SPECTATORS at a PRINT SHOP in St. PAUL'S CHURCH YARD

Printed for Carington Bowles, at his Map & Print Warehouse, No.69 in St. Pauls Church Yard, London. Published as the Act directs 25 June 1774
British Museum Catalogue #3758, Courtesy of the Print Collection, New York Public Library

 

 

Printsellers and the Market

This catalogue traces the development of a market during the last four decades of the eighteenth-century for a relatively cheap print of convenient size. Printsellers’ catalogues from the period, describing the inventory for retailers, list these prints at "Price 1s. plain, or 2s. each coloured" for the 10 x 14 inch postures or "6d." for the reduced versions. By comparison, a fine mezzotint reproduction of a painting, portrait, or famous scene from the stage might cost 8 shillings or more.The printsellers targeted persons of the "middling sort," the urban and town middle classes. These were the new participants in the accelerating consumer economy that historians like Neil McKendrick, J.H. Plumb, John Brewer, and David Solkin have described.

Beside being relatively inexpensive, the posture sized mezzotint was small enough to be convenient for display and collecting. They fit readily within the shop windows of printsellers, as in these scenes in front of the Bowles' firm in St. Paul's Churchyard. The circulating library in Beauty in Search of Knowledge displays prints as well as books. Such shops and libraries graced Britain's cities and many large towns. Framed or simply pasted up on the wall the prints show up in mezzotints like Jack into Port with his Prize or Bachelors Fare—or Bread and Cheese with Kisses decorating a brothel salon. They could be readily gathered in portfolios by collectors or pasted up in albums that a host may share with guests.

MISS MACARONI and her GALLANT at a Print Shop

J.Smith pinxt J.Smith fecit
Publish'd Apr. 2d 1773. Printed for John Bowles, at No. 13 in Cornhill
British Museum Catalogue #5220, Courtesy of the Print Collection, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
 The fashion for these prints has its own history. During the first decade, the 1760s, a prominent share of the market was comprised of mezzotint reproductions of genre paintings, often Dutch, and fancy pictures. In fact, it may have been the realization that such cheap copies could yield quick profits that kicked off the fashion. The paintings’ images would be reduced in size to the posture format and sometimes lent a verse subtext or altered to underscore a licentious, comic, or satiric edge. Around 1770, perhaps prompted by a tightening of the copyright laws, the mezzotint drolls commonly become more original. These take on more the character of cartoons (though the term would not have been used in this context at that time), circulating current jokes, usually reflecting tensions generated by social foibles, dress, and class, and occasionally politics. The war, initially with British-America and eventually France, and its threats and relative austerities dampens the most extravagent of these strains. Indeed through the 1780s, even following the peace, the mezzotint never fully recovers the energy, spirit, and sharpness that is evident through much of the 1770s. There is a brief resurgence during the 1790s,when the thrust of the drolls becomes more sentimental, less sharply satiric in general, though a few satiric strains persist. In this softer vein, the later drolls often illustrate long verses, songs that have become popular on stage, or current events.

The printsellers involved reflect the waxing and waning in the course run by the mezzotint drolls. The two key figures whose presence or influence continues throughout the period are Robert Sayer (1725-94) and Carington Bowles (1724-93).

 

from Laurie & Whittle's Catalogue of New and Interesting Prints for 1795, advertising "Humorous and Entertaining Prints for Country Dealers &c."

 

 

Robert Sayer became active as a printseller in his twenties as early as the late 1740s. Over the decades he built up his stock of copper plates by taking over others’ inventories, first Philip Overton, then James McArdell when he died in 1765. He formed a brief partnership with John Bennett from around 1774 to 1785, then operated alone again through 1793. At his death in February 1794 the firm and Sayer’s stock of plates were taken over by Laurie & Whittle. The Bowles family had been printsellers since the late 1600s with Carington Bowles representing the third generation. He worked with his father John Bowles (1701-1779) until 1763 when he took over the firm vacated by his aging uncle, Thomas Bowles (1695-1767), which he lead for thirty years. At his death in 1793, Carington Bowles’ business passed to his son under a partnership, Bowles & Carver.

During the height of the mezzotint fashion, a few other printers and engravers entered this print market. The most important is John Raphael Smith (1751-1812) among the finest mezzotint engravers of the day who produced a couple dozen of these posture mezzotints during the 1770s. Francis Adams and William Humphrey were also active in the mid-70s and published some of the more distinctive images. But though most of the 1780s, the Sayer and Bowles firms had the field to themselves. During the mid 1790s, their stocks were taken over by successors. Of the two, Laurie & Whittle seem to have been most active in generating new plates, largely illustrating songs and long poems. Bowles & Carver reissued several of Carington Bowles’ impressions both in posture and reduced size. A handful of new printsellers briefly tested the market for the posture mezzotint, among them Haines and Son, S.W. Fores, John Fairburn, R.D. Barry, and P. Stampa. But this period of recovery and innovation was brief, lastly scarcely a half dozen years. By 1800 the fashion for the mezzotint droll was exhausted, to be replaced by other engraving techniques, among them stipple and aquatint, as the media for the popular print market.

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