Taken from his essay on ‘Mr Angerstein’s Collection of Pictures’, William Hazlitt’s description of the merits and deficiencies of print shops, particularly when contrasted with those of a collection of paintings, registers many of the preoccupations of Britain’s art world at the turn of the nineteenth century. This was an unstable, if pivotal, moment in the history of art in Britain: the public desire for a myriad of forms of visual culture had reached a fever pitch; art institutions and the artist were gaining new found cultural importance; Old Master art, once solely the prerogative of aristocrat connoisseurs, was increasingly available to bourgeois collectors and middle-class viewers; and there was a growing desire to move away from ephemeral exhibitions to publicly owned, permanent collections. The debates surrounding the meaning and value of art, as well as a voracious audience’s fervour to consume a diverse range of visual culture, were shaped and determined by contemporary print culture, and in particular popular periodicals and engraved prints.

Print shops were at the very heart of this frenzy and could be found throughout the country, with an especially high concentration located in London. Thanks to an influx of highly skilled Italian engravers to Britain, who would collectively raise the profile of British engravings for an international market, shops specialising in prints became popular in the mid-eighteenth century (Murgia 2019 and Rauser 2008), even as they operated within a wider network of printed and visual culture. The print shop shares a kinship with booksellers, publishers, map-makers and art supply stores, all of which also sold engravings. But not all print shops were created equal, and wares could range from rare engravings of Old Master art or high-end prints of contemporary history paintings (as in the case of Molteno’s and Colnaghi’s), to satires of the most salacious gossip and political intrigue found in the popular periodicals of the day (as one might find at Hannah Humphrey’s or William Holland’s).