Setting aside fire and other destructive events, dilapidation, changing tastes, or posterity's disinclination to retain art, the root-and-branch iconoclasm accompanying the establishment of Protestantism in sixteenth-century England has left us a distorted image. Still, before and after that cataclysm, stainers (painters on cloth), glass painters, limners, portraitists, and painters of coats of arms, ships, furniture, and ephemera were active. This study painstakingly surveys a category of remunerative employment.
Some foreign or “stranger-painters” taken up in chapter 2 operated under significant constraints and experienced xenophobia, but others, employed by the court and aristocrats, enjoyed protections. Italians were present under Henry VII and Henry VIII, some Frenchmen and many Netherlanders, now mostly Protestants, under Elizabeth I. Their technical abilities and humanist cultural heritage distinguished them from the native talent, as did living among expatriate countrymen, a circumstance that engendered practical benefits but further limited interactions with local professional peers.
The London livery company of Painter-Stainers, the subject of chapter 3, saw to giving worthy public expression to its status, defining the contours of apprentices’ training, maintaining standards among full-fledged members, and preserving a monopolistic bulwark against competitors like the stranger-painters and another livery company, the Plasterers, whose members’ remit legitimately included applying pigment to variously treated surfaces.
In chapter 4, surviving written records allow for a look away from London, first to East Anglia. Between 1500 and 1550, no fewer than three painters called Norwich home; twelve did so between 1600 and 1640, yet only that city showed an increase among forty-one tabulated places in Norfolk and Suffolk. Many that had boasted of one painter in the earlier period had none in the latter. In the west, patrons throughout Cheshire engaged, in the county seat of Chester, arms painters and portraitists who faced little competition and ran small but influential operations. In this regard, four generations of the Holme family constitute an instructive case study of provincial centralization and consolidation.
The arms painters discussed in chapter 5 responded to families wishing to give visual expression to a rise in social standing. Here, conflicts arose with heralds, the usual stewards of this semiotically complex language, who identified increasingly frequent instances of fraudulent imagery but were not always themselves willing or able to blazon. Glass painters, treated in chapter 6, collaborated with glaziers, each group performing non-fungible tasks. In the seventeenth century, patrons like Robert Cecil and William Laud commissioned ensembles in this medium, as did officials at several London churches and Oxford colleges.
Subsequent chapters take up venues for selling art and workshops that accommodated the master, his family, apprentices, journeymen, equipment, tools, and materials. In the provinces more than in London, intergenerational kinship ties shaped painters’ career pathways. The author gathers evidence of women, some of them capable artists, who served first as their husbands’ business partners, and then, as widows, managers of the enterprises they had inherited. Setting prices paid for individual objects or contracted projects against recurring and job-specific costs reveals that making a decent living often posed challenges inflected by intermittent demand, punishing inflation, and even the seasons.
Of the book's fifteen figures, only three receive exceedingly brief commentary. A fascinating detail from a painting that shows a portraitist seated at his easel embellishes the front cover yet merits not one word of exposition. The author gently criticizes those art historians who, he believes, endow artists like Hans Holbein the Younger and Anthony van Dyck with a well-nigh mystical virtuosity manifestly unattainable by others, to whom they have consequently paid scant attention. But he himself falls victim to insidious value judgments when he writes of those who “lacked [Holbein's] skill or imagination” (5). Presuming that an anonymous (to us) Lincolnshire painter's portrait of a notable “was hardly, in its subtlety or composition, an elegant work” (90), the author does not illustrate it, thereby denying readers the opportunity to form their own opinions. There were varying provincial standards, varying metropolitan standards, and yet apparently no failures of representation. The painters under examination possessed an expertise that distinguished them as a group, and it is both unnecessary and unproductive to hint at deficiencies. Nevertheless, this book fruitfully documents why and how these artisans’ wide-ranging services were sought and carried out.
