Winsor & Newton Archive

Note that the archive is currently closed for research so we are unable to respond to questions about it.

The Winsor & Newton colourmen and artists' suppliers archive consists of handwritten recipe books, bound records of processes and shopfloor accounts (time and pricing for manufacturing their products), as well as miscellaneous details of their daily operations from the company's beginings in the early 1830s through to the twentieth century.

Winsor & Newton have permitted the Hamilton Kerr to digitise and index this information. As a result, an AHRC funded project photographed a subset of the archive and it is hoped that funding to address the remains of the archive will follow in due course.

87 Winsor & Newton hand-written books containing nineteenth century recipes and workshop manuscripts have been digitised. This material is now available as a database which consists of a series of photographs of individual pages of each of the manuscripts, and a related database that indexes these images in considerable detail (by key words, materials, named individuals, etc). This approach combines considerable flexibility and convenience in locating relevant material, together with the advantages of seeing the full manuscript text, along with notations such as corrections, interpolations and diagrams, as well as erasures.