L. Cornelissen & Son

L. Cornelissen & Son traces to 1855, when Louis Cornelissen, a Flemish lithographer who had arrived in Paris in 1848, was encouraged by J.M.W. Turner to move to London and open shop. The business held one address, 22 Great Queen Street, from 1861 to 1987 — a continuity broken only when the last family member working the counter died in 1977 and the shop closed. It did not stay closed: Stavros Mihalarias, a Greek restorer of Orthodox icons and a longtime customer, worked with his friend Nicholas Walt to reopen it in 1979, and in 1988 they moved the business to its present home at 105 Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury, where it still trades today under its original Victorian fittings.

What survived the interruption was the specialism: Cornelissen supplies pigment powders, binders, rabbit skin glue and the other raw components of paintmaking alongside finished oils, watercolours, pastels, drawing and calligraphy materials, printmaking supplies and gilding stock. That range — sundries for artists who mix their own paint, not just tubes bought off a shelf — is what separates a colourman's shop from a general art-materials retailer, and it is the range the rescued business chose to keep rather than modernize away.

Nearly a century and three quarters after Louis Cornelissen first opened, and just short of half a century after a near-closure, the shop still occupies the same trade in the same district of London, its Bloomsbury premises retaining the Victorian character of a business two owners have now taken care not to lose.