The Mass-Produced Print

Typical Victorian picture dealers like Agnew, Gambart, Wallis or Tooth differed in many respects from most of their predecessors. Rather than just buying and selling individual works to private collectors, they also engaged in the publication and sale of reproductive prints. Although earlier publishers like Boydell, Macklin or Bowyer had pioneered this type of business activity, Victorian dealers took it to new heights. Their operations evolved from retailing artistic luxury articles to include publishing and selling derivative mass products nationally and internationally. The press celebrated these firms as missionaries of culture that brought the benefits of art to the underprivileged. Like Hogarth a century earlier, these entrepreneurs applied one of the central tenets of modern capitalism: greater profits can be derived from the sale of many goods cheaply to a mass market than by selling luxury goods to the elite. The earning potential of these mass-market goods boosted the high prices of the original works from which they derived and increased the general cost of artistic labour.