William Powell Frith, Poverty and Wealth

WILLIAM POWELL FRITH
(Yorkshire 1819 - London 1909)
Poverty and Wealth
signed `W.P. Frith.’ and dated ‘1888’ (lower left)
oil on canvas
81.3 x 119.4 cm (32 x 47 in)
Provenance: Christie’s, 4th May 1889, lot 139;
James B. Andrews (1951).
Exhibitions: The Royal Academy, 1888, number 26.
Literature: Blackburn, H., Academy Notes,. page 1, illustrated plate 23;
Royal Academy Illustrated, 1888, page 16;
Art Journal, 1888, page 181;
Athenaeum, 26 May 1888, page 668;
Punch, 14th July 1888, page 16;
Ernest Govett, Art Principles with Special Reference to Painting, together with Note on the Illusions Produced by the Painter
(G.P. Putmam’s Sons, New York & London, 1919), p. 178;
Susan P. Casteras, ‘Seeing the Unseen: Pictorial Problematics and Victorian Images of Class, Poverty, and Urban Life’
in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ & John O. Jordan
(University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 1995), pp. 269-270;
Mark Bills and Vivien Knight, William Powell Frith, Painting in the Victorian Age, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006,
illustrated pages 56, plate 58 (detail) and 69, plate 66;
Simon Knowles ‘Pavement, Gutter, Carriageway: Social Order and Urban Spaces in the Work of W. P. Frith’,
in Victorian Literature and Culture (vol. 39, iss. 02, 2011), pp. 360-362, illustrated in colour (figure 5).
P
overty
and
Wealth
highlights
the
inequalities of late Victorian London as exemplified in literature
by the author Charles Dickens (1812-1870). William Powell Frith
was friends with Dickens, and like him, his most popular works
were scenes showing the daily life of all social classes, not just the elite.
This work is typical of the London street scenes that Frith painted, crowded
with figures, where the subject’s interpretation depends upon minutely
observed incident and detail. Outside a fishmongers shop on Bond Street,
a group of poor women and children queue up to acquire the day’s unsold
fish. On the opposite side of the picture a group of wealthy women and
children have paused whilst they wait for their companion to join them,
and she is followed by a footman laden with toys. The work contains many
contrasts between figures on the opposite sides of the scene, for example,
on the right hand side the sorrowful woman, dressed in black cradling a
small baby, is juxtaposed with the left-hand side where a wealthy lady is
happily playing with her child in a carriage. The elaborate, detailed and
richly coloured clothes of the wealthy contrast with the muted colours and
simple designs of the poor peoples’ clothing. The two groups, though binary
in their compositional position, overlap as they look to one another’s side
of the street. In particular, an old woman in a black head-scarf, who was
William Powell Frith, Poverty and Wealth (Detail)