Frith, William Powell

Synonyms

Art; Frith; London; Nineteenth century; Streets; Urban crowd; Victorian

Introduction

Born in 1819 near Ripon in Yorkshire, William Powell Frith is best remembered as the most famous and successful painter of modernity and the urban crowd of the Victorian period. This reputation rests, primarily, upon three panoramic paintings: Ramsgate Sands (Life at the Seaside) (1854), Derby Day (1858), and The Railway Station (1862). The success of these works at the time of their original exhibition, and their accumulated historical value since, lies in the extent to which Frith, along with many of his contemporaries, recognized and responded to the dramatic growth of the Victorian city and to the social diversity of its citizens. Using his art as a means to establish a taxonomy of metropolitan types, he drew attention to key experiences of modern city life. As Mary Cowling observed (2006: 57), for the viewing public, these works “proved irresistibly attractive: a veritable mirror of their own times.”

London Locations in the Work of W. P. Frith

Frith began his training in London at the age of 16 with the artist Henry Sass, whose school he attended from 1835 until his enrollment at the Royal Academy in 1837. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840 and continued to exhibit regularly throughout his life. Alongside his paintings of metropolitan life, he also produced contemporary and historical genre scenes and portraits, one of the most famous of which was the large and complex royal commission, The Marriage of the Prince of Wales 10 March 1863 (1865). Frith was a significant figure within the Victorian art world. His success and popularity, particularly at the Royal Academy’s annual summer exhibition, can be measured by the number of times his submissions to this exhibition required the placement of a rail in front of his work to help regulate public viewing, six occasions in all.

Frith’s early associates included former fellow students such as Augustus Egg, Richard Dadd, and Alfred Elmore, with whom he established an informal sketching club called “The Clique,” not to be confused with the St. John’s Wood Clique. Alongside these artistic connections, he also established a close friendship with Charles Dickens, as a result of the writer’s commission in 1842 for two portraits of his female characters: Dolly Varden from Barnaby Rudge and Kate Nickleby from Nicholas Nickleby. This relationship, and Dickens’s own work, would prove crucial in helping Frith frame his own response to London and to the depiction of its crowds. Discussing the influence of Dickens in his autobiography, Frith explained (1887–88: 1:101) that his “inclination being strongly towards the illustration of modern life, I had read the work of Dickens in the hope of finding material for the exercise of any talent I might possess.” Frith was also influenced by other writers, such as Henry Mayhew and George Augustus Sala, whose commentaries on London life reflected with his own interest in the city. However, of greater significance, in terms of his artistic development, was the work of William Hogarth (1697–1764).

For Frith, as for many artists of the mid-Victorian period interested in the subject of modern life, it was Hogarth’s advocacy for a distinctive English school art, combined with a moralizing and accurate commentary on pressing social issues of the day, which proved so influential. This combination of truth and morality provided a vital and relevant visual context within which to frame their own commentary on the increasingly complex world of the city. However, in constructing a response to modernity by emulating Hogarth’s example, Victorian artists trod a difficult line. On the one hand, paintings of contemporary experience were expected to demonstrate a truthful realism, to engage with the world the way it was, but on the other hand, artists were also expected to respond to this social landscape while still respecting those moral, social, and aesthetic sensibilities, upon which, within the wider cultural context, the value of art was constructed. The paradox of Hogarth’s influence of Victorian art, and on Frith in particular, was recently summarized by Mark Bills (2006: 55), who wrote: “A Victorian Hogarth could only really exist in the imagination of a Victorian, it jarred too much with the eighteenth-century Hogarth, but Frith came closest to the realisation of this ideal, a masterly assimilation of Hogarth through Victorian eyes.”

This balance between Hogarth’s interest in the accurate observation of contemporary life and the desire to represent society as diverse but not dramatically divided is clearly present in Frith’s three panoramic paintings of the urban crowd. Hogarth’s commitment to aesthetic and moral value, measured by truthful representation, was elaborated by Frith through the additional perspective provided by physiognomy, a pseudoscience arguing that a person’s character, class, and moral value could be determined by the study of facial features. In terms of stabilizing the diversity of the urban crowd, physiognomy seemed to offer a clear and consistent mechanism that proved particularly popular during the Victorian Age. It formed a key part of Henry Mayhew’s popular and extensive social study, London Labour and the London Poor (1851–62), an encyclopedic work that responded to anxieties over a city whose population would grow from just over one million to over six and a half million in the course of the nineteenth century, and for which Frith’s three panoramic paintings of the metropolitan crowd, offered a highly seductive visual equivalent.

The first of these paintings, Ramsgate Sands (Life at the Seaside), was conceived during a holiday Frith had taken with his wife, Isabelle Barker, whom he had married in 1845, and his growing family. The work, although not set in London, offers a study of the metropolitan crowd, organized, for the viewer’s inspection along the shallow, stage like space of a beach seen from the sea. The subject carried some risk for Frith, due to its explicit engagement with modernity and its detailed depiction of lower middle and working class types. This ran contrary to the principal tenant of Academic teaching which privileged history painting above all other genres and therefore exposed Frith to the potentially damaging charge of contravening Victorian aesthetic sensibilities by selecting an un-picturesque, even vulgar subject. However, in spite of the fact that such criticisms were indeed made about this painting, it proved to be a huge success at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1854, where it was voted picture of the year. The success of this work, and with it Frith’s reputation, was further underlined when it was bought by the Queen.

The difficult task of constructing the complex social tableau seen in Ramsgate Sands was tackled by Frith through the creation of a series of distinctive portraits of figures set in small groups, engaged in incidental details of everyday life. These groupings were then linked together within the overarching structure of a shallow pyramid, whose apex is marked by the man in the black top hat at the center of the painting, thus converting the messy diversity of real life into a coherent tableau. This compositionally structure was then further elaborated by Frith, who, broadly speaking, reserved the foreground of his painting for the middle class. Here women are seen enjoying the sun, reading, or supervising their children at the water’s edge, a man dressed in a grey lounging suit relaxes with his newspaper. On the far right, an elderly woman bends down to comfort a frightened child. Immediately above her, partially hidden between two men, Frith has included a self-portrait. Towards the back of the crowd can be seen representatives of the lower classes, including a group of blacked up figures on the left, performing music in the exotic guise of an “Ethiopian” band, and on the right, in a humorous touch typical of Frith, a group of boys try to sell donkey rides to an elderly couple. The longer term significance of this work as social commentary was recognized by The Art Journal whose review noted that it would remain valuable as “a memento of the habits and manners of the English “at the seaside” in the middle of the nineteenth century” (1854: 161).

Frith’s second panoramic painting of the London crowd, Derby Day, was conceived during a visit to the races at Kempton Park in 1854. Although not set in the city, this work once again records the rich variety of the metropolitan milieu, highlighting both the desire and the difficulty inherent in stabilizing urban identities. From both an artistic and a commercial point of view, Frith had made an inspired choice. The Derby, held each year on Epsom Downs, was a major public holiday, with a huge attendance drawn from all classes, providing both artist and viewer with a rich and varied spectacle. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858, it proved a sensational success. By repeating his earlier use of a stretched landscape format, Frith was once again able to incorporate a large number of closely observed and recognizable types engaging in a wide variety of activities. These included, on the far right, a dissolute young aristocrat who leans casually against a barouche in which his mistress sits. Standing beside her, an older woman points out the danger of her morally questionable life style. In the center of the composition, another group of aristocratic men are seen drinking champagne on the top of a carriage. Already drunk, they enjoy the company of prostitutes. Below this carriage of revelers, the central section includes: acrobats, a gang of gypsies, and a pickpocket. Just left of center, can be seen the unfortunate figure of a young man, foolishly conned by the thimble riggers standing beside him. Further to the left stands another trickster, holding a bank note in his hand, with which he hopes to tempt the rustic looking gentleman, wearing a pale smock, whose wife, recognizing the danger, attempts to steer him away from temptation by holding on to his arm.

Frith’s third crowd panorama, The Railway Station, was his most ambitious, both in terms of its scale and the novelty of its subject (see Fig. 1). The work is set in Paddington Station, close to the well to do inner suburb of Bayswater in West London, to which Frith and his growing family had moved in 1852. Commissioned by the art dealer Louis Victor Flatow, the work was produced between 1860 and 1862. Recognizing its financial potential, the work was exhibited by Flatow at his Haymarket gallery, where over twenty-one thousand people paid to see it. In the following year, he arranged for the work to tour the country. For the viewing public, the subject held a particular fascination, drawing attention not only to the social mix of the crowd, but also to the dynamic space of a large railway station and to the new levels of mobility that so marked both the fabric and the experience of urban living in the nineteenth century.

Fig. 1

Frith, The Railway Station, 1862, Royal Holloway, University of London

The questions and anxieties raised by the growing scale of the London crowd, and the problem of securing social identification within such diversity, rest upon the extent to which this knowledge could then assist in exercising order and control. The desire to establish credible mechanisms that would help to present the city and its occupants as a legible text, which underpins Ramsgate Sands and Derby Day, was developed by Frith with particular force in The Railway Station in which the desire for order and control, and the anxieties generated by the need to separate those who conform to social norms from those who transgress formed an explicit part of his narrative.

On the right hand side of the painting, can be seen two policemen arresting a man trying to board the train. His well-dressed appearance would indicate a more sophisticated form of criminal behavior, such as fraud. Highlighting his desire for realism, Frith modeled the policemen on Michael Haydon and James Brett, two detective-sergeants of the City of London Police. This reassuring statement of control serves to secure the public space of a busy platform in a large London terminus. Just right of center can be seen an upper class wedding party including a bride, with her groom, bidding farewell to her sisters. Immediately behind them stands another criminal type, but in this case, and in accordance with the principles of physiognomy, his course features indicate an habitual criminal from the lower classes. Now enrolled in the army, his mother, dressed in black, weeps on his shoulder. By contrast, the central group of figures focuses largely on those from a higher social rung. Standing proudly with his wife and children, Frith, dressed in a plain brown coat, asserts his elevated social status. Standing beside him, a foreign tourist and his wife are confronted by an aggressive cabby holding out his hand as he argues over the fair. Repeating a compositional device Frith had used in Ramsgate Sands, these two groups are contained within a central triangle whose apex is marked by a man in a black top hat kissing a woman whose has already boarded the train. The left of the picture is dominated by members of the lower orders, including porters pushing trolleys of luggage, a boy selling copies of Punch, a woman hoping to smuggle her small dog onto the train, and, on the far left, a huntsman getting his dogs ready for the journey.

Following the success of these three paintings of the London crowd, Frith began to search for a new subject through which to address contemporary city life. As he later explained (1887–88: 1:336): “The great success that had attended my modern life subjects encourage me to further effort in the same direction, and I forthwith arranged compositions for three pictures of London street scenes, to be called “Morning,” “Noon,” and “Night.”” Collectively titled The Streets of London, these three works were commissioned by the dealer Ernest Gambart in 1862. On their completion, Frith was to receive the enormous sum of £10,000. By setting each work at a different time of day, Frith not only created a better opportunity to catalogue a broader cross section of London’s urban milieu, he also made explicit reference to the London-based subject matter and chronological structure of Hogarth’s The Four Times of Day (1738). In addition to this pivotal visual source, Frith also referenced more contemporary literary sources, such as Sala’s recently published commentary on London life, Twice Around the Clock, or the Hours of the Day and Night in London (1859). Sadly, due to his commission to paint the wedding of the Prince of Wales, this project never progressed beyond the completion of three detailed oil sketches.

In the first, Morning: Covent Garden (1862), a group of flower sellers can be seen on the left, getting ready to begin their day’s work. Two well-dressed young men, still enjoying their night on the town, flirt with the girls, while two street urchins look on, amused by their drunken attempts to engage with the flower-girls. On the right hand side of the painting, two burglars are being arrested by a policeman, a prostitute leans exhausted against a lamppost, and a destitute family shelter temporarily in a doorway on the extreme left. The combination of class and type that Frith deploys in the creation of this early morning tableau demonstrates his principal interest in the depiction of the social habits and patterns of modern urban life. This theme is further developed in the second and third oil sketches.

Set in another famous location in London’s West End, the second oil sketch, Noon: Regent Street, moves the chronology forward, a shift in time demonstrated by the dramatically increased scale of the crowd that fills the space of this popular shopping street. Repeating the same compositional structure of a tableau of figures set in a relatively shallow space that had proved so effective in his earlier paintings of the London crowd, Frith makes full use of the stretched landscape format to detail a wide range of metropolitan types. Starting on the far right hand side, those living in extreme poverty are represented by the common street presence of the sandwich boardman standing and a young girl selling flowers. Further to the left stand two women whose colorful dress may indicate their status as prostitutes. Beside them can be seen another easily recognized street character, the crossing sweeper with his broom, scratching his head is if he too is puzzling over the identity of these two flamboyantly dressed women. Standing next to the crossing sweeper, a young girl leads her blind grandfather and his dogs across the road. Her social status, as with the flower seller, is clearly indicated by the girl’s bare feet. Standing in the gutter an older woman in a red shawl attempts to sell flowers to a well-to-do group in a carriage. There wealth is measured by this form of travel, which affords both comfort and a vital degree of protection from the street characters who occupy the immediate foreground. On the pavement on the left hand side stand two men, probably tourists, study a map, their apparent uncertainty reminding the viewer of just how complex the city is, both spatially and socially. On the far left a middle class woman attempts to turn her daughter away from the dogs that have attracted the little girl’s attention, hoping to protect her from the sinister figure of the second hand dog seller, another common presence on the street, who lurks behind them, his arms full of more small dogs that he will have recently stolen.

In the final sketch, Night – Haymarket, Frith selected another famous west end street. At this late hour, the crowd has thinned out but still presents the artist with an opportunity to investigate a range of experiences and characters bound up with the spaces of the city street. The pool of light at the center of the composition immediately draws attention to the two well-dressed couples who have just left one the Haymarket’s theatres. The reflective quality of the women’s white dresses amplifying this pool of illumination in which they seem to pause, hesitating as they consider how best to navigate the street. Framing this group are two figures who help explain their unease. On the far right, a woman identified by Frith as a prostitute turns towards them, her sad countenance revealing the envy she feels towards the social status and security they enjoy and which, due to her own status, she is denied. On the other side, holding out a hand towards the well-to-do quartet, two young couple, young boy in ragged clothes begs for small change, in return he will entertain by turning cartwheels and performing other acrobatics in the gutter. On the road itself, a row of carriages can be seen, while on the far left, pushed to the very edge of the picture, in a pictorial echo of their marginal social status, a destitute family can be seen. Their social position is further underlined, one again, by the bare feet of the child at the front of this group.

In terms of Frith’s interest in the urban setting and its social life, these three works represent a more direct engagement than either Ramsgate Sands or Derby Day. This engagement with the city as subject is further amplified, not only by his use of the crowd as a means to identify and comment on the diversity of urban society, but also by his use of the discrete zones of the street. Unlike the structure of a railway platform, as seen in The Railway Station, the subdivisions of the street provided Frith with an additional schema through which he could identify and separate types and classes. It is no coincidence that in all three oil sketches those on the lowest rung of the social ladder are frequently found in, or adjacent to, the gutter. This includes the burglar arrested in “Morning,” the flower-seller in the red shawl and the old blind man being led by his granddaughter in “Noon,” and the begging street urchin and the destitute family in “Night.” This association between the gutter and poverty, degradation and even violence, was well understood. In Twice Around the Clock, Sala (1971: 351) offered the following graphic description of children in the street, “but, heavens and earth! the little children! who swarm, pullulate – who seem to be evoked from the gutter.” By contrast, the carriageway itself was closely associated with those who could afford to travel around the city in carriages, described by Sala (1971: 221) as those belonging to “the first-class genteel circles, the very superior middle ranks.” They can be seen in “Noon,” maintaining a safe distance from the lower orders who crowd the street and the gutter. In terms of street zones used as a means to establish social identity, the pavement presented a different kind of problem. Here, the mobile, middle class shopper always risked an unwelcome encounter with frequently static presence of street sellers, prostitutes, and crossing sweepers. The contested nature of this space was acknowledged by Frith in “Noon,” in which the middle class woman and her daughter on the far left are seen avoiding the unwelcome attentions of the second hand dog seller, and again in “Night,” in which the bourgeois theatre goers stick resolutely to the middle of the pavement as they edge between the prostitute, standing up against the wall, and the begging child near the gutter. In his own description of Regent Street, Sala (1971: 160–61) picked out the dog seller as a particular problem, describing “forbidding looking gentry” who “lurk about the kerbs of the purlieus of Regent Street and Waterloo Place.” He went on to comment on how frequently the police were required to clear such figures from the city’s main shopping areas.

Frith’s adoption of Hogarthian methods, particularly evident in The Streets of London, was repeated in two further sets of paintings: The Road to Ruin (1877–78), a series of five works depicting the problem of gambling, for which Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress provided the model, and The Race to Wealth (1880), another set of five works tracing the downfall and eventual imprisonment of a financial speculator. Although neither of these two sets of paintings addressed the city directly, both offer, in their final paintings, a glimpse of the urban setting pictured as a stark and unforgiving place. In The Road to Ruin, the final painting depicts a wealthy, educated man addicted to gambling, locking his door as he casts a despairing look towards the gun that lies on the table. The dark attic room that will witness his suicide is dimly illuminated by the light from the window, through which can be seen, beneath a grim sky, a silhouette of rooftops and chimneys. This anonymous, dark cityscape indirectly highlights the hopelessness of his position. The connection regularly drawn between poorer metropolitan locations and their potential to harbor a life of poverty, degradation and isolation, is made explicit by Frith in the last painting from The Race for Wealth. In this scene, the fraudulent financier paces the exercise yard at Millbank Penitentiary. The grim symmetry of the prison buildings, accurately portrayed by Frith, not only refer to criminal incarceration, they also imply, in their architecture, the kind of social incarceration experienced by those living in the working class slums of London’s poorer districts.

The busy city center thoroughfare, used as a setting for paintings that investigated identities within the metropolitan crowd, was elaborated by Frith in two further paintings of London’s streets, The Crossing Sweeper (1858), his first use of this particular space as a setting for social commentary, and a later work, For Better, For Worse (1881). However, in both these paintings, Frith replaced his interest in the crowded center for the quieter, more intimate, and – for Frith – more familiar location of suburban Bayswater. In the first of these two paintings, a fashionably dressed woman is portrayed in the everyday action of crossing the road. Stepping down from the security of the pavement and into the gutter, she looks anxiously down the street, waiting her opportunity to cross, mindful, no doubt, of the dangers posed by traffic even in this quiet suburban location. Indeed, just behind her can be seen the looming form of the Notting Hill omnibus and a hackney carriage. Beside her stands the ubiquitous crossing sweeper, broom in hand.

In selecting this well-known street figure, Frith was clearly referencing the work of Dickens, who, 5 years prior to this painting, had published Bleak House (1853), which included one of his most famous and tragic creations, Jo the Crossing Sweeper. However, in contrast to Dickens, for whom Jo provided a vehicle to speak powerfully about urban poverty and degradation, Frith’s young boy appears well fed and healthy, a much sanitized version of the everyday reality of life on the London street. Looking up towards the woman, he acknowledges his lower status by touching his forelock as offers to sweep clean the street. The woman’s anxious response, both to the boy and to the space, is reflected not only in the way she holds her skirt clear of the dirt, but also in her refusal to engage with the crossing sweeper at her side. After all, the gutter may be a natural space for him, but for the wealthy woman it is a liminal zone, to be occupied briefly before crossing the street and regaining the safety and class security of the pavement on the other side.

In the second of these two paintings For Better, For Worse, a couple from a wealthy background can be seen departing for their honeymoon from a large house in Lancaster Square in Bayswater (see Fig. 2). This work may well refer to Frith’s own domestic situation and to his second marriage, undertaken a year after the death of his first wife to Mary Alford, with whom he had maintained a long term relationship and a second family. For Better, For Worse was painted very soon after this marriage, perhaps indicating, as Cowling has argued (2006: 68), the artist’s own interest in achieving a longer term happiness. In the painting, the bride and groom can be seen walking along a red carpet laid out across the pavement to a waiting carriage. The double edge implied by the title is underlined by the actions of the maid. Standing immediately behind the groom, she discreetly holds a mysterious letter. Her anxious glance towards the groom’s retreating back suggests a message of some importance, perhaps from a previous recipient of the young man’s attentions. On the right of this small urban tableau, the family of the newlyweds wave them off from the elevated space of the steps leading up to their own front door, while other guests look down on the street from the first floor balcony. Their departure is also watched by a small crowd gathered on the pavement, a mixed group which includes, along with the anxious maid, a young Italian organ-grinder with a monkey, a second-hand Jewish clothes seller, easily recognized by his full beard, and a policeman, holding out a steadying hand towards the crossing sweeper immediately in front of him, a reassuring gesture that indicates control of this more diverse group. On the far right, partly obscured by the carriage, a family of beggars, their low social statues defined by the small boy’s bare feet, watch proceedings from the gutter.

Fig. 2

Frith, For Better, For Worse, 1881, Private Collection

When the painting was exhibited in 1881at the Royal Academy, The Times offered the following revealing commentary. Having established the elite status of the wedding party and the guests, and that of the location in well-to-do Bayswater, identifiable through the imposing façade of Christ Church, the reviewer went on to discuss those watching the departure of the bride and groom. “Then come the regular street crowd, consisting as we all know, of a beggar-woman with her child, a street arab with his broom, a policeman repressing everybody, a beery rough and an Italian boy with a monkey.” The writer then concluded by observing that “the feelings of everyone concerned, from the arab to the footman, are exactly as they ought to be” (30 April 1881, 10). This final comment clearly indicates that Frith’s painting not only defines the metropolitan crowd, identified by class, economic status, and occupation but also offers the viewer the reassurance of a deeper pattern, in which all participants are aware of their social position and are indeed occupying their allotted places. The writer acknowledges, if only indirectly, that social identity is also bound up with those identities carried by the discrete spaces of the street. It is the elite who occupy the privileged location of the private steps leading to the house, while the public space of the pavement, occupied by a range of figures whose lower social class contrasts with the wedding party, underlines its contested nature. The problematic aspect of this space is further underlined by the red carpet, whose function is to temporarily privatize a section of the pavement, thus facilitating the departure of the bride and groom. Finally, at the bottom of the social ladder, the beggar and his family occupy, inevitably, their allotted place in in the gutter.

Frith’s final attempt to represent the complexities of the London crowd came in 1888 with his painting Poverty and Wealth. The scene is set in Bond Street in the West End. Once again the canvas is divided into smaller groupings that can be defined by class. On the left, representing wealth, are members of the upper classes, waiting in their carriages. On the right, representing poverty, a group of people queue up to buy fish at the end of the day, when the price has fallen to its lowest point. The line of the kerb, echoed by Frith’s use of single point perspective and the patch of sky seen between the buildings, serves to divide the two groups. However, not all members of this small crowd are positioned within this spatial framework. Standing behind the carriage, in the immediate foreground, the poorer classes are also represented by the girl who urgently pulls her younger sister towards the fishmonger, eager to buy before all the stock is gone. Their social status is underlined not only by their placement in the gutter, but also by the extent to which, as in For Better, For Worse, there are partially hidden from those waiting in their carriage. On the other side of the kerb, an older, well-dressed woman, wearing an elaborate black hat, waits rather uneasily at the edge of the pavement. Behind her stands her manservant, holding a present of a toy ark. Carefully he surveys those queuing to buy fish, clearly concerned that the presence of the poor does not impinge upon the space occupied by his mistress, waiting for her carriage.

This depiction of class and economic contrasts on a London street was, by 1888, a very familiar subject both for Frith and for his audience. Using this familiarity as critical leverage, The Times described Poverty and Wealth as a work of “facile contrasts and obvious sentiment” (5 May 1888, 14). However, on closer inspection, it is evident that Frith has given the subject an additional twist through his depiction of the gaze. The correlation between the exercise of authority and the power of the gaze is well established: in short, those who look exercise power over those they look at. In Poverty and Wealth, this correlation is challenged by the actions of the older woman, standing in the queue to the right of the manservant and the attractive boy standing in front of her, both of whom, though poor and therefore lacking social power, directly scrutinize those sitting in their carriage. This reversal of the gaze as an indicator of social authority is then extended to those in the carriage, who, instead of exercising their power to look, seem to avoid the gaze of the poor. One of the two women in the carriage pays all her attention to the young child on her lap, while the second, holding an umbrella, looks towards the crowd, but in a distracted fashion that does not indicate the same level of attention demonstrated by the poor who look at her. Engagement with those on the pavement is left to the child standing on the seat beside this second woman. Trying to attract her mother’s attention, she points towards the poor people queuing for fish.

Frith’s innovative response to the complex problem of depicting the modern, metropolitan crowd through highly detailed panoramas proved extremely influential on a number of artists also interested in the representation of everyday life in the city. These included Phoebus Levin, George Elgar Hicks, and John Ritchie, whose paintings of London life produced during the 1860s and 1870s, all adopted Frith’s panoramic approach, carefully detailing class, type and behavior. However, as indicated by the negative response to Poverty and Wealth, published in The Times, Frith’s reputation was in decline. Indeed his last great success at the Royal Academy, and the last to require a rail, had been at the start of this decade with The Private View at the Royal Academy (1881). Clearly public taste was changing. Artists such as Whistler and the London Impressionists were showing new ways in which the city could be represented. Frith’s attempt to catalogue the metropolitan milieu, that had played so pivotal a role in establishing his reputation in the 1850s and 1860s, now seemed out of step with an urban environment that was simply too complex to distill into a single painting, however carefully observed, a position that is reflected in Frith’s own reactionary attitudes towards the art world’s changing priorities. He had no interest or respect for new ideas such as French Realism, Impressionism, or Aestheticism. Falling fortunes, both in terms of his reputation and in the value of his paintings, caused Frith to leave Bayswater in 1888, moving firstly to the cheaper suburb of Sydenham on the edge of South London, and then, after the death of his second wife, to a smaller house in St John’s Wood where he died in 1909.

Cross-References

• London

• Visual Representation

• William Hogarth