Notes
The son of a bookbinder, Shields was born in Hartlepool in 1833, moving with his family to London six years later. From an early age he nursed artistic ambitions, even studying briefly at the Mechanics' Institute and Somerset House, but in the light of his parents' abject poverty he was forced to undertake hack work for engravers and other lowly forms of industrial design. By 1848 this soul-destroying drudgery had taken him to Manchester, which was to remain his base for the best part of thirty years.
In Manchester Shields's fortunes gradually improved and he began to make his name with watercolours of rustic subjects in the manner of William Henry Hunt. These were often exhibited at the Royal Institution and acquired by local patrons, notably the businessman Frederick Craven, a great enthusiast for the English watercolour school. In the late 1850s his vision became more intense under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work he encountered at the Art Treasures Exhibition, held in Manchester in 1857, and in the famous Moxon edition of Tennyson published the same year. He himself blossomed as an illustrator, contributing to Once a Week and producing remarkable designs for two books that mirrored his own Calvinistic faith, Pilgrim's Progress (1861) and Defoe's History of the Plague (1862). These brought him new admirers, including Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin and D. G. Rossetti.
In May 1864 Shields went to London and met Rossetti, through whom he soon came to know the whole Pre-Raphaelite circle. The following year he was elected an associate of the Old Water-Colour Society, but it was not until 1876, after a visit to Italy, that he finally settled in the capital, finding a home in Regent's Park. Influenced by Rossetti, Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites' hero William Blake, his style changed dramatically, becoming more mannered and mystical in theme. Increasingly he devoted himself to large-scale decorative works, designing stained glass for Heaton, Butler and Bayne and collaborating with Alfred Waterhouse on glass and mosaics for the chapel at Eaton Hall, Cheshire. However, by far his most ambitious project was the cycle of murals that he painted 1888-1910 for the Chapel of the Ascension in the Bayswater Road, a building commissioned by Mrs Russell Gurney and designed by the young Herbert Horne. The murals illustrated a complex iconographical programme, in which Biblical subjects were mingled with more allegorical concepts. Like so much in Shields's career, they were the product of an intense struggle, not made any easier by a series of legal disputes and his failing health. By a terrible irony, the Chapel was completely destroyed during the Second World War.
Although the present picture is traditionally known as Knott Mill Fair , it probably represents Manchester's Old Clothes Market, or at least draws its inspiration from both events. Knott Mill Fair took place annually on Easter Monday in Castlefield, at the lower end of Deansgate, an area that had once been the site of the fort established by the Roman general Agricola. The Old Clothes Market was held nearby in Campfield every Monday and Saturday.
Shields himself was the source of the confusion since he used the term Knott Mill to refer to both the Fair and the Market. On 29 January 1864, for example, he recorded in his diary that he went 'to look for old velvet frock at Knott Mill'. The following 25 June he 'went down to Knott Mill Fair', while on 13 September he was at 'Knott Mill Fair... to buy old clothes'. None of these entries can refer to the Fair since none of the dates are identifiable as Easter Monday, while the consistent mention of old clothes strongly suggests that it was the Market he was attending. However, the following reminscence of a later date was clearly written with the 'real' fair in mind. It was, he recalled, 'my annual sketching festival, rich in character never seen but at these old fêtes, where Wombwell's Menagerie vied in attraction with the strolling players who strutted upon the platform in pasteboard armour and conventional robber costumes. In my early days I made acquaintance with Hanlon, father of the Hanlon brothers, gymnasts, afterwards famous on London boards. Their kindness to me during a sore crisis of my being deserves grateful remembrance. I tried to return it by designing a large poster for them.'
The attraction of these events for Shields, a young illustrator with a taste for social realism, is not hard to grasp. It was no doubt to dress his models that he wanted the old clothes, while the picturesqness of the scene itself must have held him spellbound. If Knoll Mill Fair was uniquely 'rich in character', so was the Old Clothes Market. When it was described in the Graphic on 17 December 1870, the writer observed that 'the vendors, as they sit by their piles of clothing, present a wonderful variety of subjects which would delight a painter's eye'. What is fascinating in Shields's case is that he revelled in these sights despite the puritanism that led him to shun the theatre on account of its louche associations. Clearly artistic imperatives carried more weight than scruples about moral contamination.
The focus of Shields's design is a subject that he must often have witnessed in the Old Clothes Market, a young woman contemplating the purchase of a dress, holding it against herself to gauge its effect while other women look on or offer advice. The building on the left is probably St Matthew's Church, built in Campfield to designs by Sir Charles Barry between 1822 and 1825. One of four new churches in the Manchester suburbs financed by the national Church Building Commission as an act of thanksgiving for the victory of Waterloo, St Matthew's was demolished in 1951. The Graphic article refers to its 'beautiful spire aloft in the smoky air', a description that Shields echoes in the Lowry-like chimneys, belching smoke, that appear in the picture's distance.
Shields first treated the theme as a watercolour in the late 1860s, no doubt, as Ernestine Mills observes, using 'many old costumes and properties' that he had purchased at the Market itself. Probably the picture called Sisterly Help that he exhibited at the OWCS in 1872 (no. 159), it now seems to be lost, although it was engraved in reverse to illustrate the Graphic article. Here, quite categorically, the design is entitled 'The Old Clothes Market, Camp Field, Manchester', Shields's authorship is not mentioned.
Our painting is a large oil version of the watercolour, and remarkably close it it in detail as we know it from the engraving. Although it is dated 1889, Ernestine Mills maintained that Shields did not complete the oil until 1893, working on it 'in spare hours' snatched from his labours on the Bayswater murals. Combining the modern anecdotal subject matter he had explored in the 1860s with the monumental scale and Rossettian idealisation of his later work, it has no real parallel in his oeuvre . Mills rightly describes it as 'the only work quite of its kind produced by the artist, and interesting as showing the extraordinary versatility of his genius'.
In the light of Shields's tendency to associate the Old Clothes Market with Knott Mills Fair, it seems likely that his decision to repeat the design on a larger scale was related to the fair's closure. Knott Mill, which reputedly dated from the time of Henry III, was one of several annual fairs that had been held in Manchester since time immemorial; the Dirt Fair, the Acres Fair and the Whitsunday Fair were others. In 1876, probably as a result of lobbying by local temperance groups, they were abruptly abolished by the City Council. In August the decision was ratified by the Home Secretary under powers granted by the Fairs Act of 1871, and a more decorous covered market was erected on the Knott Mill site the following year.
Shields may well have regretted the passing of something that had meant so much to him in earlier life, and painted the picture as a monument to what had disappeared forever. It is interesting that two related sheets of figure studies in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (nos. 1939, 6-7), are said to date from 1875. No evidence for this is given in the 2002 catalogue, but if correct it would seem that Shields was already planning the picture at this date, aware that his beloved Knott Hill Fair was under threat. Presumably the drawings were then put aside for some fourteen years until he eventually found time to execute the picture.
