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James Pollard is best remembered for his paintings of coaches and sporting themes, but at the start of his career, he was willing to work at any subject to make a living. His father, Robert, was a minor painter, engraver, and printseller, and when James was around twenty, they joined together in some kind of commercial partnership. Between 1816 and 1819 James was reported to be busy "making drawings, designs for engravers, and etching outlines to be aquatinted in imitation of Drawings." His Greengrocer belongs to this period in his life. It is one of four designs showing London food-sellers; the others represent the stalls of a butcher, poulterer, and fishmonger. These were engraved in aquatint as London Markets by M. Dubourg and published by Edward Orme, the king's own printseller, in 1822. This activity caused friction between father and son. Robert Pollard's business had been in financial trouble, and he was forced to sell in 1815. Around 1819 it was reconfigured as Robert Pollard and Sons, but James's relative success with aquatints worried his father. He told his friend and fellow engraver Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) that James's aquatinted works were good, but that "[h]e also knows it, and is rather assuming of late tho', I hope, not to lead to a parting ... our strength and consequences would be upheld when together, and the reverse on division or separation." Edward Orme soon provided the catalyst for their final parting of ways. In 1819 he commissioned James to paint an inn sign showing a coach and horses. So popular was the work that it led to a spate of commissions for similar subjects on canvas, allowing James to abandon watercolor and devote himself to coaching and sporting paintings for the rest of his life.

When the London Markets aquatints were being sold, London was the largest city in the world, and its population bought and consumed food on an equally epic scale.' The principal wholesale vegetable and fruit market in London was in Covent Garden, though smaller, local retailers supplied their clients with choice supplies. These food shops were increasingly distinct from other kinds of stores. By the late eighteenth century, London shops gradually installed glazing, and proprietors displayed their wares behind glass. Fresh-food sellers, however, tended to cling to the older convention of keeping an open window onto the street. Here, Pollard's greengrocer uses an open sash window, loaded with produce spilling out onto the street, to attract passing customers. In his Letters from England (1808), Robert Southey, in the fictional guise of a Spanish tourist, described "the opulence and splendour of the [London] shops," including fruiterers, adding "the articles themselves so beautiful, and so beautifully arranged, that if they who passed by me had leisure to observe any things, they might have known me to be a foreigner by the frequent stands which I made to admire them. Nothing which I had seen in the country had prepared me for such a display of splendour." When Napoleon dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers," he was quoting Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), which had first used the phrase. Despite Napoleon's disparagement, Pollard's print belongs to the tradition of seeing the health and strength of the country at large in a well stocked English shop.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, p. 67, no. 69