SESSION: Uncovering the Victorian Art-Workman
A neglected figure, the Victorian ‘art-workman’ worked largely in a trade context, often as part of a firm supplying skills to leading designers. Hidden within the aesthetic, classed and structural hierarchies of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the art-workman is often ignored in favour of critical accounts that focus on the ambitions and creations of privileged, wealthy men.
This session seeks to uncover the figure of the ‘art-workman’ through critical responses to the short film ‘The Man Who Painted His House’ (Victoria Mills and Lily Ford, 2025), which explores the life and work of David Parr, a working-class decorative artist. Parr worked for the Cambridge firm, F. R. Leach and Sons, from 1871 to 1908 and was commissioned by prominent designers, including William Morris. In 1886, Parr moved to a modest terraced house in Cambridge, which he decorated over forty years with an extraordinary array of hand-painted designs. Parr’s house is now an independent museum.
The session is structured around a screening of the film, ten-minute response papers, and questions. Papers will examine: the concept of art-workmanship; the relationship between art and labour; the paint-maker as art-workman; the artist’s house museum; film as a form of curation; how gender, class and faith shaped the experience of art-workers (including women); the art-worker as a globalised and colonial phenomenon; the spaces of art-workmanship; using audio-visual practice for academic research; and working with museums. Speakers will draw on their own research, using the film as a basis for generating questions and prompting debate.
There will be an opportunity for panel attendees to book a tour of the David Parr House in the afternoon. See the digital programme for the booking link.
Session Speakers and format:
Screening of ‘The Man Who Painted His House’ introduced by Victoria Mills,
Victoria Mills, Birkbeck, University of London
Aesthetic Labour, Film and the House Museum
This paper considers how the film ‘The Man Who Painted His House’ invites a wider conversation about artistic legacy, the overlooked figure of the ‘art-workman’, and the relationship between art, labour, and devotion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It discusses the film’s key themes (time, layering, labour, pattern) and the usefulness of film as a methodology of microhistory, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between film, material culture and biography. It examines film as a form of curation and explores how the medium shapes and is shaped by the interconnected media ecologies of the house museum. The paper also reflects on the use of audio-visual practice in the context of academic research, on the wider research project to which the film belongs, and on working in partnership with a museum and a composer.
Claire Jones, University of Birmingham
At Home with Parr: Professional Art Workmanship and the Domestic Archive
Text and still images are often limited in capturing practices and spaces of making. This paper explores how film offers a distinct mode of working – historically, spatially and conceptually – by bringing together archival materials, family history, historical writings, visual demonstrations of technique, and multiple spaces. Unlike the printed page and the house-museum, film enables a mobility across Parr’s life and works that is part-linear and part-spatial. This is anchored by touchstones for the viewer – a house, a family, a workplace, a church, a home – all connected by the sustaining power of creative labour. Parr’s house, as revealed in the film, is simultaneously a place of professional art workmanship and the decorator’s own home. This is unusual, not least because Parr’s ownership enabled him to create complex interiors for his own benefit, rather than for clients. I will explore how the film connects these two traditionally separate domains: Parr’s salaried workplace and his private home. The paper will question the hierarchical separation of these spaces within histories of interiors, proposing instead a more integrated understanding of creative labour. Through this lens, the film becomes a prompt for reconnecting distinct spaces of art-workmanship, and for rethinking the boundaries between professional practice and domestic creativity.
Octavia Young, University of Cambridge
Artists, Artisans, and Housekeepers: Women’s Work at Morris & Co.
David Parr’s painted house is a remarkable testimony to how art, work, and the domestic are intertwined. The lives and careers of the female workers of Morris & Co. (1861-1940) offer another route to explore these themes and consider how they have been constructed around gendered ideologies.
The design firm Morris & Co. employed numerous women to make their celebrated products. These women worked in close proximity to the “artist-workmen” who wove tapestry or painted stained glass, but their labour was discussed in very different terms.
This paper will consider carpet knotting at the firm. The department was made up entirely of women, as carpet knotting was felt to be less creatively demanding than tapestry weaving. Despite this conceptual restriction, workers such as Eliza Merritt and Diana Penn produced striking, monumental works, such as the Bullerswood Carpet (1889). When their work is put into conversation with that of David Parr, we can explore how artistic labour was, in conception and practice, informed by gender, even as the works themselves seem to resist the value hierarchies imposed upon them.
Morris & Co.’s factory at Merton Abbey was a living space as well as a place of work. Apprentices lived on-site and were looked after by a housekeeper (as yet unidentified). Domestic work thus co-existed with, and enabled, art work. In drawing together these various examples of marginalised female labour, we can gain a fuller understanding of working-class artistic production in Victorian Britain.
Kate Nichols, University of Birmingham
Imagined dialogues between artworkers in South Asia and Birmingham in 1886
In the same year that David Parr moved into his Cambridge house, the Colonial and Indian Exhibition brought to London an array of products of art-labour, as well as exhibiting colonial art-workers themselves at work. It was a key moment in the construction of ideas about the ‘Indian artisan’ in Victorian imaginaries. The story, however, did not end in London. In December 1886, a new display opened at the heart of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG). It showcased over 240 objects – primarily metalwork – purchased from the Indian Department at the 1886 exhibition.
BMAG acquired these objects with two specific goals in mind: firstly, to educate Birmingham’s metalworking artisans in ‘correct taste’ and secondly, to give local manufacturers a sense of the metalwork objects in use in South Asia (with a view to Birmingham-made goods entering – and swamping – the South Asian market).
This response explores ideas about the art-worker as an increasingly globalised, and distinctly colonial phenomenon, and introduces the ways in which BMAG is today seeking to contend with these histories. Starting with two key objects exhibited at the 1886 exhibition by Mubarak Din and Sarwal Das, I examine the significance of these imagined dialogues between art workers in South Asia and Birmingham. What messages might Mubarak Din and Sarwal Das have sought to convey to their Birmingham art-worker counterparts? How were these objects received in Birmingham? And how might these imagined dialogues prompt new ways of interpreting these objects in Birmingham today?
Phillipa McDonnell, Lincoln Conservation, University of Lincoln
The Victorian Paint-Maker as Art-Workman
The history of decorative art is rife with hidden labour, and at its core lies the paint-maker: a quintessential Victorian art-workman. Descended from the apothecaries and ‘colourmen’ of earlier centuries, the paint-makers of the late-19th century occupied an industry on the cusp of transformation – from alchemy to chemistry, from craft to manufacture. Yet their labour, knowledge, and practices often remain invisible behind the celebrated designers and architectural commissions.
This paper examines the men, women and children employed by one of Britain’s principal architectural paint-manufacturers, Lewis Berger & Sons. Drawing on company archives (employment registers, recipe books, and wage data) and technical trade manuals, it reconstructs how these art-workmen were recruited, their skills valued or overlooked, and how class and gender shaped their working lives. It explores how recipes circulated within and beyond the firm, how labour shaped the materiality of the colour produced, and assesses the reliability of archival recipes as sources for understanding industrial colour manufacture.
By centring the labour of paint-makers, this study reframes architectural colour as the product of human, embodied labour, not merely raw materials or designer conception. It makes visible the art-workman whose labour transformed plants, animals and minerals into the palette of the Victorian built environment – and thereby challenges prevailing narratives of design, craftsmanship and decoration.
Maddie Hewitson, University of Birmingham
‘‘The Bible in Clay’: George Tinworth and the Religious Imagination of the Art-Workman’
This paper responds to David Parr’s work with a case study of his near contemporary, the ceramicist George Tinworth (1843–1913). Tinworth’s reputation as an ‘artisan workman’ was partly self-fashioned and partly constructed by his employer of nearly five decades, Doulton & Co.. This identity was rooted in his south London working-class origins, as the son of a wheelwright, and in his strict Dissenting faith, which held the Bible to be the literal word of God. He became known for creating terracotta panels depicting vivid biblical scenes. Working as the head of Doulton’s art pottery, a venture that blended artisanal ideals with commercial production for mass markets, Tinworth’s panels sought to reconcile spiritual devotion with industrial craft.
Tinworth had a prolific output, but this paper focuses on a single panel, Moses Overthrowing Pharaoh’s Host (c.1892), purchased by the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary. I will focus on the panel’s distinctive composition of relief figures and directly carved Scriptural quotations. The Exodus narrative of oppression and liberation would have resonated with the hospital’s working-class patients, many of whom were workers from the Potteries, perhaps uniquely attuned to the significance of both the story and the material from which it was made. In his unpublished autobiography, Tinworth claimed that his work continued the lineage of Phidias and the craftsmen of Solomon’s Temple, a genealogy that elevated craft and labour to the level of sacred vocation.
Examining this panel reveals how class and faith combined to shape Tinworth’s understanding of artistic labour. Tinworth centred ceramics as a medium of devotion. Through a demotic didacticism and, simultaneously, complex visual hermeneutics, his work invites reflection on religious art in popular contexts and the role of the decorative arts in Victorian devotional culture, showing how the art-workman could redefine the spiritual and social meanings of labour itself.