Society in Victorian Art

 

Derby Day by William Powell Frith, RA. [Original 1858 in Tate Gallery, London] Signed and dated 1893-94. 102.3 x 234.4 cm. City Art Galleries, Manchester. According to the museum site, "This version replicates a Royal Academy exhibit of 1858. It was commissioned by James Gresham of Stretford and was thought by Frith to be better than his original." The museum's entry further explains:

Derby Day was an established day out by the 1850s. The crowds of thousands came from all social classes for the colourful entertainments as much as the race. Frith's first visit to Epsom Downs was in 1856, when he was taken in by a thimble-rigging gang. A team of these con-men can be seen on the left. The Victorians were fascinated by phrenology, the reflection of social types in facial characteristics. This partly accounts for the success of and other crowd scenes by Frith and his followers.

In 1855, Victorian artists had the opportunity to be judged against their European counterparts at the Paris International Exhibition. British painting though not found to compete with the elevated characters of French works, was admired for its originality, eccentric humor and love of detail in the genre and narrative paintings.

Domestic genre, rustic subjects and literary and historical anecdotes continued to flourish in mid-Victorian Britain, but from the early 50s, a new element entered narrative and genre painting. Many of the artists now began to paint the contemporary urban middle-class milieu with a naive delight in the up-to-date: omnibuses and railway stations, opera boxes and parlormaids, and scenes from life and from modern literature.

The move to paint contemporary life was part of a wider repositioning of European taste. Baudelaire, in his Paris salon reviews of the mid 40s had called for artists to represent the heroism of modern life, its 'neck ties and patent leather boots', and the 'thousand existences' which formed the 'floating life of a great city'. British painters, while remaining conservative in their attitude to narrative, detail and composition, anticipated in the 50s and early 60s, the subject that would be taken up by the Impressionists in the 70s and 80s: the races, the opera, the urban middle classes at leisure in parks, on beaches and city streets.

Paintings on urban life by William Powell Frith were among the most popular of British depiction of contemporary social life. Frith's pictures, for all their novelettish concentration on surface rather than inner moral complexities, have something of the richness of Dickens' novels with their interweaving of plot and subplot, and their mixture of characters from different social worlds.