Vincent Brooks, Day & Son
Vincent Brooks, Day & Son was a major British lithographic firm most widely known for reproducing the weekly caricatures published in Vanity Fair magazine.
[6] After leaving school, Vincent Brooks spent time on John Minter Morgan's farm estate near Uxbridge before returning to London to join his father in business.
[11] The Leighton Brothers, who would go on to produce the pictures featured in the Illustrated London News, left their Red Lion Square premises in 1857.
[7] Staying in the Covent Garden area of London, two years later, during 1859, Vincent Brooks moved to larger premises in Chandos Street.
London's International Exhibition of 1862 saw Vincent Brooks awarded a gold medal for his Lithograph of Mulready's Choosing the Wedding Gown.
[12] The same year Vincent Brooks produced one of his finest works in the form of a chromo-lithograph of the Lumley Portrait of William Shakespeare.
[13] During the 1860s, Vincent Brooks acquired plant and premises of Messrs J.S.Hodgson & Son of High Street Lambeth and he embarked in letterpress and colour block printing.
The company's winning entry was reproduced by one of their leading chromo-lithographic artists, William B. Bunney, and the firm's success led to many years of work from Punch.
Vincent's eldest son Alfred William Brooks had preceded his younger brother into the firm but 'never had very robust health'[2] and by 1901 had left the business.
[17] Later that year the firm purchased William Willis’ remarkable Aniline process of direct photography,[2] which reproduced engineering 'blue prints' keeping the original positive image.
[20] Financially assisted by the Henry Graves, the Printseller of Pall Mall,[2] Vincent Brooks bought their property, name, and goodwill in an agreement dated 25 March 1867.
[28] In 1851, Day & Son was commissioned by Matthew Digby Wyatt, known for his work as an architect, to produce the book The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, an imposing imperial folio in two volumes which illustrates a selection of items from the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Such a grandiose production must have called into play a significant proportion of Day's resources, including skilled craftsmen and lithographers such as Francis Bedford, J.A.
Kossuth was in exile from his homeland and this attempt at re-establishing a separate Hungarian currency lead to both him and Day & Son to be charged in the courts with having 'levied war upon the Emperor of Austria'.
He refused to leave the board and after the resulting row he left the company and for a short time started business in Cockspur Street.
A later obituary published in a trade journal praises Vincent Brooks's handling of the situation stating that "the way in which he combined together the two businesses testified to his energy and experience, and the way in which they formed a harmonious whole, were a record of his remarkable tact and kindness.
[40] At a time when Punch magazine was still primarily using wood blocks[41] this 'process of chromolithography and wedding it to a new kind of visual humour helped to bring about a revolution in taste, preparing the way for the acceptance of less strictly representational art forms and breaching the fortifications of academic realism.
[40]Back in Chandos Street the firm had received a Command from the Queen to execute lithographs of Kenneth MacLeay's watercoloured Highlanders of Scotland.
[49] Frederick and his older brother Alfred appeared in the bankruptcy courts in 1898[50] and on 14 May that year the company was incorporated as Vincent Brooks, Day & Son Ltd.[51] During this time the firm's premises in Gate Street were badly damaged by fire.
[53] This decision was reversed in 1911 with the arrival of editor Thomas Allinson who, struggling with the now failing magazine, wished to revert to the process whereby 'the most satisfactory results' had been obtained.
[56] The start of the century also saw Frederick Vincent Brooks write an article for the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica[57] and become the official printer of the Senefelder Club.
Wilfred remarked that 'although there were older firms in existence that were now practising lithography, no other house had been established as lithographic printers for so long a period as theirs.'
He expressed his own sentiments in a speech soon after, The day, I hope, will come when quality and quantity will come together in happy alliance and the most ordinary commodities will benefit in form as well as in substance.
Ugliness is at all times and in all places to be vigorously rejected; it is a coarsening and debasing influence, a clear sign of deterioration in a nations life.
[51] The official Receiver concluded his report stating that 'the Receiver for the debenture holder is continuing the business in the hopes of disposing of it as a going concern, but he states that having regard to the specialised and somewhat ancient type of plant he doubts whether the assets will realise sufficient to discharge the debenture liability, particularly bearing in mind the somewhat heavy claims of the preferential creditors.
Up until his retirement in the 1990s Sidney Reed continued to run the company on a small-scale basis using outside printers, notably Round Square Ltd, to produce the work he had created.
Round Square Ltd took ownership of Vincent Brooks, Day & Son after Sidney Reed's retirement but went into liquidation themselves some time prior to 1999.
