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Brookes' Portfolio Manufactory (McKechnie Section 3)

This concern, recorded by Jackson (Dictionary) simply as 'Brooks', is listed because the proprietor, Henry Brookes, was associated at one period with Abraham Jones (q.v.), an artist who worked on glass and on paper.

One advertisement issued by the firm, dated 1785 by Jackson, refers to the making of portfolios and the sale of instruments for taking profiles, not to the sale of profiles themselves:

Likenesses. To the Ingenious World. There is now to be had a Mathematical Instrument, by which any Person for the expence of Half a Guinea, may reduce Miniature Profiles of themselves or a thousand different persons, in the most correct manner. In short, it answers every intent of not having any of its complicated difficulties and not one-eighth of the expence and are so portable as to lay in the compass of a foot rule. The Public are assured that the above are the original ones, but their great utility and demand for them has induced persons to make very imperfect copies, for if they are not put together with mathematical exactness they can never work true.

All orders sent to Portfolio Manufactory, No. 28, Coventry Street (the Golden Head, next house to the corner of Oxendon Street) will be executed, with engraved directions so as to render the operation perfectly safe.

N.B. The above house is the only manufactory for portfolios in London, where there may be had all sorts of prints, drawings, writing, &c. &c. to any size. Likewise a Collection of Modern Drawings.

If Brookes's `mathematical instrument' was as complex as his syntax, it must indeed have needed some `engraved directions' for its use. Another advertisement does offer profiles, but since these were apparently taken by Abraham Jones, it is quoted in the entry on him.

During the period with which we are concerned (1785 onwards) the north side of Coventry Street was in the parish of St James's; the south side, in that of St Martins-in-the-Fields. An examination of the rate books for St Martin's shows that one Henry Brookes paid the rates at 28 Coventry Street for at least fifteen years: 1785-1800. It was therefore Henry Brookes who ran this business, and who, during the 1780s, worked with Abraham Jones, who, while he was living at 7 Coventry Street, was working almost opposite to Brookes' Portfolio Manufactory.

It is not clear from the wording of Brookes's advertisement which house was the Golden Head, but we know from Horley's Plans of Westminster (London, 1819) that the house on the corner of Coventry Street and Oxendon Street was No. 29.