an original illumination on vellum made by "less affluent members" as a premium. In Brooks's words, this exploited women "to place their excellent taste and skill, for worse than starvation prices, at the disposal of some unprincipled adventurer, ignorant himself of the very rudiments of the art he professes to teach." By 1860, the Art Journal had changed its mind, and argued that it was not possible for a woman to support herself through illumination. Beckwith notes that by the 1860s, Laurent de Lara's manual had competition in the form of other, more successfully developed publications by Winsor & Newton, George Rowney & Company, and J. Barnard and Son; and says he failed to grasp the idea that illumination was about a unity between text and ornament. Instead, Laurent de Lara suggested that illumination was about the carefully drawn mechanical repetition of fussy detail. According to his granddaughter, the pianist and composer Adelina de Lara's autobiography, David Laurent de Lara was the son of a Spanish count called Laurent de Lara. David married a London-born Polish Jewish woman, Sarah Cracour. References Further reading 1806 births 1876 deaths 19th-century Dutch painters 19th-century Sephardi Jews Manuscript illuminators Dutch emigrants to England Painters from Amsterdam Artists from London British Sephardi Jews Jewish artists Dutch Sephardi Jews Dutch people of Spanish-Jewish descent British people of Spanish-Jewish descent British people of Dutch-Jewish descent