Foster 888

Painting cabinet, c.1790s, formerly belonging to Robert Home.

Fruitwood. A pair of panelled doors opening to thirteen shallow drawers, with inset silver labels lettered A to M and small drop handles. The drawers contain a number of items connected with the painting of portrait miniatures. Brass carrying handles to sides.

Cabinet: h.40 cm by w.42 cm by d.29 cms., standing on a small Pembroke table.

Bequeathed by E.J. Westby, descendant of Robert Home, in 1996, along with miscellaneous papers relating to the artist and his family (WD4431(Additional)), and WD4426-4431.

For Robert Home see F869.

The cabinet contains a wide range of items to do with drawing, although not all would have belonged to Robert Home. Two of his sons were fine artists, and the cabinet was probably in use by other family members until fairly recently. The following items appear to be the earliest and certainly some would have belonged to Home:

Drawer D contains two large and two small oval metal mounts and two small frames.

Drawer E has two pieces of ivory and a small square wooden palette.

Drawer F contains a notebook, with index, in Robert Home’s hand, giving recipes for gilding, varnishes, sizes etc. The little hand-made book is made up from paper with a Rome watermark and must have been started when Home was in Italy between 1773 and 1778. In addition there are a number of loose recipes for various processes in different hands, including directions for making a transparent screen, mending china and glass and making prints of plants using oiled paper blackened with lamp smoke. In the same drawer is a size guide for prepared ivory leaves from L. Vincent, Soho Square.

Drawer G contains a wooden tray with storage compartments for colours.

Drawer H contains one large, three medium, and five smaller oval glasses, one small oval blue glass and two small circular glasses for miniature frames plus an oval gold frame and fillet and a ground glass for grinding colours. One of the small circular glasses may be a magnifying or spectacle lens. Robert Home wrote to his daughter asking her to send him two pairs of spectacles before she joined him in India.

Drawer I is fitted out with a set of draughtsman’s instruments and ivory rulers, inscribed ‘Troughton. London’ (Edward Troughton, 1753-1836, Mathematical Practitioner), plus a small tortoiseshell handled penknife and two boxwood rules.

Drawer J is divided into four sections and contains a tiny ivory palette; two square marble sheets, one in two pieces, the other incomplete; pieces of conte chalk and charcoal; a white china paint mixing dish and miscellaneous pieces of ivory.

Drawer K is also subdivided, with a wooden tray for cakes of watercolour pigment, each sectioned labelled in Home’s hand with its colour. The paints are in most cases unused and embossed with the makers’ names: ‘T Reeves Original Superfine Colours; Reeves and Woodyer, Original Superfine Colour Manufacturers. Holborn Bridge’ and’ Newman’s Soho Square’. In addition there are seven brush heads with four porcupine quill brush handles, and an india-rubber labelled ‘Manufactured by G.N. & Co. N.Y. 1852.’

Drawer L is fitted with circular cutouts for colour pans and contains four large china dishes, two smaller ones and five tiny ivory dishes.

Drawer M is fitted with two trays, one with variously shaped sections containing eight unused watercolour blocks from ‘Winsor & Newton Ld. London England.’ The other tray has circular holes to hold glass jars of ground pigment and inks. There are six jars in the drawer. In addition there are two glasses for grinding colours, a glass pestle, and a brass set square.