Happiness Lost: William Powell Frith and the Painting of Modern Life

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I would like to thank Barbara Black and Deirdre D'Albertis for inviting me to participate in both the INCS conference and this volume; the scholars who helpfully commented on the versions of this paper delivered at the INCS, NECBS, and NAVSA conferences; and, especially, Aviva Briefel and John Plotz, whose generous and thoughtful suggestions greatly improved its argument. Notes [1] Over the past twenty years, historians have challenged the notion of “separate spheres,” but most scholars still see the powerful gendered binary between private and public as a significant ideology, if not practice, in Victorian culture. For overviews of some of this debate, see Levine; Stern. [2] On sentiment in Victorian art see Codell; Arscott, “Sentimentality in Victorian Paintings”; Stoddart; and Fletcher. [3] The picture was not exhibited under this title, but with accompanying text in the catalogue from Isaac Watts's Divine and Moral Songs for Children: “When we devote our Youth to God, ‘Tis pleasing in his Eyes.” [4] This defense of Frith's work as documentary emerged in the painting's first reception in 1854, as in the Art Journal's praise of Ramsgate Sands as “a memento of the habits and the manners of the English ‘at the sea‐side’ in the middle of the nineteenth century” (“The Royal Academy” 161), and continues to be invoked in current scholarship as a reason for studying such work (see, for example, Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting). For the anthropological view, see Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist; and Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting. Caroline Arscott is the preeminent interpreter of the pictures as images of the modern crowd, and her analyses of them focus on Frith's balancing act between invoking the excitement of the modern crowd and consolidating bourgeois identity as ultimately unthreatened by that social mixing. Arscott, “Modern Life Subjects”; Arscott, “Ramsgate Sands”; and Arscott, “The Railway Station.”