Vincent Brooks, Day & Son
| Private | |
| Industry | Printing |
| Genre | Lithography |
| Fate | Wound up/acquired |
| Founded | 1867, London, United Kingdom |
| Founder | Vincent Brooks |
| Defunct | 1940 |
| Headquarters | London, England |
Vincent Brooks, Day & Son was a major British lithographic firm most widely known for reproducing the weekly caricatures published in Vanity Fair magazine. The company was formed in 1867 when Vincent Brooks bought the name, good will and some of the property of Day & Son Ltd, which had gone into liquidation that year. The firm reproduced artwork and illustrations and went on to print many of the iconic London Underground posters of the twenties and thirties before being wound up in 1940.
Company literature holds 1848 as the year that Vincent Robert Alfred Brooks (1815–1885) first set up in business. His father was the radical printer and stationer John Brooks of 421 Oxford Street. John Brooks has been described as the publisher of the Owenites because of his association with the early socialist Robert Owen. He was a member of the second council of the National Political Union and is probably most noted for his edition of the radicals and reformers favourite, Shelley’s Queen Mab.
After leaving school, Vincent Brooks spent time on John Minter Morgan's farm estate near Uxbridge before returning to London to join his father in business. Around 1840 John Brooks relocated to the Channel Island of Jersey where he continued to trade as a wholesale stationer and paper merchant. Vincent was left with the business in London. At some time during this period he was also associated with Charles Robertson, an artists’ colourman based in Long Acre.
It is not certain at what point Vincent Brooks first practised lithography. A number of his early pieces were shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The following year the business moved from Oxford Street to 40 King Street, Covent Garden.
Vincent conducted lithographic classes at Marlborough House during 1855 in what was destined to become the Royal College of Art. He was entrusted with the Princess Royal’s Dying Soldier on the Battlefield, which was reproduced and sold in aid of the Patriotic fund. The following year the Arundel Society commissioned a series of lithographs to be issued yearly to their subscribers. An effort described as ‘…the most important non-commercial application of chromolithography’ in the country at the time. However, the Arundel Society complained, maybe unjustly, about the quality or the lack of expertise in depicting religious subjects. The prints were also hampered by delays and by 1860 production had been switched to a German firm.
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