyders—£63
5. A whole length Magdalen, by Guido [Reni]—£300 …
6. The flight into Egypt, by Francisco Mola, framed on gilt frames—£150
7. The Delivering of Bacchus by Mercury to the Nymphs in the island of Near by Francis LeMoins [François LeMoyne]—£100
8. Jupiter and Io, from Corregio—£150
9. Venus Triumphant on the Water, by Le Moins—N.°1—£125
10. Telemachus on the Island of Calypso by D°[ditto]—N.°2—£125
11. Galathea on the water by Luc Jordans [Luca Giordano]— £ 52.10 …
12. A Holy Family, by Raphael—£840 …
13. A Magdalen, by Guido [Reni]—N.°4—£25 …
14. Venus and Vulcan by Vandyke, framed and marked on the Back—£150 …
15. The Death of Dido, without frame, by Le Brun—£105
16. Lot, his wife and Family leaving Sodom, conducted by the angels, by Rubens in a Burnish Gold Frame—£400 …
17. Cupid and Psyche, by Vandyke, framed—£10520

Ryland’s friend, the French artist Pierre Étienne Falconet, later designated most of these paintings as copies and was himself the author of the “Vernets.” However, the records—as well as their grossly inflated listing prices²¹—indicate that they were willfully misattributed to their authorial source and proffered as originals. They were, in other words, forgeries.

I use that term advisedly, following the lead of cultural historian Hillel Schwartz, who defines forgery, in contradistinction to “fair copy,” as having “to do with intentional misattribution.”²² I favor this definition p. 28 because it puts the onus on the purveyor of the work, rather than the artist whose copy might have been made in good faith but nonetheless become an instrument of deception.²³ Though there had long been a robust market for copies of works by celebrated artists in the European art trade, by the time of Ryland’s dealings, eighteenth-century connoisseurs had begun to valorize an autographic conception of painting not unlike that which determines value in contemporary art markets.²⁴ As Charlotte Guichard has demonstrated, originality was increasingly thought to reside in the materiality of the painting itself, rather than the inventive genius, or disegno, of its author.²⁵ Paintings were becoming artifactual records of an artist’s performance and, as such, potential sites of more rarified economic value.²⁶ Central to the argument of this article is the contention that, in such a commodified regime, misattributed paintings may be productively considered forgeries, in the same sense as counterfeit banknotes or bills of exchange. Indeed, some decades earlier William Hogarth had derisively named dealers like Ryland “picture-jobbers,” a riff on “stockjobbers,” the term for the financial speculators who were commonly reviled, as one commentator put it, as “pests” who profited by “every mean artifice” and “scandalous forgery.”²⁷ Hogarth acidly complained of these dealers “continually importing Ship Loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, and Madona’s … on which they scrawl the terrible cramp names of some Italian Masters, and fix on us poor Englishmen, the character of Universal Dupes.”²⁸

In the lawsuits and countersuits that followed the Bengal scheme, each party would allege that the other had caused the inflation. According to Mears, Ryland and Bryer set the prices, whereas Ryland and Bryer claimed that Mears had insisted on raising them. Both parties had an incentive to do so, particularly Mears who was guaranteed his 50 per- cent profit “together with the original costs.” Yet, Ryland and Bryer also stood to gain because the bonds were tied to the value of the paintings and could be traded on the open market. The more valuable the bonds were, however, the more they would owe Mears in case the captain was unable to offload their wares in Bengal. The two opportunistic picture dealers apparently assumed that increasing their cash-in-hand was more valuable than its corresponding subtraction from revenue, because they could use it to accumulate capital until the debt came due—or, as some friends would later put it, having erected an edifice of “false credit,” they were enabled to “raise money upon the public for a time.”²⁹ Most likely they initially conspired together. By manipulating respondentia, they turned the imagined value of their paintings into real capital, money that would be immediately available to Ryland and Bryer, but ultimately guaranteed to Mears. Their ability to do so was, according to many p. 29 period observers, an inherent danger of the credit economy. As David Hume had written in 1752, credit was essentially a way of “increasing money beyond its natural proportion to labour and commodities” and was, therefore a kind, of “counterfeit money.”³⁰ Hume’s criticism seems apt in this case. While the bonds were ostensibly tied to the value of the paintings (themselves counterfeit), they were more truly grounded on pure speculation—on the specious anticipation of returns to be extracted from Bengal through the wealthy colonial bureaucrats of the East India Company.

“Bad Adventures … in the East Indies”

After nearly four months of floating repairs, lading, and preparation on the Thames, the Egmont set sail for Bengal on February 22, 1770, bound for a country wracked by famine.³¹ In the fall of 1769, reports were arriving at the East India House in Leadenhall Street that famine was beginning to threaten Bengal and the neighboring province of Bihar. A report from Madras, dated September 25, alerted the company’s board that “very distressing consequences [were] being apprehended from the great scarcity of grain,” and that there was “a most melancholy prospect of universal distress.”³² The EIC’s main worry was apparently that a famine could “occasion a very considerable diminution in the Company’s revenues,” which they avoided by ordering austerity measures, seizing or buying up grain, and maintaining a rapacious tax regime.³³ Richard Beecher, a company factor at Murshidabad, wrote that during 1770, “the provinces laboured under the most severe calamity that any country was ever afflicted with—a continued drought which produced such famine and mortality among the inhabitants as I believe history does not furnish us with an instance of.”³⁴ Though the famine would begin to abate after an abundant rice harvest in December, by then as many as ten million people had died, a third of the population of Bengal and Bihar.

The Egmont sailed from Gravesend to Tenerife, to Ascension, then around the Cape of Good Hope toward Madras where it arrived on July 26, 1770.³⁵ In October, the Egmont arrived at Culpee, a port-city downstream of Calcutta, where it remained until January 1771. It’s unclear if the picture dealers were aware of the looming disaster when they launched their venture. If so, they failed to make the assessment that such catastrophic famine and resulting austerity measures would dampen the market for their expensive goods. Mears was contractually obligated to “sell and dispose of the said paintings to the best advantage,” yet, he had little other incentive to do so.³⁶ The captain must have realised that it was improbable he could gain anything more than the £8,973 he was already guaranteed, because the specified prices “were exorbitant and p. 30 unreasonable and far above the real values thereof.”³⁷

Figure 2Joseph Vernet. A Landscape at Sunset, 1772. Oil on canvas. © The National Gallery, London.

Nonetheless, he put the lot up for auction on January 22, 1771 in Calcutta and managed to sell four paintings, listed in the articles of agreement as Telemachus on the Island of Calypso by François Le Moyne, Galathea on the Water by Luca Giordano, A Magdalen by Guido Reni, and A Gentle Breeze, by an unnamed artist. All four were bought by Richard Beecher (the Murshidabad factor quoted above), for £347 7s. 5p.—more than what they were listed for in the articles (£275 20s.), but sums still insufficient to entitle Ryland and Bryer to any of the profit. According to Mears, no one else bid on any of the works for anything close to the specified “unreasonable” prices, and he was forced to rebuy fifteen of them himself to prevent them from being sold far below “prices agreeable to expectations.”³⁸ The Egmont proceeded from Culpee to Fort St. George at Madras, where it arrived in March of 1771.³⁹ Here, Mears advertised that he had paintings for sale but again found that there was no prospect of selling them on account of their overestimated prices. He put thirty-four pieces up for auction but was forced to rebuy them all for a total price of 1,969 pagodas (equal to £786).⁴⁰

Though the scheme had been a failure, its premises were not entirely unfounded. Ryland, Bryer, and Mears evidently thought that company men would be keen to exchange some of their colonial wealth for the European cultural capital associated with the ownership of Old Master paintings. Indeed, EIC factors were returning to England in the 1760s and voraciously acquiring art, along with land and parliamentary influence.⁴¹ Art ownership signified not only wealth, but also taste, which various aesthetic philosophies associated with virtue, nobility, and an according fitness to rule. The third earl of Shaftesbury and Jonathan Richardson had both argued that taste’s cultivation could refine one’s moral judgment, a supposed requisite of a gentleman’s education.⁴² Put more bluntly, as art historian Iain Pears writes, the aspiring eighteenth-p. 31 century gentleman was liable to believe that the cultivation of taste would “bolster his social position through distinguishing him from the common ruck of mankind.”⁴³ Such were the prejudices of Joseph Addison, who wrote that “A Man of Polite Imagination is let into a great many Pleasures, that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving.”⁴⁴ As such, newly wealthy men like Robert Clive “of India” (the infamous progenitor of Company rule in Bengal), converted portions of their vast colonial loot into collections of art. The walls of the “Great Drawing Room” of Clive’s Berkley Square residence, where he would fatally cut his own throat in 1774, were hung with works by Rubens, Claude, Poussin, and Veronese.⁴⁵

Figure 3Joseph Vernet, A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas, 1772. Oil on canvas. © The National Gallery, London. The picture dealers’ inclusion of a significant number of seascapes in their inventory was also a plausibly winning idea. In 1773 Clive bought two paintings from Joseph Vernet, titled Calme and Tempête. The first is a Claude-like scene, in which a Dutch East Indiaman is depicted floating in an idyllic, classicized harbor, taking on crew and unfurling its sails. The latter depicts two ships in distress on a rocky coast. The passengers of a third ship, wrecked against the rocks at bottom right, seek to salvage their cargo. In a central grouping, four figures try to rescue a supine, lifeless woman. These likely resembled two of the paintings carried on the Egmont: A View in Italy with the Launching of a Boat and A Shipwreck, which were ostensibly by Vernet (but as noted above, were actually painted by Ryland’s friend, Falconet). Though the paintings failed to sell, it was plausible that such images would appeal to merchants building their fortunes through transoceanic trade.

In any case, the majority of the lot consisted of Old Master copies, appealing more to the merchants’ class aspirations than their sentimentality about trade. Ryland and Bryer mistakenly assumed that such considerations would sufficiently motivate buyers in India, where the social power indexed to art ownership was subservient to the mercenary paradigm of company rule. In India, the paintings were divorced from p. 32 their original “regime of value.”⁴⁶ Men like Robert Clive had no use for Poussin in Bengal. It is worth noting, however, that only a couple years after the 1770 famine, the governor-general of Bengal, Warren Hastings, paid the English painter Tilly Kettle 1,000 guineas for a full-length portrait of Muhammed Ali Khan Wallajah, the same subject as one of Mears’s paintings from the first parcel.⁴⁷ Yet, indicating how the value regimes in London and Bengal were essentially untethered, Kettle’s portrait was later resold at Christie’s auction house for seven guineas. Just as objects were at risk of loss or damage in transit between London and Calcutta, their capacity to retain and convey the social memory constituting their monetary value was unstable. As art historian Jennifer L. Roberts writes, “pictures … must not be conceptualized as inert tokens travelling passively around the globe.”⁴⁸ Like material integrity, meaning and its attendant market value were subject to decay.

An Edifice of False Credit

“The most remarkable feature” of a respondentia bond, or sea loan, one economic historian writes, “is that it provided insurance and credit within the same contract.”⁴⁹ While it provided the security necessary for Mears to transport the paintings to Bengal, it also alchemized value at the port of departure. Thus, even before the Egmont had departed, Ryland and Bryer could start converting their inflated respondentia bonds into cash. On February 9, 1770, they applied to a lawyer on Fleet Street, to advance them £605 in exchange for assigning over one of the bonds, agreeing that in case the bond was not paid by Mears, “that [they] did become security for such payment… .”⁵⁰ Apparently further insurance was necessary, so Ryland and Bryer applied to their unwitting friends, furniture makers John Linnell and James Triquet, to stand collateral security. They proceeded to sell the respondentia bonds to several different creditors, with Linnel and Triquet standing collateral on each exchange.⁵¹ It is unclear what Ryland and Bryer did with the cash. They may have used it to repay other creditors. They may have reinvested it in more speculative ventures. In any case, it seems to have been spent by the time Mears returned to London in September of 1771, carrying thirty-four of the fifty-one article-controlled paintings he had taken to Bengal.⁵² Of these, two were lost upon arrival and four were “spoiled,” including one of the few genuinely attributed paintings in the lot: a large canvas depicting His Marquis of Rockingham’s Arabian Horses, by George Stubbs, which, being unsalable, was returned to the artist.

Shortly after arriving at the docks at Deptford on his return in 1771, Mears acquainted Ryland and Bryer with the “bad adventures of the said paintings in the East Indies,” promptly demanding the £7,627 2s. 7p. he p. 33 was owed according to their contract.⁵³ Ryland and Bryer prevaricated, insisting that Mears first pay the money due on the bonds. Yet, Mears claimed that they had not been entitled to sell the bonds, and that the £5,982 he owed on them were contractually bound to be balanced against the £8,973 guaranteed to him under the articles of agreement.⁵⁴ Ryland and Bryer claimed that they had only agreed to accept payment in respondentia because they considered “such bonds as cash as they were currently assignable and saleable,” that Mears knew they meant to assign them and had even agreeing to split the invoice into smaller bonds so that they could be more easily traded on the open market.⁵⁵ Mears, for his part, claimed that Ryland and Bryer were the ones who prepared the bonds and that he simply “executed such bonds in the manner they were brought to him.”⁵⁶

The picture dealers joined forces with the several assignees in seeking payment from Mears, who filed for an injunction against such legal action, arguing that the bonds had been assigned in a “fraudulent and collusive manner.”⁵⁷ Ryland and Bryer countered that Mears knew the bonds were going to be assigned and that they had done so without “any fraudulent or unjust design to [their] advantage.”⁵⁸ The magistrate thought otherwise. Ryland and Bryer were made responsible for the debt and accordingly went bankrupt on December 10, 1771. This debt then fell on their unsuspecting friends John Linnel and James Triquet, who had been led to believe that their collateral security was little more than a formality. The furniture makers would later complain bitterly about having been “left at full liberty to support a false credit to the world.”⁵⁹

Here, the entanglement of artistic and monetary value—and their mutual dependence on nebulous notions of authenticity—becomes explicit. Having been forced to rebuy the remaining paintings from Mears, Ryland and Bryer were obligated to use them as partial repayment to Linnel and Triquet, reducing the sea-worn forgeries to their function as a degraded currency.⁶⁰ Some were sold at James Christie’s for discount prices. A Sea View at Naples, attributed to William Marlow, which had been listed for £250 in the articles of agreement, sold for £36 12s. A “Rubens,” sold for £12 12s. The remainder eventually embarked a ship bound for Russia, where Falconet, acting as Linnel and Triquet’s agent, tried to sell them to Catherine the Great.⁶¹ The Empress, a voracious collector with a partiality for Raphael copies, bought the Holy Family, originally listed at £840, for £200, but Falconet struggled to sell the rest.⁶² He sold a few more for insignificant prices such as the Mola copy, which, he wrote to Triquet, could no longer be considered a “tableaux precieux,” for having been transported from London to Bengal, back to London, then across the Baltic Sea to Saint Petersburg, had ended up “en tres mauvais état.”⁶³ In p. 34 another letter to Triquet, Falconet wrote that Ryland “must have done you a world of hurt. This man is more ambitious than wicked but what avails the motive to those who are the victims?”⁶⁴

Printing Facsimiles, Forging “Heaps of Paper”

Such sensational and nearly criminal credit-failures were by no means novel to the British economic imagination. Ryland and Bryer’s scheme was, in fact, nearly contemporaneous with one of the largest credit crises of the eighteenth century. In 1772, Alexander Fordyce, a London speculator, went bankrupt after financing a massive short position on East India Company stock, which unexpectedly stabilized after the famine. Fordyce’s bank was heavily indebted to the Edinburgh-based Ayr Bank, which subsequently failed, precipitating financial panics in London and Amsterdam that caused the collapse of large networks of bills of exchange.⁶⁵ Merchants, bankers, and speculators across Europe suddenly found themselves unable to exchange bills for their purported value. (Needless to say, Ayr bank became the subject of many puns—Ayr/air.) It was apparently this crisis that led Adam Smith to write in the Wealth of Nations that “the commerce and industry of the country … cannot be altogether so secure when they are thus, as it were, suspended on the Daedelian wings of paper money as when they travel about upon the solid ground of gold and silver.”⁶⁶

The evaporation (or melting, in Smith’s formulation) of capital erected on false pretenses had long been imagined as an inherent danger of the paper credit economy. In 1711, Joseph Addison wrote an allegorical essay in which credit, personified as a young woman, sits on a heap of bags of gold. After being confronted with a troop of ghosts personifying various threats to political stability and public trust, she faints and suddenly,

[t]here was a great change in the Hill of Mony Bags and the Heaps of Mony, the former shrinking, and falling into so many empty Bags, that I now found not above a tenth part of them had been filled with Mony. The rest that took up the same Space, and made the same Figure as the bags that were really filled with Mony, had been blown up with Air, and called into my Memory the Bags full of Wind, which Homer tells us his Hero received as a present from Aeolus. The great Heaps of Gold on either side of the Throne now appeared to be only Heaps of Paper.⁶⁷

Ryland later turned his reproductive skills on such “heaps of paper,” forging that Aeolian engine of transoceanic trade—the bill of exchange. While the gothic novel was contemporaneously providing a new artistic arena in which authors could play with “signs divorced from substance,” p. 35 Ryland’s more material confrontations with the ghost of the counterfeit would eventually get him killed.⁶⁸ However, in the decade prior to his execution, Ryland was staging such confrontations within the bounds of law, using innovative techniques to push the limits of the reproductive art print’s mimetic potential.

Figure 4Thomas Burke, after Angelica Kauffman. Cleopatra Adorning the Tomb of St. Anthony, 1772. Mezzotint. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 5William Wynne Ryland, after Angelica Kauffman. Dormio Innocuus, Vix Impune Expergefeceris, 1776. Stipple engraving. © The Trustees of the British Museum. In the wake of the 1770 failure, Ryland lost his print shop. In 1772, he was expelled from the Incorporated Society of Artists for exhibiting with the Royal Academy (presumably driven to do so because of his need of funds); however, that same year he was able to turn his fortunes around after publishing a mezzotint (made by the English engraver Thomas Burke) after Angelica Kauffman’s Cleopatra Adorning the Tomb of St. Anthony.⁶⁹ This initiated a partnership that sustained Ryland for the remainder of his career. Though the alliance was initially mediated through Burke, Ryland spent most of the next decade engraving Kauffman’s paintings himself, applying the stipple method he had learned in France to make his prints look like red-chalk drawings—that is, products of the painter’s rather than the engraver’s hand.

Ryland adapted his technique from the chalk manner invented by his former tutor, Jean-Charles François. By stippling the printing matrix with an etching needle, François discovered that he could approximate the crumbled texture of chalk drawings on rough textured paper, resulting in surprisingly convincing facsimiles.⁷⁰ François initially marketed these prints as democratizing teaching aids, whereby French students could reap the educational benefits of copying Old Master drawings, without having access to the drawings themselves.⁷¹ However, as a fashion for collecting and displaying drawings developed in mid-century France, chalk-manner printmakers stepped in to serve the lower end of the market.⁷² Replica, it turned out, could adequately replace original.

Ryland began making chalk drawing facsimiles shortly after returning from France in 1758; however, they weren’t widely publicized until 1778, when his patron Charles Rogers published a two-volume compendium of Prints in Imitation of Drawings. While Ryland’s stipple-engravings p. 36 after Kauffman merely evoke the character of chalk drawings, his contributions to Rogers’s compendium were designed for maximum verisimilitude to the medium of their source. They therefore approach the conceptual logic of signature forgery, in which the imitation is of not only graphic information but also the signs indicating the circumstances in which it was drawn. Consider, for instance, Ryland’s engraving after a drawing of St. Francis by Carlo Maratti. To imitate the crumbled texture of the original cross-hatching, Ryland built up the lines with precisely stippled dots. Each line, originally achieved with a casual stroke of red chalk, is laboriously engraved to create not only a copy of the image but also a facsimile of the original object—a product of its medium, substrate, and maker.

Figure 6William Wynne Ryland, after Carlo Maratti. Saint Franciscus, 1763. Stipple engraving. © The Trustees of the British Museum. The technique repositioned the reproductive print as a precedent—rather than antecedent—to painting, the sketchiness of which seemed to promise greater access to the creative impulses of its author. This was certainly the promise made by Rogers, who wrote in the preface to his Prints that “it must be unquestionably allowed that Drawing is the Fountain from which all imitative arts have issued; and that none of his Branches can appear with any beauty, without being generously supported by this Head of a very numerous progeny.”⁷³ The argument being made is not only technical, but also aesthetic; being less mediated, drawing’s perceived proximity to the font of inspiration was seen as lending it a privileged value. Ryland was therefore able to restore his career by obscuring the mechanical nature of his art, displacing his own authorship by imitating an earlier stage of another artist’s creative process. These conceits proved massively popular with London buyers, particularly their more modest expression in the stipple engravings of Ryland’s Kauffman series.

Figure 7William Wynne Ryland, after Carlo Maratti. Saint Franciscus, 1763. Stipple engraving. Detail. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Such prints were necessarily bound up in eighteenth-century London’s preoccupation with the deceptive power of ink on paper in a financial landscape increasingly dependent on paper technologies. As art historian Maggie Cao has argued, trompe l’oeil prints shared a representational logic with counterfeit bills; both were instruments of deception seeking to appear as “the thing itself” rather than a mere copy or representation of that thing.⁷⁴ Ryland’s 1769 scheme, by transmuting art objects into dubious credit instruments, furthermore demonstrates how prints and paintings could inhabit the monetary logic of counterfeit bills. Seen in p. 37 this light, Ryland’s practices as a printmaker and art dealer and are consistent with his eventual implication in the more unambiguously criminal realm of financial fraud.

On April 3, 1783, his name appeared in the London papers under an ominous headline: “A FORGERY.” The text read as follows:

WHEREAS WILLIAM WYNNE RYLAND stands charged, before the right honourable the Lord Mayor, on suspicion of feloniously making, and forging, an acceptance to two bills of exchange, for payment of Seven Thousand One Hundred and Fourteen Pounds, and for publishing the same as true, well knowing them to have been so falsely made and counterfeited, with intent to cheat and defraud the United East-India Company. Whoever will apprehend, or cause to be apprehended, and delivered up to justice, shall receive a reward of Three Hundred Pounds, to be paid by Peter Michell, Esq; Secretary of the said company, immediately after his being apprehended and delivered to the Magistrate. The said William Ryland is an Engraver, and formerly kept a print shop in Cornhill, London, in partnership with Mr. Bryer, deceased; he has an house at Knightsbridge, which he left on Tuesday, the 1st of April instant, and was seen in London that day, about eleven or twelve o’clock. He is about fifty years of age, about five feet nine inches high, wears a wig with a club or queue and his own hair turned over in front, a black complexion, a thin face, with strong lines; his common countenance very grave, but whilst he speaks rather smiling, and shews his teeth, and has great affability in his manner.⁷⁵

Ryland had begun trading bills of exchange sometime in the late 1770s or early 1780s. These paper-based securities operated on the principle that a drawee, or a debtor, is obligated to make payment to a payee, or creditor. Such bills would often be written up by third parties such as company employees, known as drawers, who facilitated payment from the drawee to the payee. The drawee was fixed, but the debt was exchangeable, meaning whoever possessed the bill after purchasing or otherwise acquiring it became the payee. A bill’s value was not necessarily fixed and might be payable for different sums at specified intervals following the date on which it was drawn. These interest-accruing bills, often dispatched in triplicate to account for loss or destruction in transit, could be traded for their base value, known as discounting, or held as assets p. 38 that could be liquidated for a profit once interest came due. Once proffered and put into the circulation of the credit market, a bill was regarded as “published.”

Not unlike Mears’s respondentia trick, bills of exchange allowed companies, such as the EIC, to defer payments and potentially recoup initial investments before they were even parted with, regularizing cash flow between routine transactions and facilitating embarkations on risky, speculative ventures for which a factor could rely on their profit to pay their seed capital. Banking houses and independent traders in the metropole could similarly benefit by holding or buying bills during periods of liquidity and selling them when debts came due. As bills changed hands, successive holders canceled the name of the previous holder and wrote in their own name as the party to whom the drawee was indebted, thus lengthening a chain of credit based not only on the credibility of the drawee but also on each successive owner of the bill, making the business of discounting bills, “the business of reading the solvency or character of each preceding party on this relay of exchange.”⁷⁶

A merchant, shopkeeper, or prospective discounter of a bill had to assess the possibility that the drawee might become insolvent, but they also had to assess the trustworthiness of the financial instrument by calling on their knowledge of the names already inscribed on the bill, knowing that every link represented a potential point of malfeasance by forgery. Perhaps driven to financial desperation by his reportedly lavish support of a young woman with whom he had a child, Ryland sought to manipulate the techniques of these paper-based securities, forging original bills of exchange as well as each verifying signature in their credit chains.⁷⁷ Ryland absconded from his West End home in Knightsbridge on April 1, 1783, after a warrant was issued for his arrest.⁷⁸ Under the alias “Jackson,” he rented a room in Stepney in the East-End house of a cobbler named Richard Freeman.⁷⁹ According to the Evening Post, on April 15, Freeman sought out the local authorities in a public house on Bow Street, “purporting, that he suspected the man, for whose apprehension a reward of £300 had been offer’d, to be then at Stepney, from the circumstance of a shoe with the stamped impression of Ryland having been that day sent him to mend.”⁸⁰ Ryland either absentmindedly forgot his name was stamped in his shoe, or fatally underestimated the extent of the publicity he was getting. In any case, he decided to enlist the services of his landlord, a reader of the dailies who was keen to claim the bounty they had been incessantly publicizing. Freeman conducted some of the magistrate’s deputies to his house and led them to Ryland’s door: “when the officers entered the room they saw Ryland sitting at a table in a serious posture with a book in his hands and upon turning his head and seeing p. 39 them, he seized a razor which lay before him, and cut his throat.”⁸¹ A surgeon was instantly sent for, who managed to sew him up and stop the bleeding. The constables restrained Ryland’s hands, “lest he should tear open the wound at his throat,” while a message was sent to the magistrate, who concluded that the prisoner was unfit to be examined and ordered that he be left there for the night under guard of six men.⁸² In the Authentic Memoirs of William Wynne Ryland that would eventually follow, the publisher commissioned a print, titled Ryland Cutting His Throat on Sight of the Officers of Justice, in which Ryland is depicted rising from his chair in front of a desk by the raking light of a window, lifting a razor to his throat.⁸³ Three officers of the law have burst into the room at the right, one of whom holds Ryland by the crook of his fatally poised arm.

Figure 8Unknown artist. Ryland Cutting His Throat on Sight of the Officers of Justice, 1774. Engraving. Page from The Authentic Memoirs of William Wynne Ryland.

Though the wound did not prove “mortal,” as one physician initially claimed, Ryland evidently had difficulty speaking, as on June 6, when a grand jury determined that the charges would stand, the court assented to his request for a deferral of his trial until the following court session in late July.⁸⁴

In the 1780s London’s judges were ordering the highest rate of executions in at least a century.⁸⁵ The situation was especially dire for those convicted of forgery.⁸⁶ In 1774, the judge, jurist, and Tory politician William Blackstone (1723–1780) wrote that there was “hardly a case possible to be conceived, wherein forgery, that tends to defraud, whether in the name of a real or fictitious person, is not made a capital crime.”⁸⁷ In 1728, the forgery of all paper-based securities and transferable currencies had been made punishable by death and, over the ensuing the century, convicted felons were more likely to be hanged for forgery than any other nonviolent property offense.⁸⁸

Britain’s aggressive forgery laws developed to protect the new financial regime in which property had become theoretical, even spectral, and based on elaborate systems of trust. The historian J.G.A. Pocock argues that the “intellect of the early eighteenth century” could “be seen applying itself to the stabilization of the pathological condition” imposed on political society by the emergence of the financialized economy, that commentators like Addison had in mind “the conversion of the pure fantasies of speculation upon the future into the well-grounded opinions of continued experience in an on-going and dynamic political economy.”⁸⁹ p. 40

Figure 9Robert Clive. Bill of Exchange, 22 January 1766. British Library, India Office Records, Mss Eur G37/7/3 f. 24: 22; recto.

Pocock’s formulation is worth quoting at length.

[I]n the credit economy and polity, property had become not only mobile but speculative: what one owned was promises, and not merely the functioning but the intelligibility of society depended upon the success of a program of reification. If we were not to live solely in terms of what we imagined might happen—and so remain vulnerable to psychic crises like those of the Darien Scheme, the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Company—experience must teach us when our hopes were likely to be fulfilled, and confiance teach us that we might create conditions in which their fulfilment would be more likely.⁹⁰

Moving to maximize the forger’s punishment was the most violent manifestation of this protective impulse. The recognition of the ontological instability of paper-based securities had provoked a deep (and not unreasonable) fear that the British economy suffered from an acute and exploitable vulnerability. Ryland’s progression from trading in respondentia bonds grounded by speculation in fraudulent art dealing, to the bald-faced forgery of bills of exchange illuminates the aesthetic nature of this vulnerability. It was a matter of the trustworthiness of marks made on paper and their ostensible—but ultimately weak—capacity to convey their origins.

Printmakers would eventually become essential players in the development of anticounterfeiting measures in paper currency; however, the East India Company bills of exchange in Ryland’s era were entirely hand drawn, meaning a forger need not grapple with the intricacies of mechanized security. Rather than replicating a complex fungible token, forgers like Ryland needed only to create a facsimile of what was, de facto, a contract, whose only security was the dubious irreproducibility of a signature.

Consider, for instance, a bill drawn by Robert Clive in 1766 in Calcutta. Though bills could be drawn haphazardly, the format of this bill is typical.

The debtor would date their bill at the top, writing in its value and location of origin. The body of text reads, “At ninety days sight of this my first bill of exchange (my Second and/Third not being paid) pay to Henry Strachey or Order [meaning anyone Strachey designates as a payee], the sum/of Three Thousand Pounds Sterling as of advice from/Madame and Gentlemen/Your most obedient humble servant/Clive.” The bill’s drawees are written at bottom left, one of whom, John Walsh, signed, p. 41 dated, and wrote “accepted” at the bottom of the bill when he paid it some nine months later. The verso records the bill’s transference and circulation in signatures. Strachey wrote, “Pay the contents to” himself, or two other designated orders. One of these, Christopher D’Oyly, signed at the bottom, indicating that he took possession of the bill. Beneath his signature are two more, the last of whom, surnamed “Drummond” would have been the ultimate payee. For a prospective forger, the bill is not merely a text but also an image replete with crucial details like the splotch of ink at center left or the acute “X” dashed upward through the body of the text.

Figure 10Robert Clive. Bill of Exchange, 22 January 1766. British Library, India Office Records, Mss Eur G37/7/3 f. 24: 22; verso. Ryland was originally accused of forging two bills, totaling £7,114. However, for reasons not described in the court records these charges were dropped, and when the court session began in late July of 1783 he stood accused of an entirely different forgery, for a bill worth £200.⁹¹ Tracing this bill’s path illuminates the fragility of an increasingly anonymous chain linked by trust, as it moved from a network of associates into the impersonal circulation of the credit market. On October 5, 1780, agents of the East India Company at Fort St. George (in Madras, present-day Chennai) drew a bill stating that a Captain Douglas Campbell was owed £200 from the company in exchange for 510 pagodas and 22 fanams. The bill accrued interest and was payable in London for £200 at twelve months’ sight, or for £210 at twenty-four months’ sight. Douglass Campbell remitted this bill to his relation Sir Archibald Campbell. In March of 1782, Archibald Campbell had the bill discounted by Hector Monro, whom Campbell calls “a friend of mine in the city.”⁹² When Monro added his signature to the bill, he also wrote “£210 due the 28th of April, 1783,” in the process of which, he would later testify, the “ink sunk” in a particular way that stuck in his memory. (This fact became crucial evidence in the trial.) In May 1782, Monro used the bill to pay a man named John Crookshank, who subsequently used it to pay John Goddard. That same month, John Goddard applied to Ryland to discount the bill. Goddard knew Ryland as a printmaker but also as regular participant in London’s private credit market, having, in the past, applied to Ryland to discount bills of £10,000, £7,000, and £4,000. The one for £10,000 Ryland did not discount, but the other two he did, meaning there was nothing extraordinary in Goddard applying to Ryland for this relatively modest sum. Ryland paid Goddard £200 in exchange for the bill-in-hand worth £210.⁹³

On September 19, 1782, Ryland presented three bills of exchange to p. 42 the bank of Sir Charles Asgill in Lombard Street. Among them was the fateful £200 EIC bill drawn to Douglas Campbell.⁹⁴ Asgill’s partner accepted these, signed for them and advanced Ryland £3,000. On November 4, 1782, Ryland walked into another bank and requested to borrow an unrecorded sum of money, leaving five bills of exchange as collateral securities. One of these bills was identical to the EIC bill that he had presented to Asgill’s bank on September 19. According to the Crown’s prosecution, Mr. Rous,

[b]oth bills were offered by Mr. Ryland… . the false bill is an exact transcript of the true; every letter, every stroke, nay the errors on that bill, and the corrections of those errors are copied on the false bill, for the No. of the bill was by mistake made 97, and it was corrected by writing should be 43; that is transcribed on the forged bill, and upon inspection, it is perfectly clear, that the one was intended as an exact representation of the other.⁹⁵

The case alleged two crimes: one that Ryland “feloniously … did make, forge, and counterfeit” the bill; the second, that “knowing it to be forged” he published it with the intention of defrauding the East India Company. They argued that Ryland must have counterfeited the original bill when it was in his possession from May until September 19, 1782. Regarding the second charge, they argued that even if Ryland was innocent of the first, having owned the bill for a significant period of time there was no reasonable possibility that he could have received the second bill in a transaction (as he said he did), not recognized it to be an exact copy of the first, and innocently submitted it to a second bank.

The counterfeit bill was so expertly forged that it aroused no suspicion passing through various professional hands. Multiple witnesses, including some whose signatures were on the bills, testified that they could not distinguish between the two. This may be unsurprising given Ryland’s professional facility as a draughtsman; yet he was ultimately foiled by an imperfect ability to reproduce all the indexical traces encoded in the original.⁹⁶ The credit market relied on the ostensible singularity of handwriting to index particular covenants made between debtors and creditors—a predicament recalling art historian Charlotte Guichard’s argument that authorial insertions were contemporaneously beginning to be “perceived as a clue to the painter’s presence in the painting, as well as a site of economic value.”⁹⁷ In Ryland’s case, Monro’s testimony that he remembered the way the ink sunk slightly when he wrote on the bill was taken as sufficient proof that the first bill, published on September 19, bearing that mark, was indeed the bill Ryland acquired through John Goddard. Needless to say, the defense argued that p. 43 Monro’s memory of a slight inky impression was dubious. (“‘Why in the name of God could you recollect this circumstance in particular?’—‘I can give you no reason for my recollecting it, but that I actually do.’”⁹⁸)

The prosecution still had to prove that the bill Ryland received through Monro and Goddard was the original and the other was the forgery. An expert witness removed all doubts. James Whatman II was a British papermaker who had already appeared as a witness at the Old Bailey in 1771, when his testimony helped convict two men of forgery, both of whom were accordingly hanged.⁹⁹ At that trial, Whatman had provided evidence about the sizing of paper, the practice of “blueing” some sheets in order to “take off the yellow cast,” and how the particularity of wire molds meant that he “never saw any two pair alike.”¹⁰⁰ At Ryland’s trial, Whatman testified that the bill Ryland offered as collateral on November 4 was drawn on paper made at his factory and could not have been drawn at Fort St. George in 1780 because a defect in the paper proved that it was not in circulation until May, 1782—the same month Ryland acquired the original bill.¹⁰¹

To conclude the trial, Ryland testified that a “Mr Haggleston,” sold him the bill and he simply failed to recognize its exact resemblance to the one he had recently owned. He also argued that “poverty and knavery are the parents of forgery” and that his friends and creditors alike would testify that he was “not connected with either.” (Surely Linnell, Triquet, and Mears would testify that he was.) A series of character witnesses followed, who testified to Ryland’s upstanding morals and trustworthiness in business. Unconvinced, the jury deliberated for less than thirty minutes before returning the verdict: “GUILTY” on both charges. Nonetheless Ryland’s friends tried to exonerate him, working through that medium which had hitherto been so instrumental to his arrest and infamy: the daily papers. The day after Ryland was sentenced to hang, the Morning Chronicle published an anonymous article that argued for the insufficiency of the evidence supporting the conviction. The author concedes that, “in a commercial country, a strict inforcement of the laws which have been enacted for the support of credit, and to render the intercourse of the mercantile world with each other secure and easy, must undoubtedly be necessary; and a relaxation in this point is certainly less allowable than in any other, except murther.”¹⁰² Yet,

[i]n cases of forgery, a jealous apprehension for the safety of commercial credit immediately implants itself in every breast. The culprit is brought to the bar prejudged. Circumstances are viewed in partial light. The words of the accusing evidences are made to bear the most unfavourable construction… rigor is allowed to exert her p. 44 utmost sway. The crime of murther, from the same cause, is considered as less heinous than forgery. In the former extenuations are sometimes admitted; in the latter, never. There, the general tenor of the life of the culprit, if unblameable operates in his favour; here it affords no alleviation.¹⁰³

This explanation prefaces the author’s main point, that “there does not appear to be one proof of Mr. Ryland’s forging it [the bill], or publishing it, knowing it to be forged.” To a modern reader of the case, this appears to be true. There was, indeed, no positive proof of the alleged crimes. According to the author, the jury consisted of merchants predisposed to overprotect the mechanisms of trade who were prejudiced against Ryland by his flight from the law, his attempted suicide, and above all by their affliction of, what Pocock has since called, the “pathological” fear of the insecurity of credit. The article ends by appealing to King George for a royal pardon. Two more appeals of this sort were published on August 26 and August 27, desperate (and fruitless) last attempts to prevent the execution from taking place on August 29.¹⁰⁴ Having become an exemplary case, the hanging was a spectacularly public affair. People lined the streets, crowded into specially erected viewing stands, and paid exorbitant prices to rent out rooms with a view of the scaffold.¹⁰⁵ According to one period observer, it was “a crowd of spectators which were hardly seen before.”¹⁰⁶ Ryland’s 1769 picture-jobbing and the credit fraud with which it was entwined presaged not only his later monetary forgeries but also contemporary art markets that glorify “authenticity” (and its attendant scarcity) to make art objects serve as speculative assets and receptacles of value.¹⁰⁷ Free from the burdensome cargo of that scheme, Ryland’s 1782 scheme nonetheless clarifies the material contingency of credit markets that bore promises encoded on paper halfway across the world at unpredictable delays. For Ryland, this material vulnerability presented an opportunity to tap into the colonial vein through which he and Bryer had once naively sought to profit. However, despite (or perhaps because of) its vulnerability, the financial system proved less tolerant of deception. And so, a decade after failing to extract wealth from Bengal by commodifying paintings as speculative assets, Ryland latched onto the colonial vampire like a leech, only to be plucked off, with bureaucratic efficiency, by the East India Company and its juridical allies.

To insist that Ryland’s monetary forgeries were informed by his technical skill as a draughtsperson and printmaker might put too fine a point on it. Yet his forgery of bills of exchange throws into relief the financial techniques used in his purveyance of misattributed paintings, just as the p. 45 semantics of deception therein reflect those that lent value to his stipple engravings. Both stories illuminate the mercurial nature of monetary instruments and art objects whose commodity statuses depended on an unstable agreement between manifest content and imperfectly signified origins. In doing so, they reveal the mutually fraught coevolution of authenticity and authorship as determinants of value in eighteenth- century art and finance.