Over the centuries, hundreds of artists worked in relative obscurity, painting away in humble studios to earn a meagre crust. But each of these carried their own ambitions, despite toiling in the shadows of established masters. Let's shine a light, through the medium of fiction, on these unsung heroes by considering a day in the life of an artist working in the circle of Isaac Sailmaker (1633-1721).
I do not suppose posterity will remember me. London hardly remembers me now, save for the colour-grinder on Lime Street who knows precisely how much ochre I use, and the tavern boy who keeps my preferred corner by the fire. But memory is of little concern when there is work to be done, and so I rise long before sunup, when the city is no more than a rumour beneath the fog.
My lodging is modest - a single room above a cooper’s yard off Tooley Street, not far from the river. All night long I hear the thud of staves being fitted into place, the iron bands hammered tight, the sharp rasp of tools against oak. Sometimes the men sing rough little tunes to keep time, sometimes they argue, sometimes they fall into weary silence. Their labour rises through the floorboards, steady as a tide, and I often imagine it working its way into my paintings - the rhythm of mallets echoing faintly in the rigging, the scent of worked timber settling into the painted masts. The river speaks through them, and they through me.
The room smells of varnish, damp plaster, and the walnuts I cracked last night to make ink. The chimney smokes in winter and refuses to draw, so I keep my sketches away from the hearth lest they curl at the edges. My hands are stiff, but I force them open - each day feels like storming a fortress built of one’s own bones.
The streets outside are little more than shifting shapes in the half-light. Porter carts rattle towards Billingsgate, and somewhere a woman quarrels through a window, her voice muffled by the fog. I walk the narrow path to my studio - a borrowed space shared with two other painters, both of whom possess more confidence than talent. They take commissions freely, even recklessly, leaving me with the quiet work: repairing torn canvases, sketching rigging for larger works, ghost-painting skies for men who sign their names boldly. Still, it is work. London does not feed idle hands.
When I reach the studio, the lamps are still burning. I paid the boy extra to keep them lit through the night so that I could continue the underpainting. The canvas waiting on my easel belongs to a merchant who wishes to show his father’s ship in battle - though whether the battle occurred or was merely imagined, he did not care. He wants valour; I must provide it.
I begin, as always, with the horizon. A thin line of grey to divide the world between water and air. Then the slow layering of the sky: strokes of umber, lead-white, a touch of soot black. Not the skies of the van de Veldes - theirs are too luminous for my temperament - but something heavier, something truer to the world I know. It is a sky that remembers coal smoke and long winters.
Around midmorning, Sailmaker himself passes through. He does not come to see me, he rarely does, but visits the senior painter across the room. Yet he pauses at my work, just for a moment. His eyes trace the rigging I laid in yesterday, the faint sweep of the main sail. He nods once, the kind of nod that could be praise or mere acknowledgement of labour done. I pretend not to notice, though my chest feels lighter after he leaves. To earn even a silent nod from him is to know one has not wasted one’s hours.
The studio warms slowly with bodies, breath, and argument. Someone complains about the price of linseed oil; another quarrels with his brother over a missed commission. I try to shut them out, focusing on the floundering Barbary ship at the right of my canvas. I add tiny figures, hardly more than strokes of the brush, clinging to wreckage. I wish I did not feel compelled to paint them with tenderness. The buyer will never notice. But I do. These are men slipping beneath the surface; they deserve a final gesture of humanity.
When hunger becomes too insistent, I step out into the clamour of midday. Bread and ale from the corner tavern. I sit alone. A group of dockworkers argue boisterously about the latest Mediterranean convoy, one claims to have seen with his own eyes the corsair ships lurking near the Straits. I listen quietly. One must study men if one is to paint the sea that shapes them.
Back at the studio, I paint until the edges blur, until the ship feels as though it could lift itself from the canvas and push out into the painted sea. I am careful with the final touches on the English ensign, the crisp cross of St George. It must be clear, for buyers want to see not just a ship, but an identity. A statement of who we are becoming.
When at last I step back, the painting is not yet finished, but it is alive in its own way. And though no one will know my name when it hangs on someone else’s wall, I take comfort in the small truth that my hand shaped the waves, the smoke, the trembling rigging. My life, in its quiet anonymity, has left its mark.
Night settles fully as I lock the studio. The air is colder now, tinged with frost. I walk home through narrow lanes lit by the occasional yellow lantern. London mutters to itself in the darkness, its chimneys breathing like sleeping giants.
I think of the sea as I climb the stairs, of the ships I have painted and the ones I will never see. My hands ache again, but it is an honest ache, the ache of a man who works, who persists, who leaves behind traces even if no one will know to look for them.
Tomorrow, I will return before dawn. The sky will wait. The sea will wait. And I, forgotten by the world, but not by my craft, will paint again.