William Mulready and the Art of Pictorial Narrative

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BURLINGTONMAGAZINE
THE
MARCIA
William
Among works in the Sheepshanks collection now on
view in a renovated ground floor gallery of the Victoria
and Albert Museum is a group of paintings by William
Mulready (1786-1863) which, by virtue of their size,
medium (oil) and subject, exemplify the early Victorian
taste in cabinet pictures. It is only in recent years that
English nineteenth-century subject painting has attracted any serious attention from art historians.
Mulready was praised by one French critic, when he exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in 1855, for 'de
penses et executes avec
petits tableaux finement
was the most that
however,
This,
beaucoup d'esprit'.'
could be said of paintings like The Wolf and the Lamb
(1820, Royal Collection) and The Butt (Victoria and
Albert Museum; Fig.10) both of which were on show in
Paris. Most critics at the time were not prepared to
devote much space to Mulready because they thought
that his genius was, in a characteristically English way,
very superficial. '11 ne pgnetre pas le fond mime de
l'dme', as one writer expressed it.2 The view that subject
paintings like those by Mulready in the Sheepshanks collection are charming, well-executed but trite would probably still be the reaction of many people today.
However, a close look at some of Mulready's cabinet
paintings raises some interesting questions and suggests
that, at least in this particular case, the apparent ease
with which the artist tells his story is the result of a
carefully calculated picture-making process.
'We must learn to read pictures and nature as others
read books', remarked Wilkie in a dialogue with his
friend John Burnet. 'I see', replied Burnet, 'that the progress of a Painter is as laborious as the Pilgrim's Progress'. The purpose of this essay is to enquire how
Mulready's narrative paintings were intended to be
'read'. The process of story-telling is our concern rather
than the content of the paintings. However, it is worth initially discussing the assumption that Mulready's paintings all portray a cheerful, even sentimental view of
domestic life. I have discussed the implications of
Mulready's The Widow (1823) in an earlier number of
this magazine.4 Suffice it here to point to two other paintings by Mulready which also deal with the dark side of
human nature and the seamier side of society. When
Mulready submitted The Village Buffoon (Fig.2) to the
S
E.
ABOUT:
Voyage
a
travers l'Exposition
des Beaux-Arts,
in
the
art
of
Mulready
Royal Academy in 1816, the subject appeared obscure to
the council and Wilkie, who was intimate with Mulready
at this time, was called upon to explain to the general
meeting what the picture was about. He described it as
'an old man soliciting a mother for her daughter who was
a matshownunwillingto consentto so disproportionate
ch'.' The Village Buffoon could thus be seen as an inversion of the scene Wilkie himself had painted in Duncan
Gray (1814, reworked 1817) and for which Mulready posed as a model for the young man. Wilkie portrayed a girl
foolishly refusing to accept the attentions of a most acceptable young man while Mulready shows a wise girl
horrified by the attentions of a foolish old man. Unlike
Wilkie's painting which is based on Burns, Mulready's
The Village Buffoon has no literary source and little
humour. The old man has money; he wears spats and is
the owner of a silver-tipped cane lying in the foreground.
The object of his desire huddles in acute embarrassment
by the doorway of her home while the heavy black
shadows under the dark wall of the cottage where the
mother sits with her daughters and the long shadow cast
across the sunlit street from the grotesquely soliciting old
man create an ominous atmosphere. The true nature of
this situation is not very humorous.
Whilst Wilkie was painting his heart-warming Chelsea
Pensioners reading the Dispatch from the Battle of
Waterloo, Mulready was painting an anonymous soldier
convalescing from his wounds. Pale and ailing, accompanied by his care-worn wife and three children, he takes
an airing on the beach. Mulready's The Convalescent
from Waterloo (1822;Fig.4) must be unique among
Waterloo paintings in its pervasive air of isolation and
sadness, its open spaces and lassitude. The children's
fight in the foregound gives rise to sad reflections on the
futility and inevitability of war. Like The Widow,
Mulready's The Convalescent from Waterloo remained
on his hands for several years.6 The pacifist point of the
painting would not have escaped an audience familiar
with Bewick's boy soldiers astride the gravestone'7 and the
extensive tradition of juvenile literature in which
children and war are poignantly associated:
Whilst playing thus you little know
The hardships soldiers undergo
run the lines of a poem in British Sports for the Amusement of Children (c. 1828). 8
Paris [1855],
2 E. BALLEYGUIER: Le Salon de 1855, Paris
[1855], p.33.
The Progress of a Painter, [1854], p.79.
3 J.BURNET:
4 M. POINrTON: 'William Mulready's The Widow: a subject "unfit for pictorial representation",' THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, CXIX, [May 1977],
pp.347-51.
NUMBER925- APRIL198
POINTON
narrative
Pictorial
p.11.
CXXII
VOLUME
SThe Farington Diary, 4th November 1816, MS. Royal Library, Windsor.
W. Mulready's account book, MS. Victoria and Albert Museum, 86 NN 1.
STail-piece for History of British Birds, London, G. G. AND J. ROBINSON
[1797,
1804].
A
ANON. British sports for the amusement of children, n.d. (c. 1828).
6
229
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1. First Love, by William Mulready. 77.5 by 61.6 cm. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
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PICTORIAL
NARRATIVE
IN
THE
The Village Buffoon and The Convalescent from
Waterloo are paintings which, like The Widow, appear
to have a very definite moral content. But Mulready
painted many other pictures which are light-hearted and
lyrical in mood and subject and it is to a group of these
pictures that we now turn. The sort of question we ask
ourselves before First Love (1840;Fig.1) and The Butt
(1847;Fig. 10), for example, is are they pleasing pictorial
records of actual occasions or pure fantasy? If they tell a
story, how is it told? What can the artist hope to achieve
in pictorial narrative and what are the means at his
disposal? Should we, like Taine, lament the fact that
Mulready employed a paint brush instead of a pen,
painted pictures instead of writing stories?'
Taine, like so many French commentators, was an admirer of English literature. His expressions of regret
about Mulready's medium undoubtedly include a note of
irony. Nevertheless, it is significant that he missed the
fact that it was precisely the ambiguities (that were less
evident in a written story) and the opportunity for
speculation offered in Mulready's painted stories that
delighted an English audience. Translating the incidents
of the picture into words was the task of the viewer whose
originality and skill would be challenged to a greater or
lesser degree according to the quality of the painting he
was looking at. Thackeray's rapture before First Love
(R.A. 1840) is the excitement'of someone who discovers
that he is collaborating with the artist in unravelling a
story, bringing all his intuition into play in order to read
the signs and translate the meaning:
Let us look at the design and conception of 'First
Love'; and, pray, sir, where in the whole works of
modern artists will you find anything more exquisitely
beautiful? I don't know what that young fellow, so
solemn, so tender, is whispering into the ear of that
dear girl (she is only fifteen now, but sapristi, how
beautiful she will be about three years hence!!), who is
folding a pair of slim arms round a little baby, and,
making believe to nurse it, as they three are standing
one glowing day under some trees by a stile. I don't
know, I say what they are saying; nor, if I could hear
10
would I tell-'tis a secret, madam
...'.
in a story
is
not
series
of
events
a
extolling
Thackeray
but the evocation of a human situation pregnant with
narrative implications. Unlike the Pre-Raphaelites and
many later Victorian painters of narrative, Mulready
declined to offer any verbal explanations for his pictures.
The titles do, however, frequently convey an enigma, a
mystery that the viewer must unravel. The Careless
Messenger Detected (1821, collection of Lord Lambton)
or The Wolf and the Lamb carry, in their titles, the same
solemn, biblical cadences as the hymns and poems of
Isaac Watts. Mulready may not actually be telling us that
these are religious parables but the visual and verbal
language of Aesop and the Bible was surely familiar to an
audience so much closer to these basic texts than we are
today. They would have asked who is the messenger and
in what way has he been careless? What will be his
punishment or will he be forgiven? Which is the wolf and
which the lamb? Why is the lamb not in his fold? Will the
'shepherd' save the lamb from the wolf's clutches? Will
9
1I.TAINE: Notes on England [1873], pp.333-34.
W. M. THIACKERAY: 'A Pictorial Rhapsody', Fraser's Magazine [1840].
10
ART
OF
WILLIAM
MULREADY
the wolf lie down with the lamb or will continued
hostilities be inevitable?
There is no such enigma and less of a challenge to interpret human psychology or penetrate the moral
mystery of human manners in Teniers or Ostade upon
whom Mulready modelled his early style. Nor is such
complexity of purpose to be found in those nineteenthcentury artists like Thomas Webster and William Henry
Knight who achieved great success and popularity by
emulating Mulready's subject paintings.
The title of First Love is similarly important. If this is
'First Love', we ask ourselves, what is 'Second Love'? Is
the harrassed housewife who shouts at her eldest
daughter from the doorway of the house an indication of
what life really holds in store for this besotted young couple? A title on its own, however, can only assist the
viewer. Mulready's paintings, at their best, succeed
because the composition is so calculated as to reinforce
the idea expressed verbally in the title. Our initial reaction to First Love might well be bne of admiration for its
structural qualities rather than for its evocation of mood
and suggestion of narrative. Before noticing the
uninhibited
of the dogs in the
rapprochement
the
who
reminds us of how the
foreground,
jeering boy
have
in
man
behaved
a similar situation onyoung
might
a
few
the
and
r6le adopted by
maternal
ly
years earlier,
the girl, we might well look at the balanced group of the
young man and the girl inclining towards each other yet
separated by the strong vertical made by the angle of the
wall against which both are leaning. The profile of the
youth matches that of the girl and the diagonal of his leg
corresponds to that of her right arm. Mulready rejected a
striking, Grecian style back view of the girl (strongly
reminiscent of the back view of the mother in Brother
and Sister)11 in order to, achieve this subtly related group
of figures.
The emphasis that nineteenth-century artists placed
on the fleeting moment of time instead of the 'timeless
function of the potent image, the Pharaoh forever
dominating his foes' might, it has been pointed out, easi" There can be no doubt
ly tempt artists into triviality.
that Mulready, at times, lapsed into triviality. Now Jump
and The Sailing Match" celebrate moments of no great
significance or moral value and lack the spontaneity that
might have redeemed them. At his best, however,
Mulready sought to unite the timeless potent image and
the fleeting, peak moment of narrative. He was occasionally able to achieve this synthesis. In The Fight Interrupted (1816;Fig.5), age and experience mediate with
reasonableness in an incident of youthful confrontation,
that reaches its climax in a school playground beneath
the most primitive time-piece and reminder of transience, the sun dial. On the pump, as a further reminder
of temporality, are carved the names of other boys who
have passed through the playground and among them
the artist has inscribed his own initials. An abandoned
cricket bat on the left and a book lying on the right
" Two versions of Brother and Sister
exist, one in the Victoria and Albert
Museum, the other in the Tate Gallery. The study referred to is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 6402.
12 E. If. GOMBRICHI: Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology
of Pictorial
Representation [1960, new edn. 1962], p.118.
" Now
Jump is known only from a photograph in the Witt Library, The
Sailing Match is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
230
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2. The Village Buffoon, by William Mulready. 1815-16. 73.7 by 62.2 cm. (Royal Academy, London).
3. Lending a Bite, by William
London).
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Mulready.
1834. 50.8 by
4. The Convalescentfrom Waterloo, by William Mulready, 1822. Panel, 61 by 77.5 cm. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
5. The Fight interrupted, by William Mulready. 1815-16. Panel, 72.4 by 94 cm. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
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PICTORIAL
NARRATIVE
IN
THE
signify a past and a future in which the protagonists
would be otherwiseoccupiedthan in the painting'spresenttime.
Despiteits title, TheFightInterrupteddepictsthe time
someminutesafterthe sage and black-cladschoolmaster
has separatedthe combatants.Whilsthe wasworkingon
the picture, Mulready described it to Farington as
'Schoolboysseparatedafterfighting'. 4 It is typicalof the
artist'stendencyto universalisethat he should have exhibitedthe paintingwith a less descriptivetitle. The action does not, however,lack clarity.The masterhas one
boy by the ear with his right hand, while with the other
handhe is aboutto remonstratewithanotherboywho, as
an observer,is recountingwhat happenedand pointing
an accusing finger. This boy is a tell-tale because he
deferentiallydoffs his cap to the teacherand receivesa
look of loathingfrom the cornerof the combatant'seye.
Another boy, somewhat older, tries to attract the
master'sattention and points to the other party in the
fight who, favouredwith the attentionof severalfriends,
leans againstthe pump on the right of the picture, one
hand holdinga painfulknee, the othergingerlypointing
to his cut lip which is being examined by his friend.
Anotherboy bends in the centre foregroundto retrieve
coat and hat that havebeendroppedin the fray.
The masterand the boy whomhe holdsby the ear are
on the left of the picturein an enclosedspace bordered
on the right and left by leaningtrunksof two great trees
and backedby a wall and the ramshackleroof of a shed.
Eventhe trees show signs of wear and the tail of a kite
hangs patheticallyfrom a branch testifyingto a game
that came to a prematureend. The tree trunk on the
right is the point of intersectionof the gesticulating
hands of three differentindividuals.Then there is the
hiatus marked by the stooping boy in the foreground
and, movingoverto the right, a secondclimax with the
group that is boundedon the left by the verticalof the
schoolporticoand on the rightby the verticalline of the
pump. The left hand of the tall boy links the two. The
various compositional elements are thus articulated
structurally;colouris also effectivelyused to link the differentsectionsof the picture, from the palid boy on the
far left to the white sleeveof the sufferingyouth by the
pumpon the right.
This is not a straightforward account of the
playground bully, a pictorial statement of absolute right
or absolute wrong. Mulready presents us with a complex
psychological and philosophical situation concerning
human nature. Blame is not apportioned and no simple
solution is suggested. This is the fight
interrupted, an
is
that
to
be
broken
before
uneasy peace
likely
very long.
Age and experience can mediate but cannot finally
resolve fundamental human conflicts. Through the
variety of human expression in the picture and the sensitive use of
environment, Mulready endows this incident
with a universalsignificance.
Mulreadywas among those artistswho kept his head in
an age when capturing the actual moment was a common goal. Like Degas towards the end of the century,
Mulready in the second a respect for academic tradition
and pictorial convention with an almost obsessive empiricism. He drew in the life class twice a week until the
"' The Farington Diary, 8th November 1815, MS. Royal Library, Windsor.
ART
OF
WILLIAM
MULREADY
day he died but he also spent hours in the streets of Kensington and Bayswater recording, classifying and analysing everything from the uniform worn by the boys of
London's charity schools to the colour of dirt by which
different workmen might be recognised and from every
kind of botanical specimen to different kinds of chimney
pots. "5
Reviewing The Wolf and the Lamb when it was exhibited in Paris in 1855, Gautier noticed that 'une des
plus curieusespeintures' was pictorially effective through
its special synthesisof ethnic everydaylife objectively seen
(il vousfait sans presentation entrer profondement dans
l'intimite du pays') and universally applicable truths ('Ce
loup et cet agneau sont deux caracteres-Addison ou la
Bruyere ne les peindraient pas mieux-et le tableau joue
dans son cadre etroit une scene de la comedie
eternelle'). 16 Mulready'smethods of work were designed
to enable him to combine an authentic view of the outside world with the timeless qualities of classical art.
Mulready covered page after page of his notebooks
with information concerning colour, glazes, methods and
materials. Each exhibited painting was the result of
months of preparation not only of technique but also of
content. As Palgrave remarked, 'each one appears to be
an experiment in advance'. 17 The origin of Mulready's
pictorial narrative was sometimes no more than a verbal
note. For example a page reads:
'Actors Woman diverting her son's attention
Deaf
in the ward. Her ready to burst
BlindI
With a dog who begs of the preacher
Workhouse idea
Hussars attacked by a warrior
Bald man
Drunken mechanic
Hat
HandkerAsleep whore watching him
chief'•"8
Verbal jottings like this were then developed by
detailed on-the-spot annotated studies in which the artist recorded the most minute details of clothing and
physiognomy. He was undoubtedly influenced by the
fashion for physiognomic experiment that had made
Lavater's work so popular throughout Europe but
Mulready's drawings are rarely theoretical; and when,
for example, he became interested in criminal
physiognomy, he went to court to make his studies as
Degas was to do so many years later. 19
Attributes and accessories are essential to narrative
art and it is only by examining Mulready's methods of
work carefully that we can hope to begin to see his pictures as they would have been seen by his contemporaries. The difference in dress between the errand
boy and the schoolboy in The Dog .of Two Minds
(1829-30)2o is the key to an understanding of their different stations and the threat that the one poses to the
" See collections of
drawings and notes by William Mulready in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Whitworth Art Gallery, the University of
Manchester.
If r. GAtTIER: Les Beaux-Arts en
Europe, Paris [1855], pp.19-20.
17 F. r. PALGRAVE: Essays on Art [1866], p.128.
" Whitworth Art Gallery, the
University of Manchester, MS. D.
121.
g. 1895.
" Victoria and Albert
See also A.
Museum, 6183, 6189, 6193-6195.
RORIMER:
Drawings by William Mulready, Victoria and Albert Museum
[1972], pp.113-15; and M. POINTON: 'Painters and Pugilism', Gazette des
Beaux-Arts [October 1978], pp.131-40.
20 Walker Art
Gallery, Liverpool.
233
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PICTORIAL
NARRATIVE
IN
THE
other. A picture like The Travelling Druggist (1825),
now known only from a photograph and preparatory
studies, comes to life by reason of a network of personal attributes. This is plain when we read a description of the picture that was published in 1864:
The scene is the door of a cottage at which a Turkey
rhubarb merchant has halted, and is weighing in a
small pair of scales a modicum of that useful drug
which, at its earliest introduction, was believed in
even more firmly that it is now. A woman stands inside the doorway, bearing in her arms a hulking and
petted boy, whose evident disgust at the dose preparing for him is exquisitely given. He holds in one
hand an unripe pear, and in the other a slice of
bread and butter. He has a night cap on his head.
By way of moral, there stands in the fresh air, and
with a skipping rope in her hand, a hale and hearty
girl, as if to show what would be the best medicine
for the spoilt boy.21
The detail in Mulready's narrative paintings is not
only thoroughly researched but also rigorously controlled. Explicit action tends to be suppressed in favour of
evocative mood. In an early sketch for First Love
(Fig.7) a small child tries to attract the attention of his
sister by dragging at her skirt while she exchanges
endearments with a young man in a doorway.22 This
motif was abandoned in the finished painting in order
to leave the central group isolated and intact, its sultry
charm threatened only from a distance by the scoffing
child. Mulready saved up the image and introduced it
into one of his designs for The Vicar of Wakefield in
1843 (Fig.6) where it appears as pure invention, totally
unsupported by any textual reference.23 In the scene
from Goldsmith's novel where Olivia is about to elope,
the narrative sequence of events is more important
than mood, development more significant than idyll.
Here the child is a poignant reminder of the family
that Olivia has just deserted.
The particularity deriving from Mulready's close
observation of the social scene is also balanced by a
deliberate attempt to universalise the subject, which
led F. G. Stephens, the artist's first biographer, to
speak of Mulready's ability to impart 'that artistic completeness we see in historical painting' and 'what we
may call philosophy' to his works.24 The participants
in Mulready's dramas may be strongly individuated in
facial expression and pose but they are frequently
anonymous. They are seldom dependent on literary
sources and, although Mulready's drawings show him
to have studied extensively from the life, by the time
the figures reach his paintings they have lost their
Therefore
names.
they differ from Wheatley's,
Morland's or Bigg's figures who are not characterised,
and from the great mass of participants in other
notable nineteenth-century paintings who have names
like Bubbles or the Blind Girl or Lola de Valence, or
21 Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education,
South Kensington Museum, A Catalogue of the Pictures . . . of the Late
William Mulready, Esq.
[1864], p.55.
22 Whitworth Art Gallery,R.A.
the University of Manchester.
23 OLIVER GOLDSMITH: The Vicar of Wakefield, London
[1843], ch. xv.
24 F. G. STEPHENS, Masterpieces
of Mulready: Memorials of William
Mulready [1867], p.1; Memorials of William Mulready, revised edn. [1879],
p.1.
ART
OF
WILLIAM
MULREADY
else who emerge from the pages of popular literature
to take up temporary residence on the artist's canvas.
Even when there would seem to have been a model, as
with Father and Child (1825), the original sketch for
which is inscribed 'James Leckie and little Mary', 25 the
finished painting emerges as a more universal statement.
In the best of Mulready's work the crystalline clarity
of detail does not detract from the overall idea (what
Stephens would call the 'philosophy' of the painting)
nor does it blur the many-stranded narrative. The
spottiness for which the Pre-Raphaelite painters were
criticised was never one of Mulready's faults even
though his own brilliant colour and attention to detail
inspired the younger generation of artists. In The Fight
Interrupted we have seen how the artist imposed a
structural and thematic unity on his subject. The process by which this was achieved is worthy of closer examination.
Mulready's notes show him to have been much
preoccupied with grouping and classifying objects.
These studies were of immense value to him in composing a narrative subject, for he appreciated that a
many-stranded narrative scene requires the recognition
of an incident as central, and that the success of a subject which seeks to balance the universal and the particular depends on the controlled reiteration of image
and idea. Comparing sketches with finished paintings
we can often see Mulready refining and concentrating
in order to achieve this balance between the central incident and the narrative implications, between the individual observation and the general idea.
The chiaroscuro sketch for The Butt (Fig.9) shows
the basic composition already complete.26 The protagonists are not fundamentally changed in the finished painting (Fig.10) but other features of the composition are radically reorganised. In place of the little girl
holding a hoop and seen from behind in the
foreground, Mulready introduces the figure of a much
older girl kneeling facing the viewer and, behind her,
another girl peeping over her shoulder. An earthenware jug, on which the marksman places his ammunition, is placed in the foreground on the left and a dog
is introduced at the right. The effect of these changes
is to tighten up the composition and heighten tension.
Both boys are seen in profile, one with his mouth
screwed up with concentration, and his arm thrust forward with muscles tensed, the other with his mouth
wide open, his elbow drawn back and his fingers
splayed. The 'S' curves of the boys' backs, one dark
and the other light, form two sides of a vessel shape,
the very shape, in fact, of the earthenware jug in the
foreground. The girls' merriment heightens the effect
of the boys' concentration and, by showing the girls
full face, Mulready is able to establish a circle of
directed looks. Thus the boys stare fixedly at each
the girls look at the butt and the dog gazes imother,
passively at the marksman.
Mulready's most effective narrative subjects are
characterised by the principle of pictorial coherence.
25 The
painting is in a private collection, for the sketch see John Varley and
his Pupils . . . Original Drawings in the Collection of J. PH.
(J. P.
Heseltine), privately printed, London [1918], No. 10, illus.
26 Victoria and Albert Museum, 6303.
234
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6. Design for 'The Vicar of
by William
Wakefield',
Mulready.
7. Study for First Love, by William Mulready. Pen and ink.
(Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester).
9. Study for The Butt, by William Mulready. Charcoal and white chalk. (Victoria and
Albert Museum, London).
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8. The Wedding Day, by William Mu
Art Gallery, Port Sunlight).
10. The Butt, by William
Museum, London).
Mulready.
PICTORIAL
NARRATIVE
IN
THE
In The Widow the idea of money and in The Convalescent from Waterloo the idea of war knit together
the disparate parts of the narrative through reiterated
the
images. In The Wedding Day (c.1816;Fig.8)27
dominant class of imagery is concerned with clothes.
The mother adjusts the bridegroom's collar and his little sister tries to do up his buttons while his young
brother explores his pockets. Nearby the open drawer
of a work table displays all that is necessary for mending and sewing. On the right the father, with an air
of scepticism, examines his hat and the festive
garments that spill out of a trunk onto the floor. Thus
the subject of a young man and his family making
preparations on the morning of his wedding (the
reverse of the traditional representation of the bride at
her toilet) is narrated through unity of design supported by thematic coherence.
In Lending a Bite of 1834 (Fig.3) (an earlier version of the subject set in an urban environment was
formerly in the Mellon collection) the thematic
coherence of the painting is established through images
of mouths. The main action takes place in the middle
27 Most of Mulready's paintings are in excellent condition owing to the immense care he took over technique. This painting is unusual in so far as the
ground has cracked badly and affected the paint surface.
DEBORAH
The
Hogarth
Club:
The Hogarth Club, an exhibiting society and social club,
was founded in April 1858 and dissolved in December
1861. Its members - divided into two classes of 'artistic'
and 'non-artistic'included painters, sculptors, architects, writers, collectors, professional men and their
friends. Those who lived in London were termed 'resident'. According to W. M. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown
suggested that the Club was named after William
Hogarth, 'a painter whom he deeply reverenced as the
originator of moral invention and drama in modern
art'.' Holman Hunt confirmed that 'we fixed upon this
name to do homage to the stalwart founder of Modern
English art'.2
The formation of the Hogarth Club marked the
culmination of a sustained campaign by Brown, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and their circle to establish exhibiting
associations which would give them independence of the
Royal Academy. They attempted to form collective exhibitions in November 1852 and May 1855.1 At the
I
2
W. M. ROSSETTI: Some Reminiscences, London [1906], I, p.224.
WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT: Pre-Raphaelitism
and the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, London [1905-6], II, pp.142-43.
' In November 1852 D. G. Rossetti invited Brown to meet C. A.
Collins, W. H.
Deverell, Holman Hunt, J. E. Millais, J. P. Seddon, Thomas Seddon, F. G.
Stephens, and possibly James Hannay to discuss plans for a collective exhibition
(O. DOUGHTY and J. R. WAHL, eds.: Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oxford
Letters). On 21st May 1855 a meeting was
[1965], I, p.116; hereafter ROSSETTI,
held to consider an independent exhibition; it was attended by Brown, Arthur
Hughes, R. B. Martineau, D. G. Rossetti, W. M. Rossetti, Thomas Seddon,
W. C. Thomas, and Thomas Woolner amongst others (Journal of Ford Madox
Brown, 21st May 1855, MS on deposit at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
ART
WILLIAM
OF
MULREADY
plane where one youth nervously and with considerable
reluctance allows another boy a bite of his apple. The
drama of suspicion and determination is simultaneously
enacted on the foreground plane between a dog and a
monkey. The composition is striking; a vertical division
cuts the painting in half. On the left the owner of the
apple has elbows drawn back, mouth open, fingers
tightly clutching his apple. On the right, the huigry
boy presents the reverse image with thrusting body and
splayed fingers. The compositional core of the picture
is in the centre left where the serpentine line of heads
and backs that runs from the tail of the dog to the
head of the baby, who sleeps in his sister's arms in the
background, terminates. Here are seen in a relatively
small area four expressive mouths. The baby's is open
as he peacefully sleeps ignorant of the scene, so are
those of the two boys. The girl smiles serenely. The
open mouths convey the theme of the painting which is
less a 'story' than a situation and, in case there were
any danger of our ignoring them, Mulready depicts
two large open-mouthed earthenware vessels hanging
from the arm of the hungry boy.
This overall unity of imagery establishes a sense of
decorum which, in itself, assists the 'reading' of the
picture. Perhaps Addison and La Bruyere would not,
after all, have been displeased had they heard the
name of William Mulready associated with their own.
CHERRY
1858-1861
private showings in the Langham Place studios in 1856
and 1857 artists and patrons assembled to view pictures
before public exhibition and to inspect collections of
works by little-known artists. 4 The first corporate exhibition was held in rooms at 4 Russell Place in June 1857.
When Pre-Raphaelite paintings were submitted that year
to the Royal Academy they were rejected or badly hung.
The group retaliated by instituting their own exhibition;
many of the contributors were to become members of the
Hogarth Club.5 Brown, the organiser of the exhibition,
believed that it would be 'the beginning of a new state of
things'6 and indeed its success encouraged the group to
continue joint ventures. That summer D. G. Rossetti
wrote confidently of 'our next year's exhibition'7 and
plans were soon underway for 'a central room for sending
ones pictures to at any time, in London'.8
SIn the spring of 1856 J. D. Luard showed his Crimean works with Millais's
Academy pictures (HUNT, II, p.105). In December Brown and Rossetti
presented a small collection of landscapes by William Davis (Brown to Davis,
21st December 1856, Troxell collection,
Princeton University Library,
hereafter PUL). In the spring of 1857 Brown's contributions to the Manchester
Art Treasures Exhibition were exhibited with four landscapes by Davis, and
Millais's Academy pictures (Brown to Davis, [April 1857], PUL).
Those involved in both ventures were G. P. Boyce, John Brett, Brown, James
Campbell, Davis, M. F. Halliday, Arthur Hughes, Holman Hunt, J. W. Inchbold, R. B. Martineau, D. G. Rossetti, W. B. Scott, and W. L. Windus.
6 Brown to Davis,
[May 1857], PUL. Material from the Troxell Collection is
published with permission of Princeton University Library.
SD. G. Rossetti to W. B. Scott, [June 1857], PUL.
SBrown toJohn Miller, 20thJune 1857, PUL.
237
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