An English Merrymaking A Hundred Years Ago
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An English Merrymaking A Hundred Years Ago
''An English Merrymaking a Hundred Years Ago'' is an 1847 genre painting by the British artist William Powell Frith. During the early stages of his career Frith was a member of The Clique artistic group. He later became known for his panoramic crowd scenes ''The Derby Day'' and ''The Railway Station''. The work depicts a day of festivities in an English village in the mid-eighteenth century. It was one of several paintings that cemented Frith's growing reputation. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition of 1847. An oil sketch for the painting is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (abbreviated V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen .... References Bibliography * Gaunt, William. ''The Restless Century: Painting in Britain, 1800-1900''. Phaidon, 1972. * Green, Richa ...
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William Powell Frith
William Powell Frith (9 January 1819 – 2 November 1909) was an English painter specialising in genre subjects and panoramic narrative works of life in the Victorian era. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1853, presenting ''The Sleeping Model'' as his Diploma work. He has been described as the "greatest British painter of the social scene since Hogarth". Early life William Powell Frith was born in Aldfield, near Ripon in the then West Riding of Yorkshire on 9 January 1819. He had originally intended to be an auctioneer. His mother was Jane Frith, née Powell (1779–1851). Frith was encouraged to take up art by his father, a hotelier in Harrogate. Frith was great uncle and an advisor to the English school portrait painter Henry Keyworth Raine (1872–1932). He moved to London in 1835 where he began his formal art studies at Sass's Academy in Charlotte Street, before attending the Royal Academy Schools. Frith started his career as a portrait painter and first ...
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Oil Painting
Oil painting is a painting method involving the procedure of painting with pigments combined with a drying oil as the Binder (material), binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on canvas, wood panel, or oil on copper, copper for several centuries. The advantages of oil for painting images include "greater flexibility, richer and denser color, the use of layers, and a wider range from light to dark". The oldest known oil paintings were created by Buddhism, Buddhist artists in Afghanistan, and date back to the 7th century AD. Oil paint was later developed by Europeans for painting statues and woodwork from at least the 12th century, but its common use for painted images began with Early Netherlandish painting in Northern Europe, and by the height of the Renaissance, oil painting techniques had almost completely replaced the use of egg tempera paints for panel paintings in most of Europe, though not for Orthodox icons or wall paintings, where tempera a ...
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Genre Painting
Genre painting (or petit genre) is the painting of genre art, which depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. One common definition of a genre scene is that it shows figures to whom no identity can be attached either individually or collectively, thus distinguishing it from history paintings (also called ''grand genre'') and portraits. A work would often be considered as a genre work even if it could be shown that the artist had used a known person—a member of his family, say—as a model. In this case it would depend on whether the work was likely to have been intended by the artist to be perceived as a portrait—sometimes a subjective question. The depictions can be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist. Because of their familiar and frequently sentimental subject matter, genre paintings have often proven popular with the bourgeoisie, or middle class. Genre subjects appear in many traditions of art. Painted decora ...
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Private Collection
A private collection is a privately owned collection of works (usually artworks) or valuable items. In a museum or art gallery context, the term signifies that a certain work is not owned by that institution, but is on loan from an individual or organization, either for temporary exhibition or for the long term. This source is usually an art collector, although it could also be a school, church, bank, or some other company or organization. By contrast, collectors of books, even if they collect for aesthetic reasons (fine bookbindings or illuminated manuscripts for example), are called bibliophiles, and their collections are typically referred to as libraries. History Art collecting was common among the wealthy in the Ancient World in both Europe and East Asia, and in the Middle Ages, but developed in its modern form during the Renaissance and continues to the present day. The royal collections of most countries were originally the grandest of private collections but are n ...
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Artist
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, the term is also often used in the show business, entertainment business to refer to Actor, actors, Musician, musicians, Singing, singers, Dance, dancers and other Performing arts#Performers, performers, in which they are known as ''Artiste'' instead. ''Artiste'' (French) is a variant used in English in this context, but this use has become rare. The use of the term "artist" to describe Writer, writers is valid, but less common, and mostly restricted to contexts such as critics' reviews; "author" is generally used instead. Dictionary definitions The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' defines the older, broader meanings of the word "artist": * A learned person or Master of Arts * One who pursues a practical science, traditionally ...
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The Clique (art Group)
The Clique was a group of English artists formed by Richard Dadd in the late 1830s. Other members were Augustus Egg, Alfred Elmore, William Powell Frith, Henry Nelson O'Neil, John Phillip and Edward Matthew Ward. They have been described as “the first group of British artists to combine for greater strength and to announce that the great backward-looking tradition of the Academy was not relevant to the requirements of contemporary art”. Foundation Information about the activities of The Clique derives mainly from the reminiscences of Frith and a short essay published in ''The Art Journal'' in 1898 by Gilbert Imray, a friend of the group. Both state that the group called themselves by this name at the time and that they formed a sketching club. Imray describes the aspirations of some members and explains that at their meetings they would all produce drawings on the same subject and ask non-artists such as Imray to judge the merits of the works.Imray, J., ''A Reminiscence of ...
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The Derby Day
''The Derby Day'' is a large oil painting showing a panoramic view of Epsom Derby, The Derby, painted by the English artist William Powell Frith over 15 months from 1856 to 1858. It has been described by Christie's as Frith's "undisputed masterpiece" and also "arguably the definitive example of Victorian modern-life genre."Ernst Gombrich, Gombrich, E .H. (1989) ''The Story of Art''. 15th edn. London: Phaidon Press, p. 411. The original version is in Tate Britain, in London. As with many of Frith's works, he painted a second version many years later, which is now in the Manchester Art Gallery. A much smaller but well-finished oil study was sold in 2011. The painting The painting measures by and gives a satirical view of Victorian society. It includes three main scenes, during the annual spectacle of the Derby, when large numbers of Londoners left town for the day to visit the races on Epsom Downs Racecourse, presenting a cross-section of society in a contemporary saturnal ...
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The Railway Station
''The Railway Station'' is an 1862 genre painting by the British artist William Powell Frith.Trotter p.63 The painting is held at Royal Holloway College, with a smaller version in the Royal Collection. Description It depicts a scene at the busy Paddington Station railway terminus of the Great Western in London. Frith had developed a reputation for producing crowd scenes of everyday life, including '' Ramsgate Sands'' (1854) and '' The Derby Day'' (1858). Frith himself was doubtful about the potential work noting "I don't think the station at Paddington could be called picturesque, nor can the clothes of the ordinary traveller be said to offer much attraction to the painter", but was persuaded by his art dealer Louis Flatow who offered him reportedly the largest commission fee ever offered to an artist.Green p.38 The panorama represents all social classes of Victorian society, using the still relatively new railway system. On the right, two detective A detective is an inves ...
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Eighteenth Century
The 18th century lasted from 1 January 1701 (represented by the Roman numerals MDCCI) to 31 December 1800 (MDCCC). During the 18th century, elements of Enlightenment thinking culminated in the Atlantic Revolutions. Revolutions began to challenge the legitimacy of monarchical and aristocratic power structures. The Industrial Revolution began mid-century, leading to radical changes in human society and the environment. The European colonization of the Americas and other parts of the world intensified and associated mass migrations of people grew in size as part of the Age of Sail. During the century, slave trading expanded across the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, while declining in Russia and China. Western historians have occasionally defined the 18th century otherwise for the purposes of their work. For example, the "short" 18th century may be defined as 1715–1789, denoting the period of time between the death of Louis XIV of France and the start of the French Revolut ...
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Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House in Piccadilly London, England. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and appreciation of the fine arts through exhibitions, education and debate. History The origin of the Royal Academy of Arts lies in an attempt in 1755 by members of the Royal Society of Arts, Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, principally the sculptor Henry Cheere, to found an autonomous academy of arts. Before this, several artists were members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, including Cheere and William Hogarth, or were involved in small-scale private art academies, such as the St Martin's Lane Academy. Although Cheere's attempt failed, the eventual charter, called an 'Instrument', used to establish the Royal Academy of ...
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Summer Exhibition
The Summer Exhibition is an open art exhibition held annually by the Royal Academy in Burlington House, Piccadilly in central London, England, during the months of June, July, and August. The exhibition includes paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture, architectural designs and models, and is the largest and most popular open exhibition in the United Kingdom. It is also "the longest continuously staged exhibition of contemporary art in the world". When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768 one of its key objectives was to establish an annual exhibition, open to all artists of merit, which could be visited by the public. The first Summer Exhibition took place in 1769; it has been held every year since without exception. History In 1768, a group of artists visited King George III and sought his permission to establish a society for Arts and Design. They proposed the idea of an annual exhibition and a school design. King George III approved of the idea and the first exhibition, ...
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Oil Sketch
An oil sketch or oil study is an artwork made primarily in oil paint in preparation for a larger, finished work. Originally these were created as preparatory studies or modelli, especially so as to gain approval for the design of a larger commissioned painting. They were also used as designs for specialists in other media, such as printmaking or tapestry, to follow. Later they were produced as independent works, often with no thought of being expanded into a full-size painting. The usual medium for ''modelli'' was the drawing, but an oil sketch, even if done in a limited range of colours, could better suggest the tone of the projected work. It is also possible to more fully convey the flow and energy of a composition in paint. For a painter with exceptional technique, the production of an oil sketch may be as rapid as that of a drawing, and many practitioners had superb brush skills. In its rapidity of execution the oil sketch may be used not only to express movement and transien ...
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