Box of artist's watercolours made by Reeves & Co., given as a school prize.

Polished wooden box containing solid cakes of watercolour pigment, paint brushes, and a colour tray, with a school prize certificate pasted in the lid.

Given by Imogen Stewart

Ernest Cullum was the grandfather of the donor, and he was born on June 27th 1864, making him 15 when he won the paintbox as a school prize.

Thomas and William Reeves had introduced a new kind of watercolour pigment in the form of hard and dry compressed moulded cakes in the 1780s. Other manufacturers started producing them and they remained popular with certain artists until the late19th century. A disadvantage was that (like Chinese ink blocks used for calligraphy) the cakes or blocks needed rubbing down with water to form a suspension of watercolour before they could be used. The blocks are finely detailed and the moulds used to form them must have been made by experienced modellers. (Some Chinese ink blocks have high quality modelling as well and may well have been the prototype for Reeves's invention.) One side of the British-made blocks of colour usually had an appropriate emblematic figure or device, while the back had the name of the manufacturer; sometimes the name of the colour was moulded in as well. They are reminiscent in their detail of the Tassie casts of gems, which were perfected about 1766, although made by a completely different process. However, the first stage of the mould making process, carving a wax original, might have been the same.

E.1351-2001