Art History From Below: The Demotic Portraits of a Journeyman Facemaker

In 1996 a folio of 51 watercolour portraits of Regency street people - was discovered in the print room of the Tasmanian Museum, in a drawer of a plan press marked ‘U’ for ‘Unknown’. One was found to be signed - by an itinerant portraitist and silhouettist named John Dempsey. Across the couple of generations prior to the widespread adoption of photography in the 1850s, a small army of artisan painters such as Dempsey supplied an expanding lower middle class market with modest miniature images of themselves and their families.

The Hobart folio was in all likelihood assembled for demonstration purposes; by depicting well-known street people, the most visible ‘remarkable characters’ of each town that he visited, Dempsey could the more easily convince potential clients of his capacity to capture a ‘speaking likeness.’ In addition to their haunting, highly-detailed naturalism, what is special about these works is that almost all are inscribed with a date and place of execution, and more than half bear the name of the sitter. This has permitted research into the lives of these people not as regional or occupational types, but as individual human beings. Between the artist’s intense, searching observation and the biographical and socio-historical facts discovered in the archives, Dempsey’s People brings vividly to life the conditions of the working class in England during the 1820s.