An inn at Bristol: people having breakfast before taking the stage coach. Stipple print after E.V. Rippingille, 1824.

Stage coach breakfast

Stagecoach breakfast

The Oxford DNB mentions "Rippingille's best-known work, "The stage coach breakfast (RA, 1824; Clevedon Court, Somerset). It records, with deliberate nostalgia, Bristol's remarkable literary associations a quarter-century earlier, including portraits of Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, and Wordsworth, of Elton and his family, and of others including John Gibbons, Rippingille's patron, and of Rippingille himself ironically being offered the bill." The ODNB also records John Clare's statement that Sir Thomas Lawrence "paid Rip[pingille] several fine compliments about his picture of the breakfast at an Inn and told him of his faults in a free undisguised manner but with great kindness ... told him that the Royal Family ... took more notice of his picture than all the rest but Rip would not own it for he affects a false appearance of such matters"

The man receiving the bill is seated on the left of the central table, who is having his boots put on by a boy: he is presumably Rippingille. On his left around the table sits William Wordsworth. The other people named in the ODNB are not so easy to identify. The Wellcome Library has a key to the identities of the people portrayed, researched by Mr Patrick Cartwright in 2006 and sent to the Wellcome Library in 2008

[Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified], [1824?]

1 print : stipple with line etching and possibly aquatint, with watercolour ; image 37.9 x 58.3 cm

E.V. Rippingil[le] 1824 A passenger's book in the foreground bears lettering "E.V. Rippingil[le] 1824"

Wellcome Collection 669679i