Victorian EnglandThrough Painting

William Powell Frith Dolly Varden, 1842-9

Illustration of a Dickens character in a 19th-C “fancy portrait” style

William Powell FrithScene from The Derby Day, 1856-8 So popular when painted, that exhibitors had to erect a rail to keep back the public

Accomplished young ladies at the piano, circa 1856.

Ford Madox BrownThe Last of England, 1852

Representing a couple whose economic misfortunes force them to emigrate to Australia

George Cruikshank, 1792-1878The Gin Shop

George Cruikshank, 1848The Drunkard's Children

George Cruikshank, The Bottle, # 1 & 8

John Everett MillaisThe Blind Girl 1854-1856

Note that the blind girl is a beggar.

Sir Luke Fildes, Houseless and Hungry, 1869

Sir Luke Fildes, The Casual Ward, 1874

Augustus Egg, Past and Present No. 1 1858

This canvas and the two related pictures hanging nearby were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858 as one work. The series deals with the modern moral subject of the consequences of the adultery of a middle class wife. Here the husband discovers his wife’s infidelity: he holds a letter, containing evidence of her treachery, and grinds her lover’s portrait under foot. The reflection of the open door in the mirror suggests the woman will soon have to leave the family home. The falling house of cards symbolises the collapse of the couple’s marriage and thus the family unit.

Augustus Egg, Past and Present No. 2 1858

This is part of a trilogy of modern-life pictures on the theme of a woman’s infidelity and its consequences. This scene is a dimly-lit garret, five years after the discovery of the adultery of a middle class wife. She has been driven out of her home, a fallen woman, and the father has recently died, leaving their two children orphans. The girls comfort each other in the sparsely-furnished room containing portraits of their mother and father. The elder gazes sadly towards the moon which is watched, at the same moment, in the third picture in the series, by their destitute mother.

Augustus Egg, Past and Present No. 3 1858 This is one of two

pictures painted by Egg to accompany his canvas showing the discovery of a wife’s infidelity. The erring wife is seen five years later, now destitute. She is, wrote one critic, ‘under the dark grave-vault shadow of an Adelphi arch – last refuge of the homeless sin, vice and beggary of London: the thin, starved legs of a bastard child – perhaps dead at her breast – protrude from her rags.’ She gazes at the same moon as her children, shown in the painting on the far right. Egg’s trilogy was criticized as ‘unhealthy’ in its ‘misery and loathsomeness’.

Hubert von Herkomer On Strike, 1891

Sir Luke Fildes, The Doctor, 1891

William Powell Frith The New Frock, 1889

What does this say about people’s attitudes toward consumer goods?

Samuel Luke Fildes An Al-fresco Toilette

Edmund Blair Leighton God Speed, 1900

Much late 19th-C painting was highly Romantic, harkening back to legends and idealized knightly life