Painting for a Living in Tudor and Early Stuart England, by Robert Tittler

A physical trace of the priorities and preoccupations of sixteenth-century England, portrayed in vivid colour, is left to us by its surviving painted images, objects and buildings. However, for all but the most prominent of these works, our picture of their creators has long been indistinct. In the last decade, research has highlighted the potential of new technical and archival evidence to strengthen our understanding of the development and significance of painting in early modern England. By investigating the materials used and artistic techniques, as well as wider questions about the purpose of painted images for patrons and audiences, such scholarship develops a productive interpretative approach that complements a more traditional, but often problematic, art-historical focus on attribution.

Robert Tittler’s new book contributes to these discussions with a sophisticated evaluation of the social significance of painting as a profession through the analysis of a considerable body of archival sources. Concentrating on the identities and experiences of the painters themselves, Tittler brings these figures into focus using the extensive database he has developed (‘Early Modern British Painters, c.1500–1640’, available online at https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/980096/), which will remain an invaluable resource for scholars of the visual arts in early modern Britain. As a result of his previous work on urban communities as producers and consumers of portraiture and other painted works (The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern England, 2007; rev. ante, cxxiv [2009], p. 1483; Portraits Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640, 2012), Tittler is well placed to argue for the value of this material in the context of broader social, political and economic histories of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This provides a new view into the realities of painters’ craft, their communities, and the urban structures that supported them, and reveals an occupation shaped by the transformations of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries but, equally, a profession integral to the development of many of the same cultural changes.

Tittler locates the roots of later Elizabethan enthusiasm for building and painting projects in changes to England’s relationship with the visual arts brought about by the early Tudor regime, such as new opportunities for social advancement, royal patronage of foreign painters, and investment in ecclesiastical buildings. Each of these elements would be continually shaped by the events of the next century, and a strength of Tittler’s work is its observation of the effect of such change on particular groups of painters. While informal networks and supportive organisations, such as the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, led to collaboration and co-operation, Tittler identifies equivalent amounts of competition between painters, causing rivalry and hostility. By exploring the fault lines that appeared in the painters’ profession as well as internal group dynamics, Tittler’s account explores wider social boundaries shaped variously by regional or national identity, guild membership and changes to the nature of work available after the outset of the Reformation. These boundaries were more flexible for some painters than others, such as native English painters who worked alongside the stranger painters rather than joining a Company, appreciating the advantages of skill-exchange compared to the protection offered by corporate membership.

A highlight of the first part of the book is the chapter on provincial painters, a subject seldom explored by scholars. Tittler provides evidence of a rich and flourishing environment for painters of all kinds across England’s towns and cities. Here, networking, intermarriage and, infrequently, civic service, consolidated a painter’s position, while Reformation changes in belief about the role of images reshaped communities, prompting economic migration. The diversity demonstrated between different regional centres and their hinterlands fuels a sense of the importance of expanding the search for under-used archival records of painting beyond London.

In a field where portrait-painting has captured so much scholarly attention, often due to stronger survival rates than other kinds of production, Tittler’s study of occupational specialisation presents a valuable alternative. His chapter on arms-painting sheds new light on the disputes and sensitivities of a growing sixteenth-century population and, even more so than portraiture, reveals the anxieties related to social mobility and the control of personal image. Additionally, Tittler is not the first to suggest that the Reformation transformed the opportunities available to some painters, but his inclusion of a chapter on the overlooked craft of glass-painting presents this narrative with the complexity it deserves, contrasting the anticipated story of hardship and decline with an awareness of subsequent waves of new interest in religious glass-painting and new domestic audiences reached through Elizabethan building projects.

The third section focuses on the practicalities of painting as an occupation, considering who we might encounter as part of the painter’s workshop and how painters managed their commercial spaces. A final chapter evaluates the economic performance of early modern painters across England. Here some of the difficulties of this kind of research become clear. As Tittler acknowledges, for most of this period English audiences did not value the identity of the artist in the same way as European markets, leading to scanty documentation and no record at all of some of those that may have been working as painters (pp. 206–7, 227). Such fragmentary evidence makes it challenging to account for the development of a market for art and artistic renown in the early seventeenth century and a simultaneous, but starkly different, reality for many painters making a living or struggling to do so in a difficult economic climate. Nevertheless, Tittler manages to produce a compelling narrative of such change without erasing the ambiguities, inconsistencies and variety of the early modern painting trade.

Overall, this book makes a cogent argument in favour of building stronger interpretative links between traditional social, political and economic history and the visual arts. Its conclusions demonstrate that the material curated in ‘Early Modern British Painters’ is not only valuable to art historians but offers an opportunity to integrate previously unexplored information about the lives of a variety of early modern people, from celebrated portraitists to obscure decorative painters, into our wider understanding of the period.