Carl Browne. Massillon Museum collection

On January 15, 1890, the Los Angeles Herald printed an article on local artist Carl Browne (1849-1914), in the hope that charges of blackmail would be dropped (which they were). The author goes on to describe Browne’s creative wood engraving technique of coating a block design with aromatic herbs and leaving it in a tree, tempting woodpeckers to cut the image with their beaks.

It is hoped [that] the charge of blackmailing against Carl Browne, the illustrious artist, will not be pressed. He may be guilty as charged in the indictment, but a man who has already done as much for art ought not to be required to go to the penitentiary too. Mr. Browne adorns everything that he touches, particularly if it is white; he leaves nothing as he finds it, unless it is very heavy indeed. Before his time art knew nettling of the reversible landscape, the five-legged cow, the stream which runs up hill and the house which has had its haircut.

It was he, too, who invented (under Providence) the new method of wood engraving heretofore described in this paper. The block is smeared with worm oil and the design drawn upon it with ink of [asafoetida]. When the picture is complete the block is hung up in a tree and the woodpeckers, attacking the light parts, leave the dark ones in high relief ready to print them.

Mr. Browne’s perspective has been highly extolled by Professor Davidson, one of the closest observers of earthquake phenomena that we have among us. but it is in his coloring that he comes out really strong. Nothing could be finer than the subtle harmonies which he produces with an arsenic-green sky brooding upon a carmine forest, beyond which a yellow sea rises steeply to the horizon, bearing two or three blue ships—a favorite subject which he has now the skill to paint with his eyes shut. Professor Holden of the Lick observatory said of one of Mr. Browne’s nocturnes, in which a noble range of black-and-tan mountains serves as a background to a constellation of liver-and-white stars, that he never saw anything so strange.

But this artist’s greatest work is doubtless his panorama of “Hamlet’s Soliloquy,” in which the spectator stands in the middle of Hamlet and sees the soliloquy retiring by the country roads toward all the points of the compass, thoroughly beaten and subdued. This painting was at one time exhibited as “The Battle of Gettysburg, ” and was highly commended in art circles in Calistoga. Afterward it was shown as “Penelope at Her Loom,” and is now, I believe, attracting considerable attention in the East as “The Petrified Forest.”

–Morning Press, Volume XXVI, Number 156, 16 January 1890 and Los Angeles Herald, Volume 33, Number 95, 15 January 1890

Although Browne’s various newspapers and lithographs have survived, none of the panoramas are known to exist. If you hear of one, please write.

Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) after James Dunthorne II (ca. 1758–ca. 1792/93), The Hypochondriac, March 1, 1788. Hand-colored etching and aquatint. Graphic Arts collection GA 2014.00796. Gift of Dickson Q. Brown, Class of 1895.

This aquatint of a man suffering from hypochondria, depicts various demons and ghosts flying about his head offering the choice of death by stabbing, shooting, poison, slitting your throat, or a serpent’s bite, among others. Given the complicated lineage of the British artist Dunthorne, this print is often attributed solely to Rowlandson although it clearly lists Dunthorne as the designer.
James Dunthorne I (British painter, 1730-1815)
James Dunthorne II (English portraitist and caricaturist, born ca. 1758, died 1792 or 1793)
John Dunthorne I (British painter, active 2nd half of the 18th century)
John Dunthorne II (British painter, active 1783-1794)
John Dunthorne III (British painter, 1770-1844)
John Dunthorne IV (English painter, 1798-1832)

We agree with the Metropolitan Museum of Art that the artist who collaborated with Rowlandson here was James Dunthorne II, also known as the Colchester Hogarth. Judy Crosby Ivy, writing for the DNB explains:

Two other artists named Dunthorne (mistakenly identified in the Dictionary of National Biography and in the standard references as John) lived and worked in Colchester and may have been distantly related to the East Bergholt Dunthornes. James Dunthorne (c. 1730–1815), portrait and miniature painter and map-maker, was apprenticed to Joshua Kirby in 1745 for £25. He was also possibly the topographer responsible for several drawings of historic Essex buildings and tessellated pavements reproduced in various antiquarian publications in the 1760s and 1770s. James Dunthorne had nonconformist and whig connections and may have been related to John Dunthorne, a dissenting pastor in Colchester. He and his wife Elizabeth had nine children, the eldest of whom, James Dunthorne (c. 1758–c. 1794), painter and surveyor, was known as the Colchester Hogarth and exhibited several genre scenes at the Royal Academy between 1783 and 1792. Works by both father and son are in the Colchester and Essex Museum and in the British Museum, department of prints and drawings. —https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-8297

See also https://suffolkartists.co.uk/index.cgi?choice=painter&pid=203

Perhaps it was Dunthorne who wrote:
The mind disemper’d – say, what potent charm,
Can Fancy’s spectre-brooding rage disarm?
Physics prescriptive, art assails in vain,
The dreadful phantoms floating cross the brain!
Until with Esculapian skill, the sage M.D.
Finds out at length by self-taught palmistry,
The hopeless case – in the reluctant fee,
Then, not in torture such a wretch to keep
One pitying bolus lays him sound asleep.’

See also: Resumé by Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.