The colourman and his amateur customers

In 2004, Peter Mandler made ‘Three Modest Proposals’, aiming to strengthen cultural history, the field that his own work had helped define. The first of these was to champion the work of others, ‘those toilers among us who do research into the mechanisms for the production and diffusion of culture’, noting ‘a tendency to look down our noses at people who study production and diffusion rather than content’.¹ This hierarchy was felt in other fields, art history’s combination of aesthetic appreciation and economic value making it particularly susceptible to elitism, as John Gage had observed a few years earlier: ‘for the most part the work of the technologists of art has remained obscure, partly because of intellectual snobbery, and partly because of the meagreness of the surviving records, which is one consequence of it’.²

This chapter combines Mandler’s mechanisms of production with Gage’s obscure technologists in surveying the amateur customers of one of London’s leading manufacturers of artists’ materials, Charles Roberson. The Roberson archive, recording the firm’s commercial activity from its foundation in 1820 until 1939, is housed at the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge. It preserves the credit accounts held by the firm’s customers. They came largely from the middle and upper classes as opening an account with the company required a reference of credit worthiness based on good character, which, as Margot Finn has noted, was ‘constituted in significant part by tradesmen’s continuous valuation and revaluation of their customers’ status and social connections’.³ This represented a barrier to poorer or poorly connected customers, likely to include a substantial proportion of amateurs, who would instead have bought materials casually over the counter as needs demanded and means allowed. While it would be unrealistic to expect evidence of significant working-class participation, either amateur or professional, in the records of a firm that explicitly aligned itself with the upper artistic echelons, it should be noted that other sources also provide scant evidence of a working-class presence in the art market, excluding the porters, frame-makers, colour grinders and models upon which the business of art depended. Nevertheless, Roberson’s eventual accommodation of middle-class amateurs entering a market hitherto dominated by businesses, professionals and the upper classes is a clear indication of gradually broadening artistic participation, foreshadowing the more comprehensive democratisation of the arts after the Second World War when economic, social, political and cultural changes facilitated an upsurge in amateur artistic activity among ‘ordinary men and women with enough spare cash to pursue interests outside their “workaday obligations”’ and ‘artists watchful of price rather than quality would come to rule the direction of the colourmen’s chemists’.⁴ Roberson is the only British colourman known to have preserved any personal customer accounts and there is therefore a danger that they may be seen as unduly representative of the market as a whole, and their abrupt cessation at the outbreak of the Second World War might introduce an artificial watershed into a possibly more gradual equalisation of the amateur market for art. Despite these potential shortcomings, the archive’s long arc of more than a century of commercial activity offers evidence for relative shifts, if not absolute changes, in the art materials market’s direction of travel and evidence for a greater diversity of participants and relationships in an era more usually associated with the development of artistic elites. While imperfect, Roberson’s archive ably demonstrates that ‘half an understanding’ is indeed better than none.⁵

Despite the requirement for references, Charles Roberson was to find that the rich were no less feckless than the poor. His ‘bad debts’ lists were populated by outwardly respectable married women, clergymen and minor aristocrats who failed to settle their accounts, along with the usual crowd of perpetually impoverished and disreputable defaulters, both amateur and professional. Wealthy customers were self-confident, used to being waited upon and had the means and connections to be able to move from place to place at ease, making them sometimes fickle and difficult to pin down. An undated letter from retired Colonel Edward Bethell, who was living with his wife and six servants in Hyde Park Square in 1911, illustrates the imperious attitude of some of Roberson’s customers, both towards their colourman and their debts:

In future when suffering from idea [sic] that I may want to pay your account please send same to Mrs O.I. Bethell at the above address … This does not mean that I want to pay your account now. Far far from it! … Next year you may get it settled but not now. So do not please waste perfectly good postage stamps on sending it to me till you really feel you must. You might try in March but earlier than that I fear you will draw a blank which is of course regrettable very.⁶

Customers like Bethell relied on their tradesmen being ‘hostages to traditions of consumer activity rooted in credit, character and connection’ and, no matter how fashionable the art world became, the social status of the artists’ colourman remained tainted by proximity to both trade and paint, occupying an uneasy position at the intersection of polite society, cultural activity and commerce.⁷ While Roberson’s expertise was respected by his fellow colourmen and professional customers, to his amateur patrons he may have been just another deferential shopkeeper. If so, his earliest cash book, with its entries for Mr Decided, Mr Writer, Frenchman, Mrs One Arm and both Mr and Miss Stink, may reveal something of the private thoughts of the Victorian colourman behind his courteous facade.⁸

As so much amateur art was ephemeral, derivative or destined for the dustbin, amateur artists can be difficult to follow in a field where significance is largely based on surviving works. Roberson’s commercial records document their customers’ purchases, regardless of ability or professional status, thereby providing a unique point of departure in tracing a sector of Victorian artistic activity that is otherwise difficult to locate. The names and addresses recorded in the archive allow individual amateurs to be pursued in other sources, including census returns, exhibition lists and institutional memberships. While very few amateurs can be associated with surviving works of art, the degree of technical and material detail in many of Roberson’s account entries compensates for this, providing transactional evidence of artistic intention, even if this was not always followed through to execution. Surveying Roberson’s amateur customers therefore liberates Peter Mandler’s ‘throw’ from dependence on extant works of art, casting it backwards in time before the first hesitant brushstroke, when a work was just an idea, and propelling it forwards into Britain’s vibrant, crowded and sometimes merciless art market, when the amateur artist developed aspirations to exhibit as the nineteenth century progressed.⁹

The undulating amateur art market

When Charles Roberson opened his shop on Long Acre in 1820, his first account ledger was largely populated by professional artists and businesses.¹⁰ Only three amateurs can be firmly identified, two clergymen and an unmarried woman, establishing a pattern of vicars and spinsters that was to recur for the remainder of the century. By the time of his death in 1876, things had changed. The amateur customers were so numerous that he had to run two series of account books, reserving ‘petty ledgers’ for his less prestigious, yet-to-be-successful or non-professional customers. While Roberson’s active customer base had increased from 52 to 1,235 accounts over the course of his working life, the proportion of non-professional customers had expanded exponentially, denoting the amateur artist’s increasing involvement in the contemporary art market as it rose to its 1870s peak¹¹ (see Figure 3.1).

While numerous, amateur customers were not always profitable; more than 2,000 customers opened an account, only to place a single order and never return. Of the amateur orders, three-quarters were placed by women. It is noticeable that there was a sizeable increase in these fleeting customers between 1869 and 1873, after which their numbers quickly collapsed, which may suggest that the early 1870s represented the height of the period of interest in art for the uncommitted ‘dabbler’ (Figure 3.2). Some of the most strident criticism of amateur works overcrowding professional exhibitions coincided with the amateur peak seen in Roberson’s records, culminating in 1889 when several hundred artists made a formal request to reduce the number of paintings that non-members could submit to the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition.¹² Professional artists felt that they were in danger of being overwhelmed by a tide of mediocrity at a time when their own markets were coming under threat. Roberson’s records, showing professionals to be outnumbered by amateurs by more than three to one at the height of the amateur boom, provide some justification for their fears.

The impulse behind this increase in amateur artistic activity has been attributed to the convergence of a number of economic, social and technological trends, many with origins in the previous century, that contributed to the creation of a dynamic market for entertainment and leisure activities.¹³ The increasing availability of time outside work and the means to enjoy it as a result of higher wages, the concentration of population in urban centres and the development of better transport networks across the country all benefited the amateur art market. Developments in reprographics and the popularity of pictorial magazines also meant that a new and more widely dispersed group of customers could be reached with relative ease, offering an unprecedented opportunity to inform, inspire and advertise.¹⁴

Amateur customers offered colourmen the potential to develop a mass market in entry-level materials as well as an opportunity to sell luxurious products to those who were wealthy enough to afford them. In making art fashionable and pursuing royal patronage they aimed to excite the desire of the expanding middle class to emulate the artistic amusements of the aristocracy. In making materials cheaper, cleaner and more convenient they could hope to attract a new pool of purchasers with diverse artistic interests who required a wide range of products. The expansion of the middle classes and their new-found interest in art could also be exploited by lower-ranked professional artists, many of whom were Roberson customers, thereby indirectly benefiting the colourman. These artists may not have been able to secure the patronage of the aristocracy, but would gladly furnish the homes of those further down the social scale. Thus, middle-class consumers of art provided a market for middle-rank producers and, through attendance and subscription, financed the exhibitions and publications on which all classes of artist came to depend. As her husband had been both President of the Royal Academy and Director of the National Gallery, Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake was in a good position to understand the prevailing art market, observing in 1870 that the influx of the commercial and trade classes resulted in ‘the note-book of the painter, while it exhibited lowlier names, showing henceforth higher prices’.¹⁵

The expansion of the middle-class market for pictures and the rising prices that were peaking as Lady Eastlake was writing encouraged Roberson to concentrate on cultivating and accommodating the professional artist, largely disregarding the commercial opportunities offered by the firm’s non-elite customers. When asked for materials such as china or poster paints Roberson politely expressed regret that they did not stock such things and referred enquirers elsewhere, ignoring any burgeoning impetus towards cultural democratisation among their customers, even when this only came aslant from the middle classes rather than truly ‘from below’. While Roberson’s confidence must have seemed justifiable at mid-century when almost ninety per cent of account turnover came from the main ledger customers, with famous names adding prestige by association, by the final quarter of the nineteenth century, with declining professional sales, this approach would seem less prudent. Dragging their feet when faced with growing numbers of middle-class amateurs left Roberson already behind their competitors as the market began to shift further towards mass participation. Their rivals Winsor & Newton and Rowney, both quick to accommodate the amateur market, had recognised the need for diversification far earlier than Roberson and continued to develop products aimed at children, students, amateurs and women throughout the lean interwar years as well as expanding internationally to establish new markets. Unlike Roberson, they were therefore in a good position to offer a new class of amateur artist materials at a lower price when a broader mass market for artistic creativity developed in the second half of the twentieth century, increasing their market share by directing new and inexperienced customers towards cheaper and occasionally gimmicky products by way of judicious advertising campaigns and product innovation.¹⁶ Rather than moulding their market in a similar way, Roberson only seemed willing to adapt to the demands of democratisation when they became impossible to ignore, leaving the firm cruelly exposed to a turbulent, shrinking professional market after their founder’s death in 1876.

Selling pictures and the materials that made them during ‘the most drastic deflation in the memory of man’ between 1873 and 1896 was never going to be easy.¹⁷ Agricultural depression had encouraged the break-up of country house art collections and large numbers of paintings came onto the auction market from the early 1880s.¹⁸ An influx of Old Master paintings benefited neither Roberson nor their professional customers and the fall in prices for contemporary art was noted with regret by those old enough to have experienced the height of the art market. As the professional art market started to decline in the last quarter of the century, Roberson’s amateur market initially looked as if it might be the answer to the colourman’s difficulties, with a marked increase in new amateur accounts between 1860 and 1890, in contrast to the gradual decline in new professional accounts (Figure 3.1). However, the amateur accounts of the 1880s were of considerably shorter duration than professional accounts opened at the same time. Even if Roberson could manage to attract amateurs to offset the reduction in professional spending, these new customers were less valuable to them in the longer term. The firm experienced a final bounce in customer numbers in 1890, likely in response to the company opening a ‘retail’ branch on Piccadilly, positioned next to the Ritz Hotel and Royal Academy in an attempt to attract wealthy amateurs – an ambition it very briefly appears to have achieved (Figure 3.3).

Although the additional income that amateur artists generated prolonged Roberson’s twentieth-century agony, it was insufficient to prevent the firm from slowly limping towards liquidation in 1987. By contrast, Winsor & Newton, who were active very early in the amateur sphere, survived into the twenty-first century occupying a dominant position in this and other sectors of the art market. Clearly, Roberson failed to capitalise on changing customer demographics when compared with Winsor & Newton’s astute handling of new markets; however, Winsor & Newton were unusually successful in the sector in their speed of growth, scale of operations and longevity. The combination of Henry Newton’s business acumen and artistic knowledge with William Winsor’s chemical expertise may have ensured that Winsor & Newton would eventually outshine their older rival, whether or not Roberson had expeditiously embraced the china paints, printing kits, glitter and glue made for the craft-inclined child, the artistically disposed homemaker and the Sunday painter. Their failure to do so proved to be to their detriment, but there is some justification in noting that if Roberson could not keep up with Winsor & Newton, nor could anyone else.

Without comparable records for other companies it is not possible to tell whether all colourmen faced an equally stringent contraction in business in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, although it is unlikely that any were completely able to escape the impact of ‘the universal depression in Trade’ noted by Winsor & Newton in 1885.¹⁹ The downward direction of travel experienced by colourmen reflects evidence from studies of the other end of the art market, looking at sales of pictures by living artists and the rise and collapse of prices.²⁰ While picture prices did not directly affect amateurs, a subdued art market, periodic economic depressions and perhaps also the availability of alternative forms of collective amusement such as cinema, which started to develop in the Edwardian period, may have combined to make art a less attractive activity for the leisured classes in the first half of the twentieth century.²¹ If emulation of the aristocratic lifestyle had in part inspired the Victorian middle classes to take up art at the start of the century, the contraction of aristocratic wealth and an increase in hostility towards the privileges of the few may have encouraged them to look elsewhere for inspiration at its end.²² Perhaps making things started to seem outmoded in the ‘Machine Age’ as a new generation questioned why they should make the things that they could now so easily buy, as they enthusiastically took up the new pastime of shopping.²³ Public museums and galleries also experienced a decline in visitor numbers at the dawn of the twentieth century, ascribed variously to the impact of cinema, the new-found respectability of music halls, the attractions of motoring, the popularity of spectator sports and the appeal of shopping as a leisure activity.²⁴ If the public were no longer interested in forming even a passive audience for art, it was perhaps too much to expect them to continue as active creators. Colourmen were not to experience another boom in amateur customers until the years following the Second World War, albeit too late for Roberson’s records to reveal whether, second time around, the firm was any better able to accommodate a broader class of customer seeking self-fulfilment through artistic endeavour.²⁵

The amateur/professional interface

Distinguishing between amateur and professional artists remains a subject of debate in the twenty-first century and was not always straightforward in the nineteenth.²⁶ Roberson’s amateur customers encompass such a broad range of individuals with such widely varying occupations, intentions and abilities that finding shared characteristics indicative of amateur status can be challenging. The ‘rapid conversion of the whole population into Art-Students, Art-Teachers, Art-Artists’ was noted by William de Morgan, painter, ceramicist, novelist and Roberson customer, who caricatured the popular perception of what constituted a professional artist in his 1907 novel Alice-for-short:

Has this man a Studio? Has he one or more Easels? Does he buy large quantities of colours, and get professional discount? Does he employ real live Models? Does he send to the Academy? If he does no one of these things, he evidently isn’t an Artist – if he does them all, or any fair proportion of them, he evidently is.²⁷

While De Morgan is overstating his point for comic effect, in the same year The Chemist and Druggist, the journal of the pharmacy trade, debated the problem of professional discount relating to photographers, usually making prices one third cheaper, along similar lines:

… what is to prevent every amateur customer who sells a few prints (and what amateur does not when he gets the chance) from posing as a professional and claiming his discount? Neither can one distinguish a professional as a man with a studio, for many photographers who do nothing else for a living have no studio. On the other hand, there are many amateurs who possess studios but who are not and will never be professional photographers in the sense that they get their whole living by the practice of their art.²⁸

The blurring of professional boundaries suggested by De Morgan’s satire and the chemists’ dilemma is confirmed in Roberson’s accounts. Amateurs might be able to afford discrete studio addresses, whereas professionals frequently had to combine living and working spaces, especially if they were female. Easels were often hired as required by professionals, whereas amateurs might treat artists’ materials like any other consumer product and purchase everything they needed at the outset. Table easels, although most frequently found in amateur accounts, might also reflect the opportunities for employment that professional women found as watercolourists, illustrators, wood engravers and miniaturists, their easels chosen to suit the size of work undertaken and their limited working spaces. While Roberson quite frequently transported their amateur customers’ paintings to the Royal Academy, many professional artists never showed work there at all. Roberson’s ledgers, with their last orders and settling of accounts, often give an impression of regularity and finality, but artists’ working lives could be unsettled and sporadic, with women in particular crossing the interface between amateur and professional as they combined domestic duties and familial responsibilities with a dogged desire for their work to be seen. Therefore, beyond the limited and exclusively male membership of the Royal Academy, there is no single reliable identifier for Roberson’s professional customers and no universal indicator at all for their amateur peers beyond their financial independence, not being solely or primarily dependent on art for their living.²⁹ As much as twenty per cent of Roberson’s account customer base falls into this category, but with notably different experiences depending on gender, social position, income and ambition.

Women, men, aristocrats, exhibitors

At the start of the nineteenth century, the amateur artist was generally identified in both fiction and the press as young, female and, with the exception of governesses, rich. Images of young women with palettes, sketchbooks and portfolios often appeared in fashion plates and art was essentially depicted as a harmless but largely unproductive private activity for the upper classes, often regarded as improving a girl’s chances in the marriage market.

The accidental drowning of a young artist in the lake at Winkfield Park in Berkshire in 1813 illustrates the essentially private nature of this period of amateur art:

A young lady, Miss Blane, daughter of Sir G. Blane, having gone out early in the morning, as she was accustomed to do, to sketch views of the place, happened to seat herself upon a small stool, which she carried with her, close to the head of the pond, and her seat being insecurely fixed, she fell from it into the water. The body was not found till past ten o’clock … She was a lady in the bloom of youth, endowed with the most rare accomplishments and finest dispositions.³⁰

Not everyone found the acquisition of artistic accomplishments laudable. Sarah Lewis, in her book Woman’s Mission of 1839, regarded it as a waste of female resources, and questioned ‘how few attain even a moderate proficiency’.³¹ However, until amateur artists chose to participate in the public arena where they were open to scrutiny and professional criticism, a lack of proficiency was no reason to stop painting.

As the century advanced, the appeal of art expanded to become a pursuit of the middle as well as the upper classes. Looking back at the nineteenth century from 1929, Wanda Neff observed that ‘not only the aristocracy, but both the upper and lower middle classes protected the females of their households from any kind of useful employment’ by encouraging their pastimes.³² To counter accusations of frivolity and insignificance, those with a vested interest in the expansion of this market promoted art as an opportunity for serious study. This was endorsed by the publisher and artists’ colourman Rudolph Ackermann in his periodical The Repository of Arts early in the century, which conveniently directed his primarily female readership to his shop of the same name on the Strand, from which he sold artists’ materials, predominantly watercolours, prints for copying and manuals of instruction. He later provided a library and, once he had firmly identified his market, a ‘feminized tea shop’.³³

Despite the popular image of the amateur as female, Roberson’s records indicate that it was not until the mid-1860s that there were more female than male amateur account holders, the former almost evenly divided between married and unmarried women, challenging the stereotype of the painting spinster. However, the period’s restrictions on female economic agency may have camouflaged the presence of greater numbers of female customers participating at an earlier period.

These invisible women include several of Roberson’s longest-standing customers, with the only surviving work of Miss Louisa Charlotte Hobart, who held an account with Roberson for sixty years, being the stained-glass window she designed for the parish church of Nocton, Lincolnshire, where her father was vicar and, until his death, the holder of Hobart’s account.³⁴ Similarly, while Mildred Holland appears to have been an active amateur artist all her life, her only known work is the ceiling of Huntingfield church in Suffolk, which she spent much of the 1860s painting from scaffolding (Figure 3.4). Despite working her way through 225 books of gold leaf, it was Mildred’s husband whose name appeared in Roberson’s account books. While it was common practice for fathers, husbands or brothers to act as account holders on behalf of their female relatives, this left women, who were already offered so little space in the wider art world, also invisible in Roberson’s records.

Mildred Holland’s autograph, large-scale, in situ, multi-media ceiling was atypical of the work women, and especially women amateurs, were encouraged to pursue. Caroline Jordan contrasts the freedom female amateur artists experienced in British colonial territories with the situation at home:

… the ‘gendered genres’ of miniature, flower, and picturesque landscape painting were extensively marketed to and practised by women amateurs because of the lower levels of skill, scale and investment they required. In contrast to the more prestigious options potentially available to male artists, women amateurs dealt in portable watercolour and pencil drawing (the modest subsidiaries to academic oil painting), in miniatures rather than full-blown portraits, in landscape and floral studies rather than history or figure painting, and in sketchbooks rather than on canvas.³⁵

This description is borne out by patterns found in the purchases made by the majority of Roberson’s amateur female customers. Watercolours predominated, along with materials for miniatures, pastels, drawings and outdoor sketching. While professional artists, male or female, largely concentrated on one specialism, the amateur female repertoire was less focused. Materials for the minor arts of fan, china and lampshade painting, painting on silk and enbiseau cards were purchased almost exclusively by amateur women. While an impression of indiscriminate and unfocused activity emerges from many of Roberson’s amateur accounts, the serious amateur female painter, who might under different circumstances have had aspirations to a professional career, is difficult to identify, no matter how talented or hardworking she may have been. Until amateur women chose to follow the lead of pioneering female professionals and participate in Britain’s burgeoning exhibition culture as exhibitors as well as visitors, they would continue to have to paint invisibly and in private.

By contrast, most of Roberson’s amateur male customers had paid occupations, about 500 of them identified by their title or rank as doctors, clergymen and military and naval officers. The difficulty of fitting a serious interest in painting around professional life can be seen in the account of Sir Robert Porrett Collier who, while a Member of Parliament, had to wait until the summer recess for his painting trips, regularly getting his colour box cleaned and ordering materials in early July before leaving for the Alps.³⁶ Despite the constraints of earning a living, the less prominent Hertfordshire farmer and brewer Samuel Lucas left 120 oil paintings and over 700 watercolours at his death, a substantial output for a man painting in his spare time.³⁷

While there were those who waited until retirement to pursue their interest in art, the majority of Roberson’s male amateurs pursued art and a career simultaneously, opening their accounts with Roberson while still of working age. There is little evidence of amateur interest developing into professional activity, with the possible exception of the house-painter Thomas Todd in Ulverston. An amateur watercolourist, Todd’s interest in art appears to have developed into a business, selling artists’ materials alongside house-paint and describing himself as an ‘artist and picture dealer’ in retirement.³⁸ The son of a butcher, Todd is one of very few working-class amateurs to be identified in Roberson’s records.

These men did not pursue the multiple, serial interests suggested by the purchasing patterns in amateur women’s accounts, instead following the lead of professional male artists in concentrating on oil and watercolour painting, along with occasional printing and modelling, making their choices according to masculine norms rather than pursuing anything intrinsically amateurish. For men, there was no equivalent of china painting.

As for women, the boundary between male amateur and professional life could be blurred, with some military and colonial amateurs also being engaged in mapping and recording landscape and ordnance as part of their professional duties. Similarly, clergymen often worked as tutors and drawing masters and physicians illustrated medical textbooks before the use of photography, often in a professional capacity.³⁹ Roberson’s military, medical and clerical customers were joined by prominent landowners, manufacturers, lawyers, diplomats, politicians, brokers, bankers, writers, musicians and actors, with those lower down the social scale being more difficult to identify, although a former valet and lodging house keeper, an insolvent schoolmaster, the superintendent of Kingston railway station and an indebted clerk in the Excise Office can be firmly identified.

While Roberson initially supplied more male than female amateurs, by the mid-1860s there is a significant increase in the number of women joining the company’s books and between 1865 and 1920 three times as many female amateurs as male open new accounts. Despite this, the number of male amateurs buying their materials from Roberson in the first half of the nineteenth century challenges the Ruskinian assumption that the Victorian art world was populated by amateur women deferring to professional men.⁴⁰ For an artists’ colourman, customers, whether male, female, employed or otherwise, were to be encouraged to take up a pastime that demanded the purchase of consumables on a regular basis as well as offering, in the words of the colourman Reeves, ‘a cheerful and agreeable relaxation from the toil of labour to the man of business … and to those of no profession … [it] fills up with great advantage the distressing vacuum of an unemployed life’.⁴¹

While the distress of the jobless rich is debatable, the upper classes did indeed establish art as a fashionable pastime, spearheaded by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, both enthusiastic amateur artists.⁴² While the overall majority of Roberson’s aristocratic account holders were female, the ratio of aristocratic women to men remained approximately equal until 1872, with a significant reduction in titled male accounts thereafter. It is tempting to suggest that the dawning ‘Long Depression’, which began to be felt in 1873, may have called male landowners away from their easels to concentrate on more pressing financial matters, leaving their wives and daughters to carry on sketching, but this remains conjecture.⁴³ Roberson exploited their royal connections as far as they could, obtaining the royal warrant once their customer Princess Alexandra was queen. They also promoted the sketchbook she had consistently ordered as being supplied to ‘H.M. the Queen, H.R.H. the Princess of Wales, H.R.H. the Princess Louise, and other members of the Royal Family’ (Figure 3.5).

Roberson’s titled customers tended to use the firm’s framing, mounting, hanging and restoration services more frequently than others, in part on account of living in large houses full of paintings. Some aristocrats also bought considerable quantities of studio furniture and large canvases, suggesting that they had a dedicated space for painting, and placed orders comparable to those of a professional, but the majority of aristocrats made purchases that differed little from those of middle-class amateurs. Titled women reflected the popularity of sketching, watercolour and miniature painting among women in general, while male aristocrats were more likely to be engaged in oil painting, along with the majority of Roberson’s male customers. While the selection of medium by gender has many exceptions, Roberson’s records suggest that it holds true to a degree for both recreational and professional artists from all backgrounds.

While Roberson’s accounts confirm that the socially ambitious amateurs had plenty of aristocratic models to emulate, as the nineteenth century progressed they would also look to the careers of professional artists as templates for success. In an increasingly publicity-driven, commercial and lucrative art market it is hardly surprising that amateur artists began to have larger ambitions to exhibit and even to sell their work.⁴⁴ Once middle-class amateurs, both male and female, decided to offer their work to mainstream exhibitions, antagonism started to be expressed by artists and critics alike, blaming ‘the mass of the amateurs and fifth-rate painters of the country who are too ignorant even to perceive their hopeless incompetence’ for their intrusion into an already overcrowded market.⁴⁵ The amateur began to be depicted as competing unfairly with the professional artist: ‘a man who does imperfectly to please himself, what another man does to earn a living’.⁴⁶ This resentment is found in many exhibition reviews, singling out amateur works for being too large, too well placed, not for sale and supplanting the better work of a professional. It is noticeable that much of this vitriol was directed against male amateurs, female artists perhaps being assumed to be unworthy of serious notice. The fact that many female amateurs confined their work to the exhibitions run by the Society of Women Artists and were therefore only in competition with other women may also have deflected criticism.

Roberson’s accounts reflect this increase in amateur exhibiting with frequent orders for porterage to and from galleries that actively encouraged the amateur artist, such as the Society of Female Artists, founded in 1857, the Dudley Gallery, founded in 1865 and, if the amateur was sufficiently well connected, the Grosvenor Gallery, founded in 1877. While many amateurs benefited from attempts to open up exhibition spaces to a wider constituency, the professionals casting envious eyes at these amateur exhibitors might have been mollified had they seen how frequently Roberson returned to fetch rejected pictures. Edith Emily Wanklyn, in many respects epitomising the popular view of the female amateur in being both a vicar’s daughter and a spinster, tenaciously but fruitlessly submitted groups of miniatures to the Royal Academy every year from 1901 to 1907, with the exception of 1905, when she had two miniatures rejected by the Royal Institute for Painters in Water Colours instead.⁴⁷ How these failure rates compared to those of professional artists is unknown, but as the unfortunate Edith Wanklyn never managed to get a single miniature accepted by the Royal Academy, it must be assumed that her 100 per cent rejection rate was unlikely to have been surpassed.

Conclusion: accommodating the amateur market

The rise of art as a pastime had some advantages for professional artists, offering opportunities for established artists to teach amateurs, particularly while women were largely excluded from art education, to write manuals offering advice in lieu of training and to formulate materials for the wide range of artistic techniques the amateur wished to pursue. For the enterprising artist, the large pool of amateurs could therefore be an opportunity rather than a threat. For the enterprising colourmen they presented a new and potentially lucrative market extending beyond the capital to all parts of the British Isles, the British empire and, in particular, to America, where the internationally astute Winsor & Newton was to dominate the market by the end of the nineteenth century.⁴⁸

The need to supply materials suitable for a wider market is seen in Roberson’s surviving catalogues from the last quarter of the century, when materials for amateurs and students begin to appear. By the 1880s Roberson’s catalogues listed a number of products of a lower price and quality specifically aimed at students. The catalogues placed a new emphasis on sketching, etching and copying, exchanging their classical plaster casts for sentimental whimsy in the form of figures such as ‘Lonely Baby’, a best-seller, and lending or hiring drawings for their amateur customers to copy. Despite being an element of artistic training encouraged by Ruskin among others, when copies were shown in public they often attracted derision, predominantly directed against female exhibitors, although copies formed only a small proportion of their output.⁴⁹ While criticised for being imitative and unoriginal, amateurs purchased surprisingly few mechanical aids from Roberson, the incidence of instruments designed to aid composition, such as the Claude glass, camera lucida or projectorama, being no more frequent in amateur accounts than in those of professional artists.

By the turn of the century Roberson had gone further into the student and amateur markets, developing a range of tempera colours, ‘produced at the suggestion of some of the leading Art Masters in the Kingdom’ and also stocking chicken skin mounted for fan painting, paper for lampshade painting, school geometry sets and a much wider range of miniature painters’ materials and accessories than the simple ivories once offered, at a time when miniature painting was almost solely the preserve of the amateur. In the catalogues after 1900 there is a greater emphasis on products used outside the professional studio, whether wearing the ‘belt’ easel on sketching trips (Figure 3.6), catering for amateur theatricals with materials for scene painting or combining two Edwardian leisure pursuits, cycling and sketching, in the ‘bicycle sketching case in strong waterproof canvas for attachment to bicycle’.

Perhaps snobbery, ingrained traditionalism, the inertia of a family firm or simply a lack of commercial foresight led Roberson to avoid exploiting the expanding amateur market of the nineteenth century, only to embrace it as it began to contract in the twentieth. Even then, for Roberson, the democratisation of art ended with the middle classes. By the time demands for more comprehensive and active artistic participation began to be voiced later in the century, Roberson was already preoccupied by its protracted terminal decline and it would be left to other colourmen to negotiate the shifting markets driven by a new class of amateur artist in the mutable art world of post-1945 Britain.⁵⁰

Acknowledgements

The Roberson archive is published by permission of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. I am indebted to Peter Mandler and the History Faculty’s Cultural History Seminar in Cambridge for thoughtful feedback on this subject.

Notes

1. 1.  P. Mandler, ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, The Journal of the Social History Society, 1.1 (2004), p. 113.

2. 2.  J. Gage, ‘A Romantic Colourman: George Field and British Art’, The Walpole Society, 63 (2001), p. 1.

3. 3.  M. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 47.

4. 4.  R.C. Brown, ‘The Rise of the Leisure Painter: Artistic Creativity within the Experience of Ordinary Life in Postwar Britain, c. 1945–2000’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oxford (2014), pp. 208, 210.

5. 5.  Mandler, ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, p. 95.

6. 6.  Hamilton Kerr Institute [HKI], Roberson Archive, HKI MS 593–1993, E. Bethell, ALS to Roberson (n.d.).

7. 7.  Finn, Character of Credit, p. 280.

8. 8.  HKI, Roberson Archive, HKI MS 143–1993, Daily Sales and Payments (1828).

9. 9.  J. Meacock, ‘Introductory Essay: The Exhibition Society’, Exhibition Culture in London 1878–1908 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2006).

10. 10.  HKI, Roberson Archive, MS 139–1993, Personal Account Book (1820–45).

11. 11.  T.M. Bayer and J.R. Page, The Development of the Art Market in England: Money as Muse, 1730–1900 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), p. 12, fig. I.1.

12. 12.  Royal Academy of Arts Archives [RAA], PC/13/4, Memorial to the President and Council, c. 1880.

13. 13.  D. Cohen, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006); H. Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution с. 1780–1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1980); J. Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (London: Harper Press, 2006); T. Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); D.S. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

14. 14.  A. Hedley, Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), pp. 3–25.

15. 15.  E. Eastlake, ‘Memoir of Sir Charles Eastlake’, in C.L. Eastlake, Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts (London: John Murray, 1870), p. 147.

16. 16.  Brown, ‘Rise of the Leisure Painter’, p. 216.

17. 17.  D.S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 231.

18. 18.  P. Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 124.

19. 19.  HKI, Winsor & Newton Archive, ‘Report of the Directors to the Second Annual General Meeting of Shareholders Held at the Company’s Offices No. 38 Rathbone Place, London, on Thursday 14th May 1885’.

20. 20.  B. Allen, Towards a Modern Art World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995); Bayer and Page, Development of the Art Market in England; Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class; G. Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices, 1760–1960 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961).

21. 21.  V. Toulmin, ‘Cuckoo in the Nest: Edwardian Itinerant Exhibition Practices and the Transition to Cinema in the United Kingdom from 1901 to 1906’, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 10.1 (Spring 2010), pp. 51–79.

22. 22.  Mandler, Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, pp. 109–52; M.L. Bush, The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 150–67.

23. 23.  E.D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); J.R. Walkowitz, ‘Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London’, Representations, 62 (Spring 1998), pp. 1–30.

24. 24.  G. Waterfield, The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain, 1800–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 302–303.

25. 25.  Brown, ‘Rise of the Leisure Painter’.

26. 26.  H. Egginton and Z. Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in H. Egginton and Z. Thomas (eds.), Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain (London: University of London Press, 2021), pp. 1–39.

27. 27.  W. De Morgan, Alice-for-Short (London: William Heinemann, 1907), p. 151.

28. 28.  Pharmaceutical Camerist, ‘Correspondence’, The Chemist and Druggist, LXXXI.13 (28 September 1907), p. 524.

29. 29.  A. Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 130; R.A. Stebbins, Amateurs on the Margin between Work and Leisure (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1979), p. 24.

30. 30.  Anonymous, ‘Caution to Ladies: Students in Drawing’, The Literary Panorama, XIV (October 1813), p. 482.

31. 31.  S. Lewis, Woman’s Mission (London: John W. Parker, 1839), pp. 58–60.

32. 32.  W.F. Neff, Victorian Working Women, an Historical and Literary Study of Women in British Industries and Professions 1832–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), p. 192.

33. 33.  A. Pullan, ‘ “Conversations on the Arts”: Writing a Space for the Female Viewer in the Repository of Arts 1809–15’, Oxford Art Journal, 15.2 (1992), pp. 20–23; A. Losano, The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008), p. 24.

34. 34.  J. Cheshire, ‘Space and the Victorian Ecclesiastical Interior’, in S. Alfoldly and J. Helland (eds.), Craft, Space and Interior Design, 1855–2005 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 39.

35. 35.  C. Jordan, Picturesque Pursuit: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2005), p. 182.

36. 36.  HKI, Roberson Archive, MS 106–1993, Personal Account Book (1865–67), p. 159a.

37. 37.  R.L. Hine, Hitchin Worthies: Four Centuries of English Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1932), p. 230.

38. 38.  National Archives (NA), RG13/4907, ‘Todd, Thomas’, Census Returns for Windermere, Westmorland, 1901, fol. 98, p. 43.

39. 39.  K. McFall, ‘The History of Medical Illustration’, unpublished MSc thesis, Cardiff University (1995); R. Barnett, The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014).

40. 40.  P.G. Nunn, ‘Ruskin’s Patronage of Women Artists’, Woman’s Art Journal, 2.2 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982), pp. 8–13; P.G. Nunn, ‘The “Woman Question”: Ruskin and the Female Artist’, in R. Hewison (ed.), Ruskin’s Artists: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 167–84.

41. 41.  Reeves and Sons, Reeves and Sons’ Amateurs’ and Artists’ Companion (London: Reeves and Sons, 1852), pp. iii–iv.

42. 42.  J. Marsden, Victoria and Albert: Art and Love (London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 2010).

43. 43.  Mandler, Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, pp. 118–28.

44. 44.  C. Trodd, ‘The Authority of Art: Cultural Criticism and the Idea of the Royal Academy in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Art History, 20.1 (1997), p. 6.

45. 45.  M.H. Spielmann, ‘The Proposed Royal Academy Reform’, The Contemporary Review, LVI (August 1889), p. 266; RAA, SP/1/35, Letter from Edgar Longstaffe to Marion H. Spielmann (30 June 1885).

46. 46.  Anonymous, ‘Amateurs’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 44.1145 (6 October 1877), p. 415.

47. 47.  HKI, MS 133–1993, Personal Account Book (1900–08), pp. 641 and 676.

48. 48.  L. Mayer and G. Myers, American Painters on Technique: The Colonial Period to 1860 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011), p. 146.

49. 49.  C. Baile de Laperrière, The Society of Women Artists Exhibitors 1855–1996 (Calne: Hilmarten Manor Press, 1996), vol. 1, p. xxii.

50. 50.  Brown, ‘Rise of the Leisure Painter’, pp. 208–33.

References

• Allen, B., Towards a Modern Art World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).
• Anonymous, ‘Amateurs’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 44.1145 (6 October 1877), pp. 414–15.
• Anonymous, ‘Caution to Ladies: Students in Drawing’, The Literary Panorama, XIV (October 1813), pp. 482–3.
• Baile de Laperrière, C., The Society of Women Artists Exhibitors 1855–1996, 4 vols (Calne: Hilmarten Manor Press, 1996).
• Barnett, R., The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014).
• Bayer, T.M., and Page, J.R., The Development of the Art Market in England: Money as Muse, 1730–1900 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011).
• Bermingham, A., Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).
• Brown, R.C., ‘The Rise of the Leisure Painter: Artistic Creativity within the Experience of Ordinary Life in Postwar Britain, c. 1945–2000’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oxford (2014).
• Bush, M.L., The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
• Cheshire, J., ‘Space and the Victorian Ecclesiastical Interior’, in S. Alfoldly and J. Helland (eds.), Craft, Space and Interior Design, 1855–2005 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 27–43.
• Cohen, D., Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006).
• Cunningham, H., Leisure in the Industrial Revolution с. 1780–1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1980).
• De Morgan, W., Alice-for-Short (London: William Heinemann, 1907).
• Eastlake, E., ‘Memoir of Sir Charles Eastlake’, in C.L. Eastlake, Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts (London: John Murray, 1870), pp. 1–192.
• Egginton, H., and Thomas, Z., (eds.), Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain (London: University of London Press, 2021).
• Finn, M., The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Flanders, J., Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (London: Harper Press, 2006).
• Gage, J., ‘A Romantic Colourman: George Field and British Art’, The Walpole Society, 63 (2001), pp. 1–73.
• Hedley, A., Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021).
• Hine, R.L., Hitchin Worthies: Four Centuries of English Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1932).
• HKI (Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge), Roberson Archive, HKI MS 106–1993, Personal Account Book (1865–67).
• HKI (Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge), HKI MS 133–1993, Personal Account Book (1900–1908).
• HKI (Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge), HKI MS 139–1993, Personal Account Book (1820–45).
• HKI (Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge), HKI MS 143–1993, Daily Sales and Payments (1828).
• HKI (Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge), HKI MS 593–1993, ‘E. Bethell, ALS to Roberson’ (n.d.).
• HKI (Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge), Winsor & Newton Archive, ‘Report of the Directors to the Second Annual General Meeting of Shareholders Held at the Company’s Offices No. 38 Rathbone Place, London, on Thursday 14th May 1885’.
• Jordan, C., Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2005).
• Landes, D.S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Lewis, S., Woman’s Mission (London: John W. Parker, 1839).
• Logan, T., The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Losano, A., The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008).
• Macleod, D.S., Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
• Mandler, P., The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999).
• Mandler, P., ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, The Journal of the Social History Society, 1.1 (2004), pp. 94–117.
• Marsden, J., Victoria and Albert: Art and Love (London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 2010).
• Mayer, L., and Myers, G., American Painters on Technique: The Colonial Period to 1860 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011).
• McFall, K., ‘The History of Medical Illustration’, unpublished MSc thesis, Cardiff University (1995).
• Meacock, J., ‘Introductory Essay: The Exhibition Society’, Exhibition Culture in London 1878–1908 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2006). Accessed 23 August 2024. http://www.exhibitionculture.arts.gla.ac.uk/.
• NA (National Archives, London), RG13/4907, ‘Todd, Thomas’, Census Returns for Windermere, Westmorland, 1901, fol. 98, p. 43.
• Neff, W.F., Victorian Working Women, an Historical and Literary Study of Women in British Industries and Professions 1832–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929).
• Nunn, P.G., ‘Ruskin’s Patronage of Women Artists’, Woman’s Art Journal, 2.2 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982), pp. 8–13.
• Nunn, P.G., ‘The “Woman Question”: Ruskin and the Female Artist’, in R. Hewison (ed.), Ruskin’s Artists: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 167–84.
• Pharmaceutical Camerist, ‘Correspondence’, The Chemist and Druggist, LXXXI.13 (28 September 1907), pp. 524–5.
• Pullan, A., ‘ “ Conversations on the Arts”: Writing a Space for the Female Viewer in the Repository of Arts 1809–15’, Oxford Art Journal, 15.2 (1992), pp. 15–26.
• RAA (Royal Academy of Arts Archive, London), PC/13/4, Memorial to the President and Council, c. 1880.
• RAA (Royal Academy of Arts Archive, London), SP/1/35, Letter from Edgar Longstaffe to Marion H. Spielmann (30 June 1885).
• Rappaport, E.D., Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
• Reitlinger, G., The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices, 1760–1960 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961).
• Reeves and Sons, Reeves and Sons’ Amateurs’ and Artists’ Companion (London: Reeves and Sons, 1852).
• Spielmann, M.H., ‘The Proposed Royal Academy Reform’, The Contemporary Review, LVI (August 1889), pp. 259–73.
• Stebbins, R.A., Amateurs on the Margin between Work and Leisure (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1979).
• Toulmin, V., ‘Cuckoo in the Nest: Edwardian Itinerant Exhibition Practices and the Transition to Cinema in the United Kingdom from 1901 to 1906’, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 10.1 (Spring 2010), pp. 51–79.
• Trodd, C., ‘The Authority of Art: Cultural Criticism and the Idea of the Royal Academy in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Art History, 20.1 (1997), pp. 3–22.
• Walkowitz, J.R., ‘Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London’, Representations, 62 (Spring 1998), pp. 1–30.
• Waterfield, G., The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain, 1800–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).