Vincent Brooks, Day & Son
Encyclopedia
Vincent Brooks, Day & Son was a major British lithographic firm most widely known for reproducing the weekly caricatures published in Vanity Fair magazine. The company was formed in 1867 when Vincent Brooks bought the name, good will and some of the property of Day & Son Ltd, which had gone into liquidation
that year. The firm reproduced artwork and illustrations and went on to print many of the iconic London Underground
posters of the twenties and thirties before being wound up in 1940.
. He was a member of the second council of the National Political Union and is probably most noted for his edition of the radicals and reformers favourite, Shelley
’s Queen Mab
.
After leaving school, Vincent Brooks spent time on John Minter Morgan's farm estate near Uxbridge before returning to London to join his father in business. Around 1840 John Brooks relocated to the Channel Island of Jersey where he continued to trade as a wholesale stationer and paper merchant. Vincent was left with the business in London. At some time during this period he was also associated with Charles Robertson, an artists’ colourman based in Long Acre.
It is not certain at what point Vincent Brooks first practised lithography. A number of his early pieces were shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851
. The following year the business moved from Oxford Street to 40 King Street, Covent Garden.
Vincent conducted lithographic classes at Marlborough House
during 1855 in what was destined to become the Royal College of Art
. He was entrusted with the Princess Royal’s Dying Soldier on the Battlefield, which was reproduced and sold in aid of the Patriotic fund. The following year the Arundel Society
commissioned a series of lithographs to be issued yearly to their subscribers. An effort described as ‘…the most important non-commercial application of chromolithography’ in the country at the time. However, the Arundel Society complained, maybe unjustly, about the quality or the lack of expertise in depicting religious subjects. The prints were also hampered by delays and by 1860 production had been switched to a German firm.
The Leighton Brothers, who would go on to produce the pictures featured in the Illustrated London News
, left their Red Lion Square premises in 1857. Vincent Brooks is reported to have taken over the remaining plant.
Staying in the Covent Garden area of London, two years later, during 1859, Vincent Brooks moved to larger premises in Chandos Street. The street is now renamed Chandos Place. Work from this era is marked either as Vincent Brooks Lith. or Vincent Brooks imp.
London's International Exhibition
of 1862 saw Vincent Brooks awarded a gold medal for his Lithograph of Mulready
’s ‘Choosing the Wedding Gown’. The same year Vincent Brooks produced one of his finest works in the form of a chromo-lithograph of the Lumley Portrait of William Shakespeare. It is even reported that the reproduction was so complete that one was sold for forty guineas to a purchaser who thought he was buying the original portrait.
During the 1860s, Vincent Brooks acquired plant and premises of Messrs J.S.Hodgson & Son of High Street Lambeth and he embarked in letterpress and colour block printing. The firm also fought off competition from Day & Son and Messrs Hanhart Bros in reproducing one of John Leech’s cartoons of Jorrocks in a competition organised by Punch Magazine. The company’s winning entry was reproduced by one of their leading chromo-lithographic artists, William B. Bunney, and the firm’s success led to many years of work from Punch.
In 1865 Vincent Brooks became involved with the ‘inventor’ of colour printing George Baxter. He purchased many of Baxter’s plates and printed them using Baxter’s presses which he had lent him on the understanding that George Baxter Jr. took up the management of them and that George Baxter himself supervised the work. It was a complex process that required up to 20 blocks per image. The process failed to pay its way and Brooks sold the plant four years later to Abraham Le Blond.
1866 saw Vincent Brooks joined in business by his second eldest son Frederick Vincent Brooks who was to eventually take over after his father’s death. Vincent’s eldest son Alfred William Brooks had preceded his younger brother into the firm but ‘never had very robust health’ and by 1901 had left the business. Later that year the firm purchased William Willis
’ remarkable Aniline process of direct photography, which reproduced engineering ‘blue prints’ keeping the original positive image.
At Paris’s Exposition Universelle
, held during 1867, Vincent Brooks won a gold medal for ‘the excellence of their reproductions’.
Vincent Brooks had started negotiating to take over the business of Day & Son Ltd during 1866. Financially assisted by the Mr. Henry Graves
, the Printseller of Pall Mall, Vincent Brooks bought their property, name, and goodwill in an agreement dated 25 March 1867. The firm now became known as Vincent Brooks, Day & Son.
From the early thirties the company was often referred to as Day & Haghe. This was due to the popularity of the work of Louis Haghe
a Belgian draughtsman and water colourist who worked for the company until 1852 when he left to focus on painting.
The firm was granted the status of ‘Lithographers to Queen Victoria and to the Queen Dowager, Queen Adelaide’ in 1837 although they were not the only lithographers to be awarded the Royal Warrant. William Day Senior died in 1845 leaving the business in the hands of his son William Day Junior. The company now became known as Day & Son.
The 1850s started with a prize medal at the Great Exhibition for their display of lithography. In the mid fifties the premises in Gate Street were enlarged and the Prince of Wales and Prince Alfred visited (probably the completed works) in 1856.
In 1851, Day & Son was commissioned by Matthew Digby Wyatt
, known for his work as an architect, to produce the book The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, an imposing imperial folio in two volumes which illustrates a selection of items from the Great Exhibition of 1851
. There are 160 chromolithographed plates. Wyatt himself stated that he had used 'the best means of graphic representation available'. Wyatt proudly drew attention to the previously unsurpassed scale and speed of production of the book. But what brought the entire project into being was the desire of Day & Son to demonstrate the potential of chromolithography
. The firm was particularly associated with the process. However, as Wyatt himself explained, the proposal was not even formalized until after the Great Exhibition had opened. Such a grandiose production must have called into play a significant proportion of Day's resources, including skilled craftsmen and lithographers such as Francis Bedford, J.A. Vinter and Henry Rafter
, as well as significant capital, and management. According to Wyatt, four or five of Day's staff were constantly engaged upon the business details of the operation alone.
In 1861 the firm printed a large run of bank notes for Lajos Kossuth
, the famous Hungarian patriot and democratic. Kossuth was in exile from his homeland and this attempt at re-establishing a separate Hungarian currency lead to both him and Day & Son to be charged in the courts with having ‘levied war upon the Emperor of Austria’. The affair ended with Day & Son delivering the notes to the Bank of England where they were duly burnt.
The firm now started to experience financial difficulties. Many stock auctions were held, the first, of engravings, taking place in 1865. That year Day & Son became a Limited Company. This not only meant that capital could be raised by the sale of shares but also that, in some cases, employees could be paid partly in shares in lieu of real wages. Another auction, this time of illustrated books, was held in 1866. Hodgson & Co. would continue to sell off Day & Son assets up until 1873.
Despite their other business worries by 1866 Day & Son Ltd, as well as Gate Street, had premises at 43 Piccadilly and at The German Gallery, New Bond Street. These were show rooms and exhibition spaces for the company’s work. They also took on the well-known photographer Vernon Heath to manage the photographic department.
Since becoming a limited company, directorship was conditional on holding at least five hundred shares. Just two years after incorporation it was pointed out to William Day Junior that he no longer fulfilled this criteria. He refused to leave the board and after the resulting row he left the company and for a short time started business in Cockspur Street.
The firm now faced liquidation and was taken over by Vincent Brooks.
A year after the merger, 1868, Gibson Bowles
began planning his new Vanity Fair magazine. His new brand of society weekly was to carry satirical caricatures of the men of the day lithographed by Vincent Brooks. At a time when Punch magazine was still primarily using wood blocks this ‘process of chromolithography
and wedding it to a new kind of visual humour helped to bring about a revolution in taste, preparing the way for the acceptance of less strictly representational art forms and breaching the fortifications of academic realism.’ The first issue to carry a cartoon came out in January 1869 featuring a portrait of Benjamin Disraeli. Later the magazine would claim that,
Back in Chandos Street the firm had received a Command from the Queen to execute lithographs of Kenneth MacLeay’s watercoloured Highlanders of Scotland. These featured the principle clans and the retainers of the Royal Household at Balmoral and are known as the artist’s best works. By 1870 the originals had appeared at an exhibition at Mitchell’s Royal Library in Old Bond Street with the lithographs being sold in two volumes later that year.
By the 1870s the firm was employing over one hundred and forty men and forty boys and in 1885 acquired the remaining part of Leighton bros.
On the 29th September 1885 Vincent Brooks died in Spalding & Hodge's Counting House, Drury Lane. He was succeeded in the business by his son Frederick Vincent Brooks (1848–1921).
Frederick and his older brother Alfred appeared in the bankruptcy courts in 1898 and on 14 May that year the company was incorporated as Vincent Brooks, Day & Son Ltd. During this time the firm's premises in Gate Street were badly damaged by fire. It started around ten o'clock in the evening of Sunday 10 April and quickly spread through the buildings. It is reported that 'the whole of the main building, containing about 40 printing machines and a great quantity of type, had been entirely destroyed'. As a result the run of Vanity Fair prints temporarily switched to colour offsets produced by P.W. Van De Weyer over in Holland and the firm moved to a new home in Parker Street just a couple of minutes walk west of Gate Street.
From January 1906 Vanity Fair used a number of other (probably cheaper) firms to produce their caricatures. This decision was reversed in 1911 with the arrival of editor Thomas Allinson who struggling with the now failing magazine wished to revert to the process whereby 'the most satisfactory results' had been obtained. Vanity Fair magazine finally ceased publication in 1914. It's forty-five year run of caricatures ended as Allinson absorbed it into his Hearth and Home magazine.
The start of the century also saw Frederick Vincent Brooks write an article for the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
and become the official printer of the Senefelder Club
.
Frederick died on the 7th August 1921 and the business passed to two of his sons, Wilfred Vincent Brooks and Frederick Allan Brooks. Two years later the firm celebrated their centenary. Wilfred remarked that ‘although there were older firms in existence that were now practising lithography, no other house had been established as lithographic printers for so long a period as theirs.’ During the evening’s celebration it was also announced that a former apprentice Thomas Edgar Griffits had been co-opted onto the firm’s board of directors.
During the twenties and thirties the art of the poster reached its pinnacle. Under the guidance of Frank Pick
, the London Underground embraced the likes of John Hassall
and Edward McKnight Kauffer
. Artists were directly commissioned and it was believed that the influence of good design could extend to enrich every aspect of life. This was a common theme during the thirties. Wilfred Vincent Brooks served as chairman of the Commercial Printing Section of the Royal Academy of Art
's exhibition ‘British Art in Industry’ held during 1935. He expressed his own sentiments in a speech soon after,
During this period Wilfred was ‘a valuable member of the Colour Lithography Committee of the London Master Printers’ Association and was also a member of the London Central Districts Master Printers’ Association.’ He was chairman of the Education Committee and member of the Advisory Sub-committee, with the London County Council School of Photo-Engraving and Lithography in Bolt Street, Fleet Street, and was an inspector of the London printing schools for the Board of Education.
It was later reported that business had been continuing with ‘fluctuating results up until 1919 and then had had a general upward trend in turnover. Dividends at the rate of 10% per annum were paid for each of the eight years to 1927. Dividends for the four following years were lower and no dividends were paid after 1931. From 1932 to 1940 profits were earned in only two years namely, 1937 and 1938. In an effort to raise funds the lease on the premises was sold in 1939 but this did little to bring in new business which had been affected by the start of World War Two. Finally a creditor petitioned the Companies Court and a Winding-up Order was made on 5 February 1940.
The official Receiver concluded his report stating that ‘the Receiver for the debenture holder is continuing the business in the hopes of disposing of it as a going concern, but he states that having regard to the specialised and somewhat ancient type of plant he doubts whether the assets will realise sufficient to discharge the debenture liability, particularly bearing in mind the somewhat heavy claims of the preferential creditors.’ Not long afterwards, German bombs hit London and fire destroyed the firm’s Parker Street premises. It is reported that the Baynard Press absorbed what ever was left of Vincent Brooks, Day & Son in 1960.
Liquidation
In law, liquidation is the process by which a company is brought to an end, and the assets and property of the company redistributed. Liquidation is also sometimes referred to as winding-up or dissolution, although dissolution technically refers to the last stage of liquidation...
that year. The firm reproduced artwork and illustrations and went on to print many of the iconic London Underground
London Underground
The London Underground is a rapid transit system serving a large part of Greater London and some parts of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex in England...
posters of the twenties and thirties before being wound up in 1940.
Vincent Brooks
Company literature holds 1848 as the year that Vincent Robert Alfred Brooks (1815–1885) first set up in business. His father was the radical printer and stationer John Brooks of 421 Oxford Street. John Brooks has been described as the publisher of the Owenites because of his association with the early socialist Robert OwenRobert Owen
Robert Owen was a Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement.Owen's philosophy was based on three intellectual pillars:...
. He was a member of the second council of the National Political Union and is probably most noted for his edition of the radicals and reformers favourite, Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
’s Queen Mab
Queen Mab (poem)
Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem; With Notes, published in 1813 in nine cantos with seventeen notes, was the first large poetic work written by Percy Bysshe Shelley , the English Romantic poet...
.
After leaving school, Vincent Brooks spent time on John Minter Morgan's farm estate near Uxbridge before returning to London to join his father in business. Around 1840 John Brooks relocated to the Channel Island of Jersey where he continued to trade as a wholesale stationer and paper merchant. Vincent was left with the business in London. At some time during this period he was also associated with Charles Robertson, an artists’ colourman based in Long Acre.
It is not certain at what point Vincent Brooks first practised lithography. A number of his early pieces were shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851
The Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations or The Great Exhibition, sometimes referred to as the Crystal Palace Exhibition in reference to the temporary structure in which it was held, was an international exhibition that took place in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October...
. The following year the business moved from Oxford Street to 40 King Street, Covent Garden.
Vincent conducted lithographic classes at Marlborough House
Marlborough House
Marlborough House is a mansion in Westminster, London, in Pall Mall just east of St James's Palace. It was built for Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, the favourite and confidante of Queen Anne. The Duchess wanted her new house to be "strong, plain and convenient and good"...
during 1855 in what was destined to become the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
. He was entrusted with the Princess Royal’s Dying Soldier on the Battlefield, which was reproduced and sold in aid of the Patriotic fund. The following year the Arundel Society
Arundel Society
The Arundel Society was founded at London in 1849 and named after the Earl of Arundel, the famous collector of the Arundel Marbles and one of the first great English patrons and lovers of the arts...
commissioned a series of lithographs to be issued yearly to their subscribers. An effort described as ‘…the most important non-commercial application of chromolithography’ in the country at the time. However, the Arundel Society complained, maybe unjustly, about the quality or the lack of expertise in depicting religious subjects. The prints were also hampered by delays and by 1860 production had been switched to a German firm.
The Leighton Brothers, who would go on to produce the pictures featured in the Illustrated London News
Illustrated London News
The Illustrated London News was the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper; the first issue appeared on Saturday 14 May 1842. It was published weekly until 1971 and then increasingly less frequently until publication ceased in 2003.-History:...
, left their Red Lion Square premises in 1857. Vincent Brooks is reported to have taken over the remaining plant.
Staying in the Covent Garden area of London, two years later, during 1859, Vincent Brooks moved to larger premises in Chandos Street. The street is now renamed Chandos Place. Work from this era is marked either as Vincent Brooks Lith. or Vincent Brooks imp.
London's International Exhibition
1862 International Exhibition
The International of 1862, or Great London Exposition, was a world's fair. It was held from 1 May to 1 November 1862, beside the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society, South Kensington, London, England, on a site that now houses museums including the Natural History Museum and the Science...
of 1862 saw Vincent Brooks awarded a gold medal for his Lithograph of Mulready
William Mulready
William Mulready was an Irish genre painter living in London. He is best known for his romanticizing depictions of rural scenes, and for creating Mulready stationery letter sheets, issued at the same time as the Penny Black postage stamp.-Life and family:William Mulready was born in Ennis, County...
’s ‘Choosing the Wedding Gown’. The same year Vincent Brooks produced one of his finest works in the form of a chromo-lithograph of the Lumley Portrait of William Shakespeare. It is even reported that the reproduction was so complete that one was sold for forty guineas to a purchaser who thought he was buying the original portrait.
During the 1860s, Vincent Brooks acquired plant and premises of Messrs J.S.Hodgson & Son of High Street Lambeth and he embarked in letterpress and colour block printing. The firm also fought off competition from Day & Son and Messrs Hanhart Bros in reproducing one of John Leech’s cartoons of Jorrocks in a competition organised by Punch Magazine. The company’s winning entry was reproduced by one of their leading chromo-lithographic artists, William B. Bunney, and the firm’s success led to many years of work from Punch.
In 1865 Vincent Brooks became involved with the ‘inventor’ of colour printing George Baxter. He purchased many of Baxter’s plates and printed them using Baxter’s presses which he had lent him on the understanding that George Baxter Jr. took up the management of them and that George Baxter himself supervised the work. It was a complex process that required up to 20 blocks per image. The process failed to pay its way and Brooks sold the plant four years later to Abraham Le Blond.
1866 saw Vincent Brooks joined in business by his second eldest son Frederick Vincent Brooks who was to eventually take over after his father’s death. Vincent’s eldest son Alfred William Brooks had preceded his younger brother into the firm but ‘never had very robust health’ and by 1901 had left the business. Later that year the firm purchased William Willis
William Willis (inventor)
William Willis Jr. is a British inventor who developed the platinum process on the basis of the light sensitivity of platinum salts, originally discovered by John Herschel....
’ remarkable Aniline process of direct photography, which reproduced engineering ‘blue prints’ keeping the original positive image.
At Paris’s Exposition Universelle
Exposition Universelle (1867)
The Exposition Universelle of 1867 was a World Exposition held in Paris, France, in 1867.-Conception:In 1864, Emperor Napoleon III decreed that an international exposition should be held in Paris in 1867. A commission was appointed with Prince Jerome Napoleon as president, under whose direction...
, held during 1867, Vincent Brooks won a gold medal for ‘the excellence of their reproductions’.
Vincent Brooks had started negotiating to take over the business of Day & Son Ltd during 1866. Financially assisted by the Mr. Henry Graves
Henry Graves (printseller and publisher)
Henry Graves was a printseller and publisher in Victorian London.-Life:Henry Graves published many of the artists whose works were exhibited at the Royal Academy and National Portrait Gallery...
, the Printseller of Pall Mall, Vincent Brooks bought their property, name, and goodwill in an agreement dated 25 March 1867. The firm now became known as Vincent Brooks, Day & Son.
Day & Son
The firm of William Day, later Day & Son, has been described as one of the largest and most prominent lithographic firms of the second third of the nineteenth century. Company documents record William Day’s business starting in 1823 although the first known lithograph was produced the following year. By 1829 the firm had moved from 59 Great Queen Street to 17 Gate Street.From the early thirties the company was often referred to as Day & Haghe. This was due to the popularity of the work of Louis Haghe
Louis Haghe
Louis Haghe was a lithographer and watercolour artist.His father and grandfather had practised as architects. Training in his teens in watercolour painting, he found work in the relatively new art of lithography when the first press was set up in Tournai...
a Belgian draughtsman and water colourist who worked for the company until 1852 when he left to focus on painting.
The firm was granted the status of ‘Lithographers to Queen Victoria and to the Queen Dowager, Queen Adelaide’ in 1837 although they were not the only lithographers to be awarded the Royal Warrant. William Day Senior died in 1845 leaving the business in the hands of his son William Day Junior. The company now became known as Day & Son.
The 1850s started with a prize medal at the Great Exhibition for their display of lithography. In the mid fifties the premises in Gate Street were enlarged and the Prince of Wales and Prince Alfred visited (probably the completed works) in 1856.
In 1851, Day & Son was commissioned by Matthew Digby Wyatt
Matthew Digby Wyatt
Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt was a British architect and art historian who became Secretary of the Great Exhibition, Surveyor of the East India Company and the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge.-Life:...
, known for his work as an architect, to produce the book The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, an imposing imperial folio in two volumes which illustrates a selection of items from the Great Exhibition of 1851
The Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations or The Great Exhibition, sometimes referred to as the Crystal Palace Exhibition in reference to the temporary structure in which it was held, was an international exhibition that took place in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October...
. There are 160 chromolithographed plates. Wyatt himself stated that he had used 'the best means of graphic representation available'. Wyatt proudly drew attention to the previously unsurpassed scale and speed of production of the book. But what brought the entire project into being was the desire of Day & Son to demonstrate the potential of chromolithography
Chromolithography
Chromolithography is a method for making multi-color prints. This type of color printing stemmed from the process of lithography, and it includes all types of lithography that are printed in color. When chromolithography is used to reproduce photographs, the term photochrom is frequently used...
. The firm was particularly associated with the process. However, as Wyatt himself explained, the proposal was not even formalized until after the Great Exhibition had opened. Such a grandiose production must have called into play a significant proportion of Day's resources, including skilled craftsmen and lithographers such as Francis Bedford, J.A. Vinter and Henry Rafter
Henry Rafter
Henry Rafter was a British master artist who can be categorized as part of the naturalism and realism movements. He is noted for his scenes of landscapes, nature and animals. He was also a prolific book illustrator, and produced several portraits as well...
, as well as significant capital, and management. According to Wyatt, four or five of Day's staff were constantly engaged upon the business details of the operation alone.
In 1861 the firm printed a large run of bank notes for Lajos Kossuth
Lajos Kossuth
Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva was a Hungarian lawyer, journalist, politician and Regent-President of Hungary in 1849. He was widely honored during his lifetime, including in the United Kingdom and the United States, as a freedom fighter and bellwether of democracy in Europe.-Family:Lajos...
, the famous Hungarian patriot and democratic. Kossuth was in exile from his homeland and this attempt at re-establishing a separate Hungarian currency lead to both him and Day & Son to be charged in the courts with having ‘levied war upon the Emperor of Austria’. The affair ended with Day & Son delivering the notes to the Bank of England where they were duly burnt.
The firm now started to experience financial difficulties. Many stock auctions were held, the first, of engravings, taking place in 1865. That year Day & Son became a Limited Company. This not only meant that capital could be raised by the sale of shares but also that, in some cases, employees could be paid partly in shares in lieu of real wages. Another auction, this time of illustrated books, was held in 1866. Hodgson & Co. would continue to sell off Day & Son assets up until 1873.
Despite their other business worries by 1866 Day & Son Ltd, as well as Gate Street, had premises at 43 Piccadilly and at The German Gallery, New Bond Street. These were show rooms and exhibition spaces for the company’s work. They also took on the well-known photographer Vernon Heath to manage the photographic department.
Since becoming a limited company, directorship was conditional on holding at least five hundred shares. Just two years after incorporation it was pointed out to William Day Junior that he no longer fulfilled this criteria. He refused to leave the board and after the resulting row he left the company and for a short time started business in Cockspur Street.
The firm now faced liquidation and was taken over by Vincent Brooks.
Vincent Brooks, Day & Son
Vincent Brooks now consolidated the new combined business in Day & Son’s Gate Street premises. A later obituary published in a trade journal praises Vincent Brooks’s handling of the situation stating that ‘the way in which he combined together the two businesses testified to his energy and experience, and the way in which they formed a harmonious whole, were a record of his remarkable tact and kindness.’A year after the merger, 1868, Gibson Bowles
Thomas Gibson Bowles
Thomas Gibson Bowles , generally known as Tommy Bowles, was the founder of the magazines The Lady and the English Vanity Fair, a sailor and the maternal grandfather of the Mitford sisters.-Parents:...
began planning his new Vanity Fair magazine. His new brand of society weekly was to carry satirical caricatures of the men of the day lithographed by Vincent Brooks. At a time when Punch magazine was still primarily using wood blocks this ‘process of chromolithography
Chromolithography
Chromolithography is a method for making multi-color prints. This type of color printing stemmed from the process of lithography, and it includes all types of lithography that are printed in color. When chromolithography is used to reproduce photographs, the term photochrom is frequently used...
and wedding it to a new kind of visual humour helped to bring about a revolution in taste, preparing the way for the acceptance of less strictly representational art forms and breaching the fortifications of academic realism.’ The first issue to carry a cartoon came out in January 1869 featuring a portrait of Benjamin Disraeli. Later the magazine would claim that,
Back in Chandos Street the firm had received a Command from the Queen to execute lithographs of Kenneth MacLeay’s watercoloured Highlanders of Scotland. These featured the principle clans and the retainers of the Royal Household at Balmoral and are known as the artist’s best works. By 1870 the originals had appeared at an exhibition at Mitchell’s Royal Library in Old Bond Street with the lithographs being sold in two volumes later that year.
By the 1870s the firm was employing over one hundred and forty men and forty boys and in 1885 acquired the remaining part of Leighton bros.
On the 29th September 1885 Vincent Brooks died in Spalding & Hodge's Counting House, Drury Lane. He was succeeded in the business by his son Frederick Vincent Brooks (1848–1921).
Frederick and his older brother Alfred appeared in the bankruptcy courts in 1898 and on 14 May that year the company was incorporated as Vincent Brooks, Day & Son Ltd. During this time the firm's premises in Gate Street were badly damaged by fire. It started around ten o'clock in the evening of Sunday 10 April and quickly spread through the buildings. It is reported that 'the whole of the main building, containing about 40 printing machines and a great quantity of type, had been entirely destroyed'. As a result the run of Vanity Fair prints temporarily switched to colour offsets produced by P.W. Van De Weyer over in Holland and the firm moved to a new home in Parker Street just a couple of minutes walk west of Gate Street.
From January 1906 Vanity Fair used a number of other (probably cheaper) firms to produce their caricatures. This decision was reversed in 1911 with the arrival of editor Thomas Allinson who struggling with the now failing magazine wished to revert to the process whereby 'the most satisfactory results' had been obtained. Vanity Fair magazine finally ceased publication in 1914. It's forty-five year run of caricatures ended as Allinson absorbed it into his Hearth and Home magazine.
The start of the century also saw Frederick Vincent Brooks write an article for the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition
The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition is a 29-volume reference work, an edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time...
and become the official printer of the Senefelder Club
Senefelder Club
The Senefelder Club is an organisation formed in London in 1909 to promote the craft of art reproduction by the process of lithography.The club was named in honour of Aloys Senefelder, who in 1798 invented the lithographic process....
.
Frederick died on the 7th August 1921 and the business passed to two of his sons, Wilfred Vincent Brooks and Frederick Allan Brooks. Two years later the firm celebrated their centenary. Wilfred remarked that ‘although there were older firms in existence that were now practising lithography, no other house had been established as lithographic printers for so long a period as theirs.’ During the evening’s celebration it was also announced that a former apprentice Thomas Edgar Griffits had been co-opted onto the firm’s board of directors.
During the twenties and thirties the art of the poster reached its pinnacle. Under the guidance of Frank Pick
Frank Pick
Frank Pick LLB Hon. RIBA was a British transport administrator. After qualifying as a solicitor in 1902, he worked at the North Eastern Railway, before moving to the Underground Electric Railways Company of London in 1906...
, the London Underground embraced the likes of John Hassall
John Hassall (illustrator)
John Hassall was born in Walmer, Kent on 21 May 1868, died 8 March 1948 and was an English illustrator.Hassall educated in Worthing, at Newton Abbot College and at Neuenheim College, Heidelberg. After twice failing entry to The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, he emigrated to Manitoba in Canada...
and Edward McKnight Kauffer
Edward McKnight Kauffer
Edward McKnight Kauffer was an influential American-born artist noted for his avant garde graphic design and poster art, especially in England....
. Artists were directly commissioned and it was believed that the influence of good design could extend to enrich every aspect of life. This was a common theme during the thirties. Wilfred Vincent Brooks served as chairman of the Commercial Printing Section of the Royal Academy of Art
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
's exhibition ‘British Art in Industry’ held during 1935. He expressed his own sentiments in a speech soon after,
During this period Wilfred was ‘a valuable member of the Colour Lithography Committee of the London Master Printers’ Association and was also a member of the London Central Districts Master Printers’ Association.’ He was chairman of the Education Committee and member of the Advisory Sub-committee, with the London County Council School of Photo-Engraving and Lithography in Bolt Street, Fleet Street, and was an inspector of the London printing schools for the Board of Education.
It was later reported that business had been continuing with ‘fluctuating results up until 1919 and then had had a general upward trend in turnover. Dividends at the rate of 10% per annum were paid for each of the eight years to 1927. Dividends for the four following years were lower and no dividends were paid after 1931. From 1932 to 1940 profits were earned in only two years namely, 1937 and 1938. In an effort to raise funds the lease on the premises was sold in 1939 but this did little to bring in new business which had been affected by the start of World War Two. Finally a creditor petitioned the Companies Court and a Winding-up Order was made on 5 February 1940.
The official Receiver concluded his report stating that ‘the Receiver for the debenture holder is continuing the business in the hopes of disposing of it as a going concern, but he states that having regard to the specialised and somewhat ancient type of plant he doubts whether the assets will realise sufficient to discharge the debenture liability, particularly bearing in mind the somewhat heavy claims of the preferential creditors.’ Not long afterwards, German bombs hit London and fire destroyed the firm’s Parker Street premises. It is reported that the Baynard Press absorbed what ever was left of Vincent Brooks, Day & Son in 1960.
External links
- Kathy Kajander Tidman, 1997, Art for the Victorian Household. Available to download from Online Originals
- My Life’s Medley, The autobiography of Frederick Vincent Brooks, and articles regarding the firm and events mentioned in the autobiography
- Frederick Vincent Brooks’s entry on Lithography for the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica