Art for the Crowd 1815–1905

Albert Moore, A Garden  1869

Moore, like many of his contemporaries, was influenced by Japanese art. He produced decorative and subtly coloured pictures. Here, the woman’s costume allows him to concentrate on the colour, texture and movement of draped fabric. Art critic Sidney Colvin said Moore’s subjects were ‘merely a mechanism for getting beautiful people into beautiful situations’. The flower-like symbol at the bottom of the picture was used by Moore as a signature.

Gallery label, August 2018

Elizabeth Butler (Lady Butler), The Remnants of an Army  1879

Elizabeth Butler represents the defeat of the British in the First Afghan War (1839–1842), when they failed to overthrow the Afghan leader Dōst Moammad Khān. Doctor William Brydon, believed to be the sole survivor of the British forces, reaches the British garrison at Jalalabad, ‘faint and reeling on his jaded horse’ against a dying light’. Butler was the leading battle painter in Europe, famous for depicting soldiers fighting at the edge of Empire, rather than the military elite. Butler’s family benefitted from Empire, but her circle was anti-imperial. This painting was made during the Second Afghan War, and offers a critique of that war.

Gallery label, May 2023

Sir William Blake Richmond, The Slave  c.1865

This painting reflects a renewed interest in stories of slavery in Britain at the time of the Civil War between the American North and South. Many British artists were sympathetic to the cause of the North which sought to end slavery across the country. William Blake Richmond depicts the model Fanny Eaton and two of her children. Eaton was born in Jamaica, where her mother Matilda Foster, a woman of African descent, was born into slavery. Eaton moved to London with her mother when she was a child. She was a very successful model in London. She often appeared in roles which conveyed strong emotions and deep thought.

Gallery label, May 2023

Thomas Faed, The Last of the Clan  1865

Benjamin Robert Haydon, Punch or May Day  1829

Benjamin Haydon thought of calling this painting ‘Life’, hoping to capture a cross-section of London. A hearse nearly collides with a marriage coach and the newly-weds contrast with the violent couple in the popular puppet show, Punch and Judy. Haydon made this work five years before the abolition of Slavery in the British Empire. He deliberately placed the upright Black coachman with the caricatured performance of the soot-blackened chimney sweep close together, so viewers would connect the two figures. Although he later expressed regret at his beliefs, at the time Haydon held racist ideas about racial hierarchies.

Gallery label, May 2023

Frederick Walker, The Vagrants  1868

Frederick Walker painted this after seeing gypsies on Clapham Common, south London. He tried to use the gypsies as models but found that they had moved on. Instead his sister Polly posed for the standing woman. The background landscape was painted in the open air at Beddington, near Croydon.Walker originally made The Vagrants as an illustration in the magazine Once a Week. He worked it up into an oil painting to show at the Royal Academy. It failed to find a buyer, but it had a great influence on younger artists who specialised in social-realist subjects.

Gallery label, July 2007

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, The Vale of Rest  1858–9

Stirred by the spirituality and yearning in Mendelssohn’s song ‘Ruhetal’, here Millais’s theme is death, signified by the presence of the grave, skull and funerary wreaths, and in the intense and solemn colours of a graveyard touched with the last rays of a setting sun. Viewers are invited to contemplate their own mortality through the preparation of the new grave in the foreground and the nun who gazes out towards them. Despite the pain and sadness in death, the title offers hope that it will bring repose from life’s cares and an infinite contentment.

Gallery label, March 2010

Frank Holl, Hush!  1877

Child death was a common occurrence in Victorian society. In Hush a mother devotedly watches over her sick baby, her anxiety mirrored in the face of an older child. This painting has a companion piece, Hushed which goes on to depict the death of the baby. Frank Holl confronts his subject directly, without sentimentality. The sombre colouring and the strong contrasts between light and shade heighten the grim mood.

Gallery label, May 2023

Frank Holl, Hushed  1877

Child death was a common occurrence in Victorian society. Hushed is a companion piece to Holl’s painting Hush! And shows the death of a baby. The mother covers her face with her hand in a gesture of grief, while her other child appears bewildered. Frank Holl confronts his subject directly, without sentimentality. The sombre colouring and the strong contrasts between light and shade heighten the grim mood.

Gallery label, May 2023

Frederic, Lord Leighton, The Bath of Psyche  exhibited 1890

The story of Psyche comes from a tale by the Roman poet Lucius Apuleius. Psyche lived in the golden palace of Cupid, the god of love. Each night Cupid would visit Psyche’s bedroom to have sex with her, without revealing his identity. Here we see Psyche undressing to bathe before Cupid’s arrival, gazing at her reflection. Leighton based Psyche’s pose on an ancient statue of Venus Leaving the Bath that he’d seen in Naples in 1859. He may also have designed the frame, which echoes the architectural details in the background of the picture.

Gallery label, August 2019

John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose  1885–6

The children lighting lanterns are Dolly and Polly Barnard. John Singer Sargent was friends with their father, illustrator Frederick Barnard. Sargent painted it in a garden in Broadway, a village in south-west England where Sargent stayed in the summer of 1885. Sargent wanted to paint from real life. There were only a few minutes each evening where the light was right. He would place his easel and paints, pose the models beforehand, and wait for the right moment to start. As summer ended and the flowers died, he replaced them with pot plants.

Gallery label, May 2023

Frederic, Lord Leighton, An Athlete Wrestling with a Python  1877

This is the earlier of Frederic Leighton’s only two life-size sculptures, both made with the assistance of Thomas Brock. In subject and scale it was intended as a challenge to one of the greatest classical sculptures, The Laocoön, which shows three men being crushed by sea serpents. Frederic Leighton was a pioneer of what became known as the ‘New Sculpture’ movement in Britain. This fresh approach looked back to classical sculpture while focusing on the naturalism of the body through careful modelling of the surface. This coincided with a revival of interest in bronze, the lost wax technique used here allowing for precision in the treatment of form.

Gallery label, November 2016

Sir Thomas Brock, Sir Henry Tate  exhibited 1898

This bust of Henry Tate commemorated the opening of the original Tate Gallery. Sir Henry Tate (1819-1899) had made his fortune through a new process of sugar refining and by selling sugar in neat, white cubes. In 1889 he offered to donate a collection of contemporary British art to the National Gallery. Since no suitable space could be found for these works, Tate provided the funds to build an entirely new gallery at Millbank, which opened in 1897. Brock was a successful portrait sculptor of the Victorian era, whose crowning achievement was the Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace

Gallery label, February 2010

Augustus Leopold Egg, Past and Present, No. 3  1858

This painting forms part of a series of three which considers the consequences of love outside marriage In Victorian Britain. Past and Present No.1 and Past and Present No. 3 show ‘Present’ five years later, two weeks after the husband has died of despair. Identical moons indicate that they take place at the same moment. The two girls comfort each other. The homeless mother shelters under the Adelphi arches, by the River Thames in London, holding the baby that resulted from her affair. The posters for two plays, ‘Victims’ and ‘A Cure for Love’, and ‘Pleasure Excursions to Paris’, are ironic comments on her situation.

Gallery label, May 2023

Annie Louisa Swynnerton, Oreads  exhibited 1907

Gallery label, August 2024

Walter Greaves, Hammersmith Bridge on Boat-race Day  c.1862

Walter Greaves was the son of a Thames boatman and a self-taught painter. A dense crowd is assembled on Hammersmith suspension bridge to watch the annual university boat race. There were fears that the bridge was not strong enough to support the weight of heavy traffic when around 12,000 people gathered there for the event in 1870. Greaves captures the diversity of London at this time, although this work, painted in his early style, simplifies and caricatures the individuals in the crowd.

Gallery label, May 2023

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt, The Golden Stairs  1880

This painting is an example of Burne-Jones’s interest in investigating a mood rather than telling a story. He deliberately made his pictures mysterious and the meaning of this work has been debated by critics. One suggestion is that the staircase, without visible beginning or end, represents continuous movement. Models for the painting include Frances Graham, daughter of Burne-Jones’s patron William Graham and Mary Gladstone, daughter of British Prime Minister WE Gladstone. Burne-Jones’s daughter, Margaret, is pictured at the top of the stairs.

Gallery label, August 2019

Unknown artist, Britain, Unknown Man  c.1830–40

We don’t know the identity of the young man represented here or the artist who painted this work. The sitter’s luxurious jacket and waistcoat are Albanian, but his turban and loose trousers appear to be Turkish or north African. At the time, artists often depicted Black people in costume and not named. The picture follows artistic conventions of portraiture, with its focus on the man’s facial features and high-status dress. The combination of different styles suggests he might be intended to represent a character from Romantic poetry.

Gallery label, May 2023

John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath  1851–3

American filmmaker and stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen (1920 – 2013) was inspired by Martin’s dramatic works. He called this painting ‘an incredible, visionary masterpiece, depicting catastrophe and conveying an overwhelming sense of destruction … it resembles a frame from a movie – this time, perhaps, a blockbuster disaster movie’.

Gallery label, August 2019

William Maw Egley, Omnibus Life in London  1859

Egley conveys the claustrophobia of the inside of an omnibus (a horse-drawn equivalent of today’s buses). People from different parts of society, from the old country woman with her piles of baggage to the city clerk with his cane, were forced to share a small compartment. Egley painted the carriage in a coachbuilder’s yard and posed models in a makeshift ‘carriage’ made from boxes and planks in his back garden in Paddington. The Illustrated London News said ‘the stern and trying incidents’ would be ‘recognized by thousands of weary wayfarers through the streets of London.’

Gallery label, August 2018

Richard Redgrave, The Sempstress  1846

This painting is the only known version of the lost original which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844 accompanied with lines from Thomas Hood’s popular poem The Song of the Shirt: ‘Oh! men with sisters dear/Oh! men with mothers and wives,/ It is not linen you’re wearing out,/But human creatures’ lives’. The success of the image was largely due to Redgrave’s presentation of the sempstress as a victim in need of salvation. The woman’s pleading expression and posture evoke standard representations of the penitent Magdalene in Old Master painting.

Gallery label, November 2016

Amelia Robertson Hill, Percy Bysshe Shelley  1882

Hill came from the artistic Paton family and was herself a prominent Scottish sculptor, contributing three figures to the Scott Monument in Edinburgh. There is no reliable likeness of Percy Bysshe Shelley as an adult, and Hill’s fascination for the Romantic poet translated into this monumental idealised bust. A prized possession, she kept it until she died, prominently displayed in the large vestibule of her studio home.

Gallery label, November 2016

Henry Perronet Briggs, The First Interview between the Spaniards and the Peruvians  exhibited 1827

Henry Briggs portrays the first encounter in 1552 between a group of Incas and Spanish conquistadors seeking to take over their land and convert them to Catholicism. While Emperor Atahualpa receives them openly, General Francisco Pizarro secretly draws a gun that will begin a massacre of seven thousand Indigenous people. When the painting was first exhibited, some viewers praised the artistic approach, rather than praising the anti-imperial theme. Briggs imagines the Incas in the tradition of classical nude paintings.

Gallery label, May 2023

John William Waterhouse, Saint Eulalia  exhibited 1885

The legendary Christian saint Eulalia was tortured and executed when she refused to respect Roman Gods and traditions. By dying for her faith, Eulalia was canonised as a Christian martyr. Waterhouse ignores the horrific details of her death and instead depicts the moment of her transcendent martyrdom. In this miraculous transfiguration white doves appear around her body and a fall of snow covers her nakedness. The dramatic theme and composition secured Waterhouse's election as an Associate of the Royal Academy.

Gallery label, March 2022

Herbert Draper, The Lament for Icarus  exhibited 1898

Icarus’s father, the inventor Daedalus, made wings that allowed them to fly away from their island prison. The exhilarated Icarus forgot warnings and soared too close to the sun, melting the wax that secured the feathers, and he fell to his death. Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 gave an optimistic picture of the present and future evolution of humankind, but it also introduced ideas of a deep and obscure past. Art and literature took up this theme of origins, man’s mythical history and struggles between animal and human nature.

Gallery label, February 2016

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Favourite Custom  1909

This scene is set in the baths at Pompeii. In the foreground one woman playfully splashes another bathing in the ‘frigidarium’, a cold bath. The artist based this work on photographs of the ruins of the Stabian baths, revealed by archaeologists in 1824. He has made them more luxurious by adding a marble floor and walls which would more usually have been found in larger imperial baths. This small work attracted enormous success when it was exhibited and bought immediately for the nation.

Gallery label, February 2016

Augustus Leopold Egg, Past and Present, No. 2  1858

This forms part of a series of three paintings which consider the consequences of love outside marriage in Victorian Britain. This painting, Past, acts as the central scene, showing a wife begging forgiveness from her husband while their children look on. He holds a letter which reveals an affair and stamps on a portrait miniature of her lover. The room is full of symbols of the family’s downfall, such as the apple cut in two.

Gallery label, May 2023

James Tissot, Holyday  c.1876

This painting is set in the artist’s garden in the wealthy north London suburb of St John’s Wood. It features its distinctive cast-iron colonnade enclosing a large ornamental fishpond. St John’s Wood was considered a rather louche area and this picture of young people flirting, unnoticed by their sleeping chaperone, was considered by some to be rather vulgar. The men are wearing the caps of I Zingari, an elite amateur cricket club.James Tissot had fled to London in 1870 after the fall of the Paris Commune, and stayed until 1882.

Gallery label, July 2007

George Elgar Hicks, Woman’s Mission: Companion of Manhood  1863

These two paintings make up two scenes in a triptych (three-part picture) called Woman’s Mission which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863. The missing section is Guide of Childhood. As a group the pictures represent the same woman in her role as mother, wife and attentive daughter or, as one critic of the time put it: ‘woman in three phases of her duties as ministering angel’. The woman in both pictures bears a striking resemblance to the artist’s depictions of his own wife, Maria.

Gallery label, November 2016

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott  1888

English poet Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott (1833) describes a heroine confined to a tower and cursed to die if she looks directly upon the outside world. By using a mirror, she embroiders scenes of passers-by. When the Lady glimpses the Arthurian knight Sir Lancelot she falls in love and defies the curse. Out in the cold world, on the point of death, she frees a boat to seek him. Lancelot is visible on her embroidery, and familiar Pre-Raphaelite clues foretell her fate: swallows fly low as the wind blows her hair and extinguishes the candles.

Gallery label, March 2022