Preface

Clayton, Timothy

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Preface

Timothy Clayton

The English Print: 1688–1802

~A PRINCIPAL PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK is to facilitate further study of prints in eighteenth-century England so that they may be rehabilitated in accounts of its cultural life. To this end I have attempted to describe the processes of publication and distribution, to outline the structure of the trade and to identify the principal participants. I have...

Author

Timothy Clayton

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21085

Preface

A PRINCIPAL PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK is to facilitate further study of prints in eighteenth-century England so that they may be rehabilitated in accounts of its cultural life. To this end I have attempted to describe the processes of publication and distribution, to outline the structure of the trade and to identify the principal participants. I have also tried to record changing fashions in collecting, using and displaying British and foreign prints and to trace some of the principal themes of the published output. I hope to demonstrate that printed pictures can illuminate issues that have preoccupied historians tout simple as well as art historians.

This is a history of separately published prints: those that were presented as discrete items, singly, in sets or in series. Book illustration is excluded from the discussion for want of space, although I have occasionally discussed sets of prints that might elsewhere have been treated as books. When the consumer could choose whether to frame for the wall or bind for the library, distinctions are somewhat arbitrary. The map trade also overlapped with the print trade, but, like illustrated books, maps have their own historians, and their history is better known than that of prints. It should be borne in mind, however, that maps represented a large part of the business of some of the most important printsellers. Similarly, the vast bulk of jobbing engraving such as trade cards, shop bills, or visiting-cards, and of specialized branches of the trade like playing-cards and games are hardly mentioned although they made a significant contribution to the income of the studio of many engravers.

Even after these exclusions the subject is still huge. I am especially conscious that having chosen to concentrate on prints that were at the cutting edge of fashion, I have paid relatively little attention to the cheap end of the market. There is another story to be written about popular prints, but I hope that it will be a slightly easier undertaking with the outline of the upper part of the business established. My own study has highlighted points at which images from the peak of connoisseurship – such as the Raphael Cartoons – were imitated in various formats right down to the cheapest woodcuts. By this I do not intend to assert that the traffic was in one direction only. A brief inspection of Hogarth’s oeuvre suffices to establish an élite appetite for themes from low life.

I have not been able to trace the whole history of every genre. Instead, I have chosen to discuss particular types of print at the point when they rose to prominence. In this way I hope to emphasize the characteristic developments in the print trade over the course of the century. In consequence, for instance, the sporting prints of the mid-century are given more attention than the equally profuse sporting prints of the last quarter of the century. I have allowed relatively little space to graphic satire or to portraiture. By exploring the circumstances of their production and distribution and through some investigation of their circulation I hope to throw more light on political prints than I would have done by repeating readily available accounts of their content and scope. Similarly, thanks to the fashions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, portraits are much better catalogued than other branches of the print trade. Both these areas have been the subject of recent study, and have perhaps been disproportionately well served by scholarship. I have tried to demonstrate the significance of the great variety of images in circulation that were neither portraits nor satires.

In the course of many years of research I have incurred debts to a large number of people. The principal debt is to Christopher Lennox-Boyd, without whose generous support over more than a decade this study could never have been attempted. Many of my insights into the print trade derive from conversations with Christopher Lennox-Boyd and Rob Dixon and access to their collections and stock in trade.

The book was conceived while I was Bromberg Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford; my research there underpins the whole fabric of the book and especially its accounts of foreign trade. I owe this opportunity to the generosity of Ruth and Joseph Bromberg, whose sponsorship was crucial to the undertaking, and to the support of the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College. I would also like to thank former Bromberg Fellows David Landau, Richard Godfrey, Giorgio Marini and especially David Alexander for their help and advice. Anybody who has worked on English prints will know how much is owed to the pioneering efforts of David Alexander and he has been especially kind and helpful to me over the years.

Without David Bradshaw the book would not have been started and without his constant encouragement it would never have been finished. Richard Sharp has taught me a great deal about the eighteenth century and especially about its more enjoyable aspects. Recording advertisements for prints in English newspapers was originally a joint project undertaken in connection with our research into theatrical prints, but my Fellowship at Worcester threw most of the burden onto Richard. I am extremely grateful to him for allowing me free access to his transcriptions. Despite many more important demands on his time Antony Griffiths read the whole of the text at various stages of its development. His vigilance has drawn my attention to sources that I would otherwise have missed and to errors that might otherwise have remained uncorrected. I would like to offer sincere thanks for his encouragement and co-operation in every aspect of the project. John Brewer read the book at a late stage and offered valuable suggestions on the presentation of its argument. Parts of the book have also been read by Giles Barber, Francis Haskell and John Stevenson, each of whom has generously put his knowledge, experience and time at my disposal. Gillian Malpass at Yale University Press has been a constant support. She has had considerable influence over the shape of the book from beginning to end and I hope that she is as pleased with the result as I am. Ruth Thackeray edited the text with vigilance, vigour and infinite patience. For their continuous support in this lengthy project I am also grateful to the rest of the staff at the Paul Mellon Centre and at Yale University Press.

For help, generosity and stimulating conversation at various times I would also like to thank Brian Allen, Hugh Belsey, Norman Blackburn, James Campbell, Judy Egerton, Ralph Hyde, Elizabeth Miller, Sheila O’Connell, Mary Pedley, John Riely and Nigel Talbot. For help with translations I would like to thank my mother, Avice Clayton, Linda Whiteley, and Francis Lamport. Last but not least, thanks to the staff of the various institutions I have visited in the course of research, especially the staff of the British Museum Print Room and the Bodleian Library who have fetched and carried huge volumes of books and prints with infinite patience and in the former case dealt with a huge photographic order.

For photographs I am also extremely grateful to Julian Armytage, Hugh Belsey, Norman Blackburn, Grosvenor Prints, Christopher Lennox-Boyd, Michael Leiserach, Manou Schama-Levy, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, and its photographer, Douglas Scott, and to the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, and especially the librarian Joanna Parker. Douglas Scott photographed the prints kindly loaned by Grosvenor Prints and Norman Blackburn. Juliette Wade took photographs of my own prints and of those at Worcester College. This book has loomed large over the lives of Juliette and our son William for some years. I dedicate it to them in the hope that they will forgive me for an obsession to which they have lost so many weekends. My parents have supported me through thick and thin and have driven across England repeatedly in response to calls for help. My family will recognise that it is appropriate that the last word should go to my uncle Neil without whom none of this could have happened, since it was he who first taught me what a print is.

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