John Dempsey’s portraits of down and outs in 18th-century Britain

It is not often that there is an exhibition of portraits of nobodies, people who have made no impact on history.

Billy the match man, Liverpool, 1844, by John Dempsey

It is not often that we enter an exhibition of portraits of people who are completely unknown­, who have made no impact on history, have left no evidence that they ever had a thought that was truly their own or performed an action worthy of memory. An exhibition, one might say, of nobodies, except that each of these people obviously was somebody and had their own stories, their own moments of happiness, perhaps even glimpses of success, as well as failure, loss, destitution and bereavement.

Everyone, even the most unfortunate, has experiences of joy, pleasure and carefree enjoy­ment in their early lives, but we encounter most of these figures long after any such intim­ations of happiness have faded away. All these men and women are middle-aged or elder­ly, and most of them are poor, often extreme­ly poor.

The artist who painted them was a little-known and very minor figure called John Dempsey; so obscure is Dempsey, indeed, that we know little more than the approximate dates of his birth and death (1802/03-77). We know that he flourished, as art historians say, in the 1830s and 40s: that is, the last years of Georgian England and the first decade of the reign of Queen Victoria. And yet we have a vivid sense of the world that he depicted, thanks to the remarkable folio of drawings gifted to the Tasmanian Museum in 1956, here accompanie­d by David Hansen’s scholarly catalogue, which casts a fascinating light on so many forgotten lives.

Why did Dempsey choose to paint all these people? Most of them were obviously far too poor to pay for their portraits and, in any case, as we can see, the artist retained them for himself. On the other hand he was presumably not wealthy enough to produce such a series of sketches simply for his own amusement. They were not studies for more elaborate compositions, because he does not appear to have painted anything more ambitious; and nor do they seem to be intended for publication, if only because they are so numerous.

Most likely, though, as the exhibition sugges­ts, he collected these portraits of characters that he met in his travels as part of an album that could be shown to clients to demon­strate his proficiency as a painter. So here we have a sample of what must have been the bottom of the British market for portrait painting almost two centuries ago.

At the top, a couple of generations earlier, Joshua Reynolds had retained his famous full-length portrait of Commodore Keppel striding along a beach in the pose of the Apollo Belvedere, and hung it in the sitting room of his elegantly appointed studio. There, as the great and the good waited for the master to emerge from his painting room to greet them, they could contemplate the masterful likeness, combined with painterly flair and composit­ional grandeur, that they might expect from his hand.

At the other extreme, in a contrast worthy of a Blackadder episode, we imagine Dempsey’s potential clients thumbing through a volume of the very sketches we see around us in the exhib­ition. But this, too, leaves us with questions. Even the poorest man or woman able to pay for a portrait, however inexpensive, would be at least lower middle class or working class. with something like a proper job. And yet many of Dempsey’s subjects are in effect beggars. Only a handful of the portraits here, like that of the fishmonger, are unambiguously of individuals capable of paying for their likeness.

Crossing-sweeper, London, no date, John Dempsey. Credit: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

What this presumably tells us is that Dempsey’s clients were more impressed by vivid naturalism than by anything else, and that they were not put off by seeing that naturalism exempli­fied in the figure of a beggar. They evidently subscribed to Oliver Cromwell’s famous preference for a “warts and all” rendering of his own features. Still, the use of portraits of the destitute to demonstrate one’s skill to poor customers remains rather puzzling, because it would have reminded the latter how easy it was to slip from a very modest but still respectable station into indigence in an age without any real form of social security.

Billy the match man, Liverpool, 1844, by John Dempsey

There were certain institutions for the very poor, but no one wanted to be rounded up and taken to the workhouse. So, as we see at the begin­ning of the exhibition, beggars would seek to practise the most minimal forms of commerce to avoid being arrested as vagrants. Match-selling was a prominent example, and here we find a whole series of men and women carrying baskets of the old sulphur-tipped matches — bright yellow patches in the paintings — which could be lit on any slightly rough surface, even on the sole of a boot.

Even more desperately poor people would stand at crossings and sweep the street clean of rubbish and horse manure for ladies and gentle­men on foot, collecting small tips. All of these sweepers are of a certain age, and they have clearly not been doing this all their lives. This is where each of these images conceals a story that we will in most cases never know: they must have been in employment of some kind once — as labourers, factory workers, domestic servants, prostitutes — and it is because­ they are too old to carry on their original trade that they are reduced to penury.

There are old soldiers too, many demob­ilised after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, and by now middle-aged. Most of these men were unskilled before they joined the army and they found it hard to get work when they left: an unskilled young man will usually be preferred, even today, to an unskilled older man. Some, as we see here, were crippled or had lost an eye. One, surprisingly, seems to be something of a dandy, still in his dashing­ ­uniform, but also clearly somehow deranged.

Little John of Colchester, a poor lunatic c. 1823 John Dempsey. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

There are a couple of images of the actually mad, includin­g the sinister portrait of A Maniac­ and the pathetic image of Little John of Colchester, a poor lunatic. And alcoholism would certainly have been a factor in many cases. The manufacture of gin had been deregul­ated in the middle of the 18th century, leading to a catastrophic epidemic of drunkenness among the poor: the kind of extreme inebriatio­n that made work impossible and led to permanent brain damage and the starvation of families.

Hogarth had deplored this calamity in his print Gin Lane (1751), and he had contrasted the dereliction of this scene with the happiness of Beer Street (1751), reminding us, however, that London water was unsafe to drink: city people drank beer all day and even if it was not particularly strong it meant that everyone, men, women and children, was permanently tipsy if not actually drunk.

We can see why coffee houses sprang up as places for business (Lloyds of London), journ­alism and intellectual discussion, because they must have been among the few places in which people were actually alert. Meanwhile, the wealthier classes had adopted tea as a daily habit, which meant that they could at least be sober between meals. But tea was initially an expensive luxury, and it was only around Dempsey’s time that it began to be cheap enough to become, eventually, the universal and even quintessentially British beverage. And for the first time it became possible to demand that workers, soldiers and servants be sober while on duty.

Poor diet and the abuse of alcohol, as well as age, no doubt, help to account for the sad physical state of almost all these people. Illness and disease would play a part too: this was the great age of tuberculosis, a disease encouraged by crowding in damp urban tenements. No one looks well or healthy, and no one appears to be happy. They seem rather to endure their lot in a state somewhere between stoicism and stupe­faction. Rarely do we see the suggestion of a smile, and even then the expression behind the smile is ambiguous.

The most striking thing about their physical presence, in fact, is the shapelessness caused by wearing too many layers of clothes, mostly cast-offs and second-hand suits and coats that have been repeatedly patched. This is, on the face of it, the consequence of living in a climate that is relatively cold for much of the year. And it is probably safe to say that those many layers of clothes were not often removed and washed, nor were the bodies underneath bathed and cared for.

Not only were these individuals then almost certainly extremely malodorous, but they would have been in every respect in poor physical shape. We can see why this was the time when social reformers started to recommend regimes of physical exercise, which were soon adopted in schools and armies, and why public schools began to introduce sport as part of the curriculum.

Personal health and hygiene, as well as public­ infrastructure, were still in every way far behind the standards of antiquity; it was from this time onwards that rapid progress was made in providing clean drinking water and building sewerage systems, as well as introducing public and private toilets and baths.

Sea bathing too became increasingly popular, and one of the few works in the exhibition that is not a portrait illustrates the cumbersome procedure of the day. Customers entered a so-called bathing machine, which was in effect an enclosed cart on wheels, in which women at least changed into a sort of full-length shift. Then the machine was wheeled out into a foot or more of water and the bather would walk down a set of steps straight into the water.

Bathing, in this sense, had nothing to do with swimming and although there were people who could swim — Lord Byron, earlier in the ­century, was said to have been an excellent swimmer — most of the customers of the bathing machines almost certainly could not.

Perhaps for this reason they were assisted by staff, naturally of the same sex as the customer, who were known as “dippers”. Here we see two bulky matrons who look almost as though they are drowning an unfortunate bather; apparently it was common for the dippers to plunge you quickly underwater and then pull you out again, which is also why there are two of them.

This strange vignette, which must have caught Dempsey’s eye as a picturesque sight, is almost the only image in which any human inter­action is taking place. This momentary digressio­n into anecdote makes it all the more striking that the rest of the exhibition is devoted to solitary portraits, and that is ultimately even more melancholy than their age and poverty.

All of these people must once have had famil­y,­ friends, probably even children, and yet all of them now seem to face the world alone and silent in a social vacuum.

Dempsey’s people, National Portrait Gallery, until October 22