A provincial town with a good river and no gentry

His trade was ancestors. A family that had risen and wanted a hall to hang would give him a surname, a century, a temperament and a budget, and he would supply a grandfather.

He was scrupulous about period — the collar right, the ground right, a crack varnished in. He was scrupulous about likeness too, in the only sense available: the grandfather had to look like the grandson, adjusted for the two intervening generations and for the fact that the grandson had married a woman with a strong jaw.

His skill was in the middle distance. He could paint a face that was specific enough to be a person and general enough to be an ancestor, and the families did the rest within about a week of hanging it.

One account, from a nephew, describes a woman standing in front of a portrait she had commissioned eleven years earlier and telling a visitor, in complete sincerity, that her great-grandmother had had exactly that way of holding her chin, and that it had come down through the women of the family, and that she saw it in her own daughter.

The nephew records that he did not correct her, and that he was not sure, standing there, what the correction would have consisted of.

The chin came down through the women of the family. It started in oil, in about 1840, in a room above a tannery, and it arrived in a living face four generations later, and there is no step in that sequence at which anything false occurred.