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Item Literature
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Blackburn, H., Academy Notes,. page 1, illustrated plate 23;
Royal Academy Illustrated, 1888, page 16;
Art Journal, 1888, page 181;
Punch, 14th July 1888, page 16;
Ernest Govett, Art Principles with Special Reference to Painting, together with Note on the Illusions Produced by the Painter (G.P. Putmam’s Sons, New York & London, 1919), p. 178;
Susan P. Casteras, ‘Seeing the Unseen: Pictorial Problematics and Victorian Images of Class, Poverty, and Urban Life’ in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ & John O. Jordan (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 1995), pages 269-270;
Mark Bills and Vivien Knight, William Powell Frith, Painting in the Victorian Age, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, illustrated pages 56, plate 58 (detail) and 69, plate 66.
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Item Description / Dealer Expertise
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Poverty and Wealth highlights the inequalities of late Victorian London as exemplified in literature by the author Charles Dickens (1812-1870). William Powell Frith was friends with Dickens, and like him, his most popular works were scenes showing the daily life of all social classes, not just the elite. This work is typical of the London street scenes that Frith painted, crowded with figures, where the subject’s interpretation depends upon minutely observed incident and detail. Outside a fishmongers shop on Bond Street, a group of poor women and children queue up to acquire the day’s unsold fish. On the opposite side of the picture a group of wealthy women and children have paused whilst they wait for their companion to join them, and she is followed by a footman laden with toys. The work contains many contrasts between figures on the opposite sides of the scene, for example, on the right hand side the sorrowful woman dressed in black cradling a small baby is juxtaposed with the left-hand side where a wealthy lady is happily playing with her child in a carriage. The elaborate, detailed and richly coloured clothes of the wealthy contrast with the muted colours and simple designs of the poor peoples' clothing. The two groups, though binary in their compositional position, overlap as they look to one another’s side of the street. In particular, an old woman in a black head-scarf, who was described by a contemporary critic as ‘not innocent of gin’, looks up towards the wealthy group's carriage, her gaze crossing that of an elegant lady with a red parasol who looks down to the widow holding her baby, an absorbed look of pity and sorrow apparent on her brow.¹ The same critic concluded that Frith had seldom done better in his depiction of figures, especially the ‘dingy urchins and dishevelled women’.²
There was a strong interest during the Victorian era for an academic approach to classification and categorisation, shown in a number of interests from butterfly collecting to botany, arguably the most pivotal example of such scholarship was Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) essay On the Origin of the Species (1859). It was in this general academic environment that the subject of phrenology (the now defunct study in which the apparent personality traits of a person were determined by 'reading' the shape a person's head and by the bumps and fissures in the skull) and its correlation to social class was thoroughly explored. This trend in phrenology fuelled what was already a crucial concern of Victorian society, that of social classification- class. Hence Frith's interest in social categories or rich and poor here in Poverty and Wealth. Undoubtedly, Frith was informed by Hogarth who nearly a century early had worked to categorise concepts and examples of art and beauty, such as his The Analysis of Beauty (1753). Hogarth also sought to categorise humans themselves and their characteristics. Hogarth's earlier work and that of later phrenologists active in the first half of the nineteenth century all helped inform the opinion of the author of an article in an 1852 edition of the Art Journal who suggested that ‘every painter should be a phrenologist’. Whilst this advice was not accepted by every artist, the determination of character and personality traits based on the shape of the head was a popular notion. Frith’s subjects can possibly be analysed in this manner, certainly his work drew upon strongly delineated types, in terms of character and social standing. Poverty and Wealth can be read in this light, with its cast of poor and wealthy London figures.
It is apt that Frith’s works were extremely popular and attracted the urban crowds whom they depicted. Considered a specifically British approach for the period in question, a descriptive vocabulary is used by Frith which parallels Dickens and Hogarth. George Stocking, in the Journal of Moden History, comments that, whilst applied to the ‘saturnalia of social equality’ of Frith’s famous work Derby Day, the characteristics allotted by the artist to race and class can also describe many of the figures seen in Poverty and Wealth:
‘the lower class Celt with his prognathous skull, large mouth, snub nose, receding forehead, and darker skin; the upper class Norman, with orthognathous skull, delicate nostrils, round chin, small ears; the Saxon middle class- the John Bull type, described by Charles Kingsley as “sturdy, and yet not coarse; middle-size, deep-chested, board shouldered; with small, well-knit hands and feet, large jaw, bright grey eyes, crisp brown hair, a heavy projecting brow; his face full of shrewdness and good nature".'³
Despite this contemporary emphasis on apparently academically defined character 'types', Frith also individualises each figure within the picture, thereby personalising the image and communicating his message more emphatically. This was one of the key features of Frith’s work, and the study of what he referred to as ‘the kaleidoscopic aspect of the crowd’ and the ‘infinite variety of everyday life’, are central to many of his best paintings.4 So while the social hierarchies are made clear, within them Frith draws out their key personalities and shows their interest in one another and sorrow for those less well-off than themselves, such as that expressed by the lady with the red parasol, offers a lesson to the viewer concerning the discrepancies of their society. Frith was keen on works that commented on the morals and injustices of the contemporary world, and a smaller version of this same subject was created, dated 1880. He was influenced by Hogarth in social commentary, as can be seen in his series Road to Ruin and Race for Wealth. Like Hogarth, Frith provides the viewer with character types whom they could ‘read’, and therefore engage with the portrayal, he also reflected upon his social environment with humanitarian interest.
The son of a prosperous innkeeper, Frith had to be persuaded by his ambitious father to pursue a career as a painter. He enrolled into the Sass Academy in 1835, whose other alumni include Millais and Rossetti, he then studied at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1845 he was appointed RA of the Royal Academy and was elected a full member in 1852. He also exhibited at the Royal Society of Artists, Suffolk Street Galleries, and the British Institution.
The frequent comparisons between Frith, Dickens and Hogarth can imply that Frith was merely a conduit for their greater influence. However, Frith was a quintessential Victorian artist in his own right, and forged a path of great influence in terms of subject and his realist treatment. He was a member of a circle of artists known as ‘The Clique’, along with Augustus Egg and Henry O’Neil amongst others. Founded by Richard Dadd, their work was characterised by a rejection of academic high art in favour of genre painting. For example Frith described the rigorous teaching of perspective as a ‘dreadful science’.5 This group claimed that art should be judged by the public, and not constrained to conform to academic ideals. They recognised that changing demands were at odds with established academic taste and opted instead for accessible subjects, whilst placing emphasis on character and incident, detail and high finish.
Frith enjoyed huge public success; on six separate occasions railing had to be erected in front of his pictures at the Royal Academy to restrain the eager crowds. His early paintings reflect his interest in literature, with scenes from Shakespeare, but soon his work became more modern in its subject matter, with Frith painting richly detailed scenes of Victorian life. Mary Cowling attributes his keen choice of subject matter as central to his popularity; 'modernity, novelty and the appeal to familiar experience were potent forces in the new art market. To the majority of people, Frith’s scenes were irresistibly attractive: a veritable mirror of their own times'.6 His first major success in this genre was Ramsgate Sands (1854) that was acclaimed as an excellent panorama of Victorian life and which was purchased by Queen Victoria. Other panoramas included Derby Day, The Railway Station (1862), The Salon d’Or, Homberg (1871) and A Private View of the Royal Academy (1883). Following this last work Frith’s output began to decline, and he concentrated on writing his reminiscences. He died in 1909, having lived through the age of Victoria.
1Athenaeum, 26 May 1888, p. 668.
2Ibid.
3Stocking, George in Journal of Moden History (vol. 63, no. 4; 1991) pp. 75-9.
4Frith, W. P., My Autobiography and Reminiscences ( London, Richard Bentley & Son, 1887), vol i, pp. 272, 269.
5Ibid. p. 37.
6Mary Cowling ‘Frith and his Followers: Painters and Illustrators of London Life’ in Mark Bills and Vivien Knight, William Powell Frith, Painting in the Victorian Age, (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006), p. 57.
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