Another day, another travel around the BBC's your paintings website.
I came across this fabulous image - A Barber's Shop, 1784 by Henry William Bunbury. Bunbury was a caricaturist - and certainly seems to display a sense of humour, at least as far as the dogs fighting over the wig are concerned.
About 40 years before this image, in 1745, the roles of barber and surgeon were split - before this a visit to a barber's was a bit of a one-stop shop as far as your physical well-being was concerned. I think I'm using the phrase 'well-being' a bit loosely, but you get the picture.
Barbers still continued to offer such off-putting sounding services as 'teeth-scraping' however, and seeing this picture has reminded me of an Old Bailey case I came across a little while ago from 1895 concerning two men - Paul Baron and Henry William Browett, who apparently were using a combination of fraud and intimidation to make customers pay for a teeth scraping/scaling service that they didn't want.
The witnesses to the case included such diverse customers as the vicar of Ebbw Vale and a man who the person recording the case felt the need to tell us was 'a Hindoo.' Both Baron and Browett were found guilty and sentenced to several months worth of hard labour.
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