Writing towards the end of the 1850s, Tom Taylor, the art critic for the Times, commented in the foreword to the Autobiographical Recollections by the late Charles Robert Leslie, that the new market environment carries the risk ‘that it will multiply the manufacture and increase the homeliness of pictures, to say nothing of less direct and obvious consequences’. His remark both quantified and qualified the effects of the changing art market. The observation that the expanding consumer base for artists’ products attracted new producers is easily documented. The population of painters residing in London, between 1840 and 1845 alone, saw an average annual increase of 70 per cent. The earlier described growth in exhibition societies in London and the provinces further evidences the entry of new producers into the market. Our auction sale records also confirm this increase. Furthermore, a simple numerical comparison of artists listed in Waterhouse's standard encyclopaedic work on British eighteenth-century painters with those in Wood's dictionary shows that over five times as many artists worked and exhibited in Britain during the Victorian era than during the entire preceding century.

The second part of Taylor's statement presents a more challenging argument. ‘Homeliness’ has a prejudicial connotation today that may not have existed at the time of Taylor's writing. Considering the context in which the term was used, we interpret it as describing without implied bias objects that were produced for private domestic use.