This is a fascinating trade card, engraved on the recto, and with a letterpress list of ‘Signs ready painted’ on the verso. It has been used as a receipt. The date is badly formed but is almost certainly 1757, five years before the legislation banning signs and, coincidentally, five years before the last houses were demolished on Old London Bridge to make way for increased traffic on the bridge.

Note the traditional three-dimensional signs: the bushes, bacchuses and grapes for inns, the tobacco rolls for tobacconists and the sugar loaves for grocers.

Many of the signs listed on the verso are readily associated with inns, but several had become associated with other trades: the Cross Keys with braziers; the Unicorn with chemists and linen-drapers; the Elephant with comb-makers; the Pineapple with confectioners; the Green Man and the Peacock with dyers; the Angel with feather-bed makers and mercers; the Wheatsheaf with haberdashers and linen drapers; the Woolpack with haberdashers; the Lamb with hosiers and milliners; the Hen and Chickens, and the Three Nuns with linen-drapers, etc. John Fairfield himself works from The Painter’s Arms.

JJ Trade Cards 19 (14a) (purchased 2000)