Victorian Painting
Posted February 7, 2009, 09:02 ET Comments Off
The Times is a-twitter that BBC blowhart Jeremy Paxman has had the gall to write a book (the Beeb series is not far behind) on Victorian Art. Big surprise. Celebrities sell more books than non-celebrities? Horrors! The good news is that Victorian painting continues to find its buyers and viewers.
About ten years back the National Gallery in Washington had a Victorian show, and a witty museum curator placed Frith’s Derby Day next to Whistler’s Nocture in Black and Gold. The joke is that Frith was a (bumbling) witness for John Ruskin when the latter was sued by Whistler. At the National Gallery, Frith’s lively and spawling painting was surrounded by admirers, while Whistler’s gloomy painting was quite ignored by the crowd.
As it happens, Frith was a rather more complicated person than we might suppose. While a thorough philistine, he maintained two separate households, with twelve children in one and seven in the other. I think that helps to understand the crowd scenes in his paintings.
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