Lecture

The Art of the House Painter 1450- 1850

James Ayres FSA

11 June 2004

Chaired by Victor Suchar

The chairman introduced the speaker as a leading authority on historic building methods and interior decoration.

Summary

In classical portrait painting, as practised from the 16^th century to the dawn of photography, the lavish deployment of a curtain was far more than a compositional device. The use of textiles in this way was an assertion of status, power and wealth--an exercise in conspicuous consumption.

This notion was also to be encountered in late Medieval England. In the houses of the gentry and aristocracy centred on the great hall, the high status dais end was hung with a ‘cloth of estate’ on the wall behind the high chair and table. This underlying principle was adopted at a much more modest scale in a 16^th century yeoman’s farmhouse. Here the main room, the hall, would have its plank and muntin screen given painted decoration--a painted 'cloth of estate'.

With the Industrial Revolution textiles and metal goods become less costly whilst the associated development of transport systems made such products widely available throughout the British Isles and to export markets. Thus, in pre-industrial Britain carpets and curtains were not available to most people as a vehicle for colour and pattern in the home. That need was met by paints and distemper.

None of this could take effect until glass windows became widely available in the second half of the sixteenth century. Before then most people were dependent upon wooden shutters to mitigate the discomfort of glassless windows (the windeye)--indeed many houses dispensed with such openings. For example, in their original form, the Saxon-type mud-built (cob) dwellings recorded in Somerset in 1845 by Henry Laver lacked windows. In these circumstances a visual aesthetic was simply unable to develop in the dark.

A further, and fundamental point which should be made is that paints and distempers were not necessarily used for visual reasons. For example distempers could be applied externally to thatch as a fire retardant or used to consolidate a mud floor. Similarly limewash was applied annually to interiors as a disinfectant. As for oil paint, this was used to maintain the flexibility of the putty used in glazing windows and by joiners as an informal glue.

These are points which may be obvious but they are, by definition, important as first principles. They are also the sort of practical issues which in ‘The Age of Reason’, the likes of Sir Joshua Reynolds, disdained. Indeed one of the main purposes behind the formation of the Royal Academy in 1768 was to establish painting, sculpture and architecture as ‘professions’. In this enterprise ‘the schools’ would proclaim the importance of the visual arts as distinct from their related ‘trades’ and associated apprenticeships. This position was reinforced by Reynolds in his series of Discourses (published as a collection in 1778) in which he alludes to ‘mechanic’ in contrast to ‘liberal’ painters. Although less evident at the time there was one respect in which the RA was a manifestation of industrialisation. Through its Summer Exhibitions art was now available ‘off-the-peg’ rather than being tailored to the needs of the client. The creative nature of patronage was in decline and consumerism was in the ascendant.

From the 1780s the Trade Directories which issued from the capital and many provincial centres divided painting into two categories. There were the academic if provincial easel painters listed as ‘Artists: Portrait, Landscape, Miniature’ and there were those listed as ‘Painters: House, Sign, etc’. As Reynolds would have known the gap between these two zones of painting was not, at first, unbridgeable. After all both categories shared the same materials and tools and, in many respect, spoke a common specialist language. This is silently explicit in Geeraerdt's drawing of 1577 The Miseries of a Painter. The 'colour closet' in the background of this drawing shows apprentices grinding pigment with mullers on ledgers which are indistinguishable from those used by house painters.

The preparation of pigment as paint, distemper or powder colour was to become a minor development of the Industrial Revolution. In London the Emerton dynasty of ‘colourmen’ used horse-mills to manufacture paint for some five decades from 1720s. They supplied both ‘mechanic’ and ‘liberal’ painters but also issued instructions with their products. With these ‘Directions for Painting’ a gentleman could employ his servants as house painters--a genteel form of ‘DIY’. Thanks to the Emertons and their like, fully apprenticed tradesmen were deprived of important aspects of potential employment. In response they diversified. The trade card of Meggitt & Son of Hull (active c1779-1860) lists on its reverse (of its pictorial obverse) a truly astonishing range of services, products and skills starting with painting but moving on to include: ‘gilding & bronzing, varnishing & japanning’, and concludes with ‘Room Floors Chalked for Balls Etc’.

Perhaps the most significant yet least known figures in the whole history of art is John G. Rand (1801-1873) an American portrait painter. In 1844, whilst working in London, he devised and patented the collapsible metal tube for oil paint. Once emancipated from the limitations of bladder colours, tube oil paint enabled landscape painters to work with ease in the presence of nature. These ‘convenience paints’ made it possible for amateurs to work in this hitherto highly technical medium. Above all the impact of this innovation was sociological.

Easel painters were now largely disengaged from the empirical demands of their craft and could more easily indulge in the theoretical notions of their art. As a consequence they ceased to be part of the wider community of craftsmen which included house and carriage painters.

But were there other trades that have since been eclipsed by the rise and rise of the easel painter? In Medieval London there were two such relevant trades but by 1502 they combined to form the ‘Painter and Staynors’ guild. The stainers were responsible for staining coarse linen to produce ‘stained hangings’. These were treated pictorially to resemble the far more expensive woven tapestries. The cheap stained hangings went out of favour in the opening decades of the 18^th century but by the close of the century a demand for ‘transparencies’ as window blinds emerged. Although these transparencies were on cotton they perpetuated many of the traditions of the stainers.

In contrast to the stainers and their dyes, the painters applied solid colours in an oil-based medium mainly to timber surfaces-but also to plaster. By the 18^th century they also made painted carpets in which oil paint was spread onto sail canvas to create oil cloths (the precursor of linoleum-the latter being bulked-up with chopped cork).

There were, in addition to the painters and the stainers, two further trades that were engaged in applying pigments, in various media, to a variety of surfaces. 18^th century building accounts regularly refer to payments to plasters for "washing and stopping" there work - in other words distempering and making good. This was a logical extension in the use of lime-based washes as a means of finishing lime-based plaster. As such the regulations of the Painter-Stainers of London explicitly state that plasterers were permitted to apply distemper, albeit with a restricted range of pigments. Even without this official dispensation the plasterers had already ventured into the two-dimensional decorative preserves of the painters with their sgraffito work in two colours of plaster. In addition to surviving medieval and Tudor examples I cite the 17^th century plaster fireplace linings with sgriffito decoration that have so far been located in Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire, Aberdeen and Massachusetts.

The fourth trade to concern us is, ostensibly, the most improbable of the lot: namely the plumbers. To explain this association between two apparently unrelated activities it is necessary to ponder the role of plumbers as glaziers - yet another conundrum. It was, of course, these tradesmen, using a plumber’s vice, who made the lead cames used to hold the glass of a 'leaded' window. It was therefore as a natural extension of their trade that plumbers became glaziers. With the introduction of sash windows the glass was held in place by sprigs and putty. Thus, in their capacity as glaziers, plumbers moved on to use materials other than lead. As we have seen, it was for structural reasons that putty was painted. Consequently as a further extension of their trade plumbers were permitted to apply oil paint and indeed to produce lead-based paints and dryers as part of their stock-in-trade.

These four trades were, together, responsible for the two main branches of painting-those in which the medium was oil (painters and plumbers) and secondly, where some form of size was used (stainers and plasterers). Whatever the media, or whichever trade, the primary source of employment was the application of all-over colour. Despite this many house painters were also 'decorators' in the sense that they created patterned designs (using stencils) and graining and marbling (using combs).

The best of these craftsmen extended their repertoire even further to create pictorial schemes of the kind described by Nathaniel Whittock in The Painters’ and Graziers’ Guide (1827). In the late 17^th century and on into Whittock’s day this type of work is often found as over-mantel panels and/or, where ceiling heights were sufficient, as over-doors. The variety of locations for this ‘art of the house painter’ was remarkable and included floors and ceilings along with moveable items like furniture and chimney boards.

Above all, the best of these craftsmen could be, as the 18^th century phrase expressed it: ‘artists in their trades’. They could even anticipate some of the ‘isms’ of the 20^th century. I offer two 17^th century examples: a panelled scheme from Yorkshire (Oakwell Hall, Kirklees) painted with a ‘Cubist’ design and a distempered wall in Wiltshire (Merchant’s House, Marlborough) which is a precursor of the ‘Hard Edge’ school of abstraction of 1960s New York.

A lively discussion followed. Among the issues raised was the question of the relationship of plumbers to painting, the colour schemes used in the past for sash windows and ironwork, and the methods used to grind pigment to make paint or distemper and the use of volatile oils (like oil of spike) to produce powder colours.

The above is a much abbreviated account of the full lecture which was based upon three of the speaker’s published books:

The Artists’ Craft (Phaidon, Oxford 1985)

Building the Georgian City (Yale University Press, 1998)

Domestic Interiors 1500-1850 (Yale University Press, 2000)

James Ayres