John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott 1888. Tate.
12 rooms in Historic and Early Modern British Art
Prosperity in Victorian Britain helps art become spectacularly popular. Dramatic images from life and literature attract blockbuster audiences
Britain’s wealth swells in the 19th century, fuelled by imperial expansion and industrial development. While most people remain poor, many have more money and leisure time. Millions enjoy art and culture, whether reading cliff-hanger novels by writers like Charles Dickens or visiting vast imperial displays like the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Thousands queue to view popular artworks on tour throughout Britain. Better printing allows more people to see or own reproductions. Some of the paintings in this room become world famous. Acts of Parliament and wealthy donors – typically industrialists – help public galleries open, with free entry, in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and London. One of these, the National Gallery of British Art, funded by the sugar merchant Henry Tate, becomes known as the Tate Gallery.
To grab the attention of these crowds, artists choose literary and modern-life subjects that reflect ideas dominating their time. They often overlook, caricature or romanticise the experiences of many people. These include women, people of colour, workers or those living in poverty. However, traces of these lives can be seen in some of the paintings here.
John Martin, The Last Judgement 1853
This was part of a triptych (series of three works), with The Great Day of His Wrath and The Plains of Heaven. The pictures were produced at the end of John Martin’s career, with the intention of touring them. They travelled extensively, even going on show in America and Australia. Their fame and influence helped pave the way for modern forms of popular entertainment – including blockbuster cinema.
Gallery label, August 2019
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artworks in Art for the Crowd
Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, The North-West Passage 1874
The north-west passage is a dangerous sea route round North America via the Canadian Arctic. For centuries, European explorers attempted to use it as a trade route to Asia. It became associated with failure, adversity and death, with ships and their crews battling against hopeless odds in a frozen wilderness. Millais painted this when an English expedition was setting off. Millais suggests the risks of the voyage through the grim expression of the old seaman. His daughter is pictured beside him, reading from a log book.
Gallery label, August 2018
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artworks in Art for the Crowd
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
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artworks in Art for the Crowd
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Silent Greeting 1889
The ‘silent greeting’ of the title is the gift of flowers that the young Roman soldier leaves for the sleeping woman. The subject was inspired by The Visit, a poem by the German poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Alma-Tadema took great pains over the accuracy of his depictions of the ancient world, carefully researching the architecture and interior details. However, the sentimental subject and the contemporary look of the figures – memorably described as ‘Victorians in togas’ – gives the painting the air of a modern costume drama.
Gallery label, September 2004
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artworks in Art for the Crowd
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
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Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Foregone Conclusion 1885
A moment from contemporary Victorian life is shown here taking place in ancient Greece or Rome. A man brings an engagement ring to his girlfriend in the hope that she will become his fiancée. Her eager attitude shows that the result of his proposal is ‘a foregone conclusion’. Although Alma-Tadema took great care in the authenticity of his classical settings, the modern subject would have made the painting accessible to a nineteenth-century audience. The painting belonged to Sir Henry Tate’s second wife, Amy Hislop. They were married the year it was painted and he may have given it to her as an engagement present.
Gallery label, September 2004
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artworks in Art for the Crowd
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
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Sir William Blake Richmond, Jochebed with Moses and Miriam 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
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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
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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
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William Powell Frith, The Derby Day 1856–8
The Derby Day was first exhibited in 1858 at the Royal Academy in London. It was so popular that a barrier had to be put up to protect the work. The annual Derby at Epsom Downs racecourse in Surrey, south-east England attracted huge crowds. Frith’s detailed panorama focuses on the day’s entertainment, relegating the racing to the margins. On the left, a group of men in top hats bet on a game-playing ‘trickster’. In the centre, a crowd of bare-footed children watches an acrobat and his son. Behind them are carriages filled with racegoers enjoying Derby day.
Gallery label, November 2019
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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
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James Ward, Gordale Scar (A View of Gordale, in the Manor of East Malham in Craven, Yorkshire, the Property of Lord Ribblesdale) ?1812–4, exhibited 1815
Gordale Scar is a bank of limestone cliffs near Settle, Yorkshire. Ward painted this picture for Lord Ribblesdale, a local landowner. He emphasised the height and scale of the cliffs by subtly manipulating the perspective. In the foreground he shows deer and cattle, including a white bull from the (originally wild) Chillingham herd, who appears to guard the cleft of Gordale Beck. Working in the last years of the Napoleonic wars, Ward aimed to depict a national landscape, primordial and unchanging, defended by ‘John Bull’ in animal form. His painting also epitomised the awe-inspiring qualities of the fashionable ‘Sublime’ landscape.
Gallery label, March 2010
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artworks in Art for the Crowd
Sir Luke Fildes, The Doctor exhibited 1891
This painting depicts a child showing the first signs of recovery following a period of grave illness. The subject matter relates to a bereavement suffered by Fildes, when in 1877 his first son died at home at the age of one. Here, the figure of the doctor stands as a symbol of quiet professional devotion, capturing, as Fildes put it, ‘the status of the doctor of our time’. Behind the child, a working class father and mother anxiously await the doctor’s assessment. The sliver of dawn light at the window suggests renewed hope in the face of near-tragedy.
Gallery label, March 2022
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Anna Lea Merritt, Love Locked Out 1890
This picture shows young Cupid, the god of desire, pressed against the door of a tomb. It was painted as a memorial to the artist’s husband, who died just two months after they married. The thorny rose around the door frame represents the pain and persistence of love. Cupid has abandoned the world, his arrow and extinguished lamp lie on the ground with the autumn leaves. He is waiting, in the artist’s words, ‘for the door of death to open and the reunion of the lonely pair’. Merritt was a successful professional painter of a variety of subjects, including nudes. Some considered nudes unsuitable for women artists at the time. Love Locked Out proved popular when exhibited in 1890 and was bought for the nation.
Gallery label, August 2019
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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artworks in Art for the Crowd
Arthur Boyd Houghton, Volunteers 1861
This painting shows a group of infantrymen recruiting for the Volunteer Movement which swept Britain between 1859 and 1860. It was fuelled by the revolutions in Continental Europe in 1848 and British mistrust of France.As Houghton shows in this painting, the volunteers were mainly recruited from the middle classes. They felt it was their patriotic duty to enlist in one of the volunteer battalions. But there appears to be a general lack of interest from the civilians in this painting. The gentleman on the left is carefully not looking at the soldiers.
Gallery label, July 2007
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James Tissot, Summer (‘Portrait’) 1876
Tissot played on ambiguity in this painting. He invites the viewer to interpret it, like a problem picture. This genre of painting, with open-ended narratives, widely appealed to Victorians at the time. His model, Miss Lloyd, stands at the entrance of a billiards’ room, a space traditionally associated with men. She is either leaving or inviting someone in and her large engagement ring adds mystery as to who she is looking at. Tissot also made a print on the same subject called Portrait of Miss L… or ‘Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée (A Door Must Be Open or Closed). He moved to London from Paris in 1871 during the Franco-Prussian war and stayed until 1882.
Gallery label, November 2019
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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
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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
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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
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Philip Hermogenes Calderon, Broken Vows 1856
The title of this painting suggests that the woman has recently discovered that her lover, whose initials are carved in the fence, has been unfaithful. Further details, including the discarded necklace and dying flowers, indicate her unhappy situation. The ivy-covered wall may symbolise her previous belief that their love was everlasting. Disappointed love was a popular theme in Victorian painting, and viewers were expected to unravel the situation from the symbols and expressions of the characters.
Gallery label, July 2007
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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
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Emily Mary Osborn, Nameless and Friendless. “The rich man’s wealth is his strong city, etc.” - Proverbs, x, 15 1857
This painting addresses the plight of a single woman trying to make a living in a hostile environment. A young woman in mourning dress offers a picture to a dealer whose expression suggests rejection. Osborn was actively involved in the campaign for women’s rights that gathered momentum in the mid-19th century. Her painting was probably intended as a political statement as its exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1857 coincided with the formation of the Society of Female Artists, an organisation aimed at enabling women to exhibit and sell their work in public.
Gallery label, November 2016
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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
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artworks in Art for the Crowd
Art in this room
John Martin
The Last Judgement
1853
Sir John Everett Millais, Bt
The North-West Passage
1874
Sir John Everett Millais, Bt
The Vale of Rest
1858–9
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
A Silent Greeting
1889
Sir Thomas Brock
Sir Henry Tate
exhibited 1898
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
A Foregone Conclusion
1885
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