James Ayres has long been recognised for his pioneering exploration of the practices of traditional artisan painters and sculptors in Britain. Books such as British Folk Art (1977) and English Naïve Painting, 1750–1900 (1980) drew attention to works that had been all but overlooked by art historians, concerned as these were principally with ‘high’ art rather than with the imagery produced by and for the people prior to the age of commercialised popular culture. In the present study he draws on much of this earlier work, but focuses in particular on how painters and sculptors received their training prior to the establishment of academies and art schools in this country. He also extends his brief to consider artisan training in North America during the period.

Ayres’s main point is that image-makers in those days learned their trade via the guilds, which regulated the ‘art and mystery’ of every craft. Nor were all the artists trained in this manner simple craftsmen. Great painters such as Hogarth and Gainsborough also began their careers in this way. The book is clearly laid out, dealing first with the structure of the guilds, and then looking in detail at the specific kinds of image-making processes that were developed by individual crafts. The result is an invaluable and comprehensive survey of a wide variety of the practices involved. The only serious omission that I could find here was the relatively scant treatment of training for printmakers. Although Ayres touches on the processes of engraving and cutting image plates in the section dealing with sculpture, he gives little consideration of the way printing flourished as a craft.

Ayres is particularly good at explaining how the different types of images that evolved related to the ways that guilds controlled the use of different kinds of materials. Hence he makes clear that the ‘Painter-Stainers Company’ of London brought together two separate practices. Painting was associated with plumbing, through the use of lead-based paints. Staining was similarly connected to plastering, through the use of water-based distemper for decorating walls. The two groups were amalgamated in London in 1502 when the ‘Painter-Stainers Company’ was formed, but the distinction between the practices remained. Ayres makes clear that there were also many other guilds that covered aspects of image making in relation to the materials they worked with. Silversmiths, for example, instructed their apprentices in metal engraving – a practice that started the young Hogarth, apprenticed to the ‘silver plate engraver Ellis Gamble’, on the first steps in his career as an artist. In his methodical journey through all the practices Ayres shows a wealth of research, principally derived from the rich resources now available concerning the history of the London guilds. One of the significant strengths of this book is a collection of seventeen appendices of documents relating to various aspects of craft practices.

Following his overview of the different trade practices Ayres has a section on the growth of academies. This begins in the eighteenth century. They began to fill a gap in the apprenticeship of craftsmen. While traditional crafts would treat the preparation and handling of paints and other materials, they did not teach the perceptual skills developed by drawing. The academies provided figure drawing, yet, in Ayres’s view, this is the beginning of the rot. For with the academies came the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and the gradual removal of the image maker from the craft tradition to become an ‘artist’, with social and intellectual ambitions of a quite different order. Much of his conclusion is spent attacking what he calls the ‘retreat into a milieu of aesthetic and academic tenets’ (p 451). He is well aware that this is part of a larger social movement, the development of early capitalism – which he characterises as ‘consumerism’ and the removal of certain professions from a craft background to middle-class status. The rise of academies – epitomised by the founding of the Royal Academy in London in 1768 – hastened this process. At the same time the new commercialism led to the production of ready-made paints and other artistic materials. This meant that the painter and sculptor no longer needed to have a craft apprenticeship to learn how to make and use the materials of their trade. They could buy them in the shop, or indeed, in our own time, online. Opinions will differ about the extent to which these changes constitute the tragedy Ayres describes. Yet there is no doubt that this work is a major achievement and provides an incomparable guide to the training of painters and sculptors prior to the modern consumerist age.