1688 Tempest “Maids buy a Mop”, The Cryes of the City of London, engraving, trades

‘Maids buy a Mop’

Very early strong as dark impression, cut to image and mounted to old card. This fact is considered in the price. 

Overall dimension: 27.5 x 13.6 cm

A mop seller standing in profile to left, balancing a bundle of mops on her head.

From and early impression of the Laroon’s The Cryes of the City of London, 1688.

According to the ESTC "The plates were probably engraved by John Savage; some authorities, however, attribute part of the engraving to Laroon or to Tempest."

Both Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe owned copies of Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London. Among the very first Cries to be credited to an individual artist, Laroon’s “Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life” were on a larger scale than had been attempted before, which allowed for more sophisticated use of composition and greater detail in costume. For the first time, hawkers were portrayed as individuals not merely representative stereotypes, each with a distinctive personality revealed through their movement, their attitudes, their postures, their gestures, their clothing and the special things they sold. Marcellus Laroon’s Cries possessed more life than any that had gone before, reflecting the dynamic renaissance of the City at the end of the seventeenth century.

Previous Cries had been published with figures arranged in a grid upon a single page, but Laroon gave each subject their own page, thereby elevating the status of the prints as worthy of seperate frames. And such was their success among the bibliophiles of London, that Laroon’s original set of forty designs – reproduced here – commissioned by the entrepreneurial bookseller Pierce Tempest in 1687.