£ 6,500.00
Sarah Biffin
£ 6,500
This handbill advertises an exhibition of the artist Sarah Biffin. It has survived in an outstanding state of preservation, constituting an integral component of Biffin’s artistic legacy. The advertisement relates to her exhibition at Bartholomew fair, one of the capital’s largest fairs which was held annually over four days; thousands of visitors attended every year to witness entertainment and spectacles from acrobatics and tightrope walkers to animals and puppet shows. It is in this environment that Biffin began her artistic career.
Biffin was born into a farming family in Somerset in 1784, and her baptism records show that she was ‘born without arms and legs’. Teaching herself to write and draw from a young age, Biffin rose to fame as an artist and established a professional career as a portrait painter. Throughout her long and successful career, she travelled extensively, took commissions from royalty, and recorded her own likeness through exquisitely detailed self-portraits.
She began her career in 1804, at...
This handbill advertises an exhibition of the artist Sarah Biffin. It has survived in an outstanding state of preservation, constituting an integral component of Biffin’s artistic legacy. The advertisement relates to her exhibition at Bartholomew fair, one of the capital’s largest fairs which was held annually over four days; thousands of visitors attended every year to witness entertainment and spectacles from acrobatics and tightrope walkers to animals and puppet shows. It is in this environment that Biffin began her artistic career.
Biffin was born into a farming family in Somerset in 1784, and her baptism records show that she was ‘born without arms and legs’. Teaching herself to write and draw from a young age, Biffin rose to fame as an artist and established a professional career as a portrait painter. Throughout her long and successful career, she travelled extensively, took commissions from royalty, and recorded her own likeness through exquisitely detailed self-portraits.
She began her career in 1804, at twenty years old, when a man named Mr. Dukes offered her employment as part of a travelling act: ‘it was suggested to my Parents that a comfortable living might be obtained by Public Exhibition, and an engagement was arranged for that purpose.’[1] Biffin left her family home to travel across the country with Dukes; she signed a contract with her new employer and began a tirelessly itinerant lifestyle, exhibiting at fairs in regional towns and cities across the length and breadth of Britain.
Emblazoned with the artist’s name in bold red letters, handbills such as this were distributed to publicity advertise her arrival at every town and city she visited. Employing sensationalist rhetoric, the broadside advertises Biffin’s mastery in a multitude of creative pursuits, including writing, sewing, drawing, and painting, stating the time and place where Biffin’s exhibition could be viewed - in this case, the Bartholomew fair.
Not only are bills such as these integral resources in researching Biffin’s early career and tracing her itinerant lifestyle, but they also chart her exceptional professional progression as an artist. By 1811, her professional status as a miniature painter is emblazoned in bold letters across her printed paraphernalia, evidenced in other bills from this period.
[1] Sarah Biffin, ‘An Interesting Narrative and proposals for a print of Miss Beffin to be dedicated, by permission to HRH the Princess Augusta’, p.1, 942 BIF/10, Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool.
