In 1996, during an audit of works stored at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery's Print Room, a remarkable discovery was made. In a drawer labeled “U”—for “Unknown”—the museum's archivists discovered a portfolio containing fifty-one watercolor portraits of British “street people” in various occupations and activities. Fascinatingly, twenty-five of these paintings, as David Hansen notes, identify these people by name: “Black Charley, shoemaker”; “Thomas Archbold, fishmonger”; and “Mary (or Diana) Croker, mat woman” to name just a few. For many years, the artist who had painted these people was thought to have been George Scharf, a nineteenth-century painter of London street life. Only when the museum's curators inspected the paintings more closely did they find the signature of the actual artist: a long-neglected portraitist called John Dempsey.
David Hansen's immaculately researched Dempsey's People: A Folio of British Street Portraits 1824–1844 is both an exhibition catalogue and a scholarly publication. It contains all of Dempsey's watercolor portraits that were found in the portfolio (plus one more that was discovered at the National Library of New Zealand) and which were the subject of a significant exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Australia, in 2017. Hansen masterfully places both the artist and his subjects in their historical and cultural contexts while also detailing Dempsey's life story and where his work fits into nineteenth-century visual culture. Hansen conveys a wonderful feeling of a lost history being recuperated, and the dual narrative Hansen tells of both Dempsey and the street people is both insightful and extremely valuable.
John Dempsey was born in Bath in either 1802 or 1803 and died in Bristol in 1877. He traveled around various British towns and cities to paint the “local characters” of each one. Each portrait is a fascinating glimpse into the life and times of one of these characters, which often include, thanks to Hansen's extensive research and Dempsey's habit of identifying the sitter, a short biography of the subject. Take, for example, “Tommy Raeburn, the Ayeshire hermit” (c. 1830s), whose remarkable appearance made him something of a minor celebrity. And it is easy to see why: as depicted by Dempsey, Raeburn has long matted hair, a grey beard, a blue-and-white hat, and a dark blue jacket covered in patchwork. Incredibly, Hansen informs us that when Raeburn died he left an estate of £2,400, which is over £100,000 in today's money.
There is a real energy and freshness to these paintings, and we demand to know more about these characters and their lives. It is easy to understand why this project has been a labor of love for Hansen: researching these people and Dempsey must have been rewarding, and Hansen's passion for his subjects is evident on every page. In this sense, Dempsey's People is also the story of Hansen and an exemplary instance of practicing art history “from below.” Taken together as a body of work, Dempsey's portraits provide us with a unique and valuable insight into not only the visual culture of the nineteenth century but also a group of people who were rarely painted: the working poor. Dempsey's work paves the way for such Victorian landmarks as Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851).
Dempsey's People is one of the most beautiful and well-produced books that I have recently encountered. The pages are thick, and the full-color image reproductions are of an exemplary standard. Attractive details run throughout the book, not least the dust jacket, which, if you remove it, folds out to become a large poster of Dempsey's portrait of “Copeman, gardener, Great Yarmouth” (date unknown). Moreover, when the dust jacket is removed, it reveals an embossed image of Dempsey's “Billy the match man, Liverpool” (c. 1820s). These details are characteristic of the thought and time that has gone into the design of the book overall.
In short, the National Portrait Gallery and Hansen should be proud of the quality of this book, both from a design perspective and the substantial contribution to knowledge that it represents. Dempsey and his subjects may have lived relatively unimportant lives compared to the subjects we traditionally associate with portraiture in the nineteenth century (the aristocracy, royalty, politicians), but the greatest achievement of Hansen's work is that, two centuries later, he has made these forgotten lives significant.
