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In London it is good to make a new friend and meet an old one. The new friend is the Guildhall Art Gallery, one of London's newest galleries though the institution itself is centuries old and its collection dates back to the 19th century.
The original gallery was destroyed in an air raid during the war, rebuilt temporarily, then pulled down and completely rebuilt, beginning in 1988. The discovery of a Roman amphitheatre under the site delayed the project and it opened in 2002.
The Victorian origin of its finest paintings, which include important works by Rossetti and Millais, makes it the perfect setting for their latest special exhibition of work by William Powell Frith called Painting the Victorian Age. It includes a replica of an old friend from Auckland Art Gallery.
This is one of the treasures of the Auckland gallery collection, a painting of a hearty woman laughing at a diminutive man who bites his nails in humiliation, anger and dismay. This is the great poet Alexander Pope and the woman is Lady Mary Wortley Montague. The poet had proposed marriage and the lady burst out laughing at the very idea.
Pope was enraged and satirised her in his verses. The Auckland version is the original. The work at the Guildhall is a replica made by the artist in his old age.
Like many Victorian paintings it tells a story. Queen Victoria bought and commissioned paintings from Frith. His work was popular and reproduced in steel engravings. His images were in thousands of households. In the 20th century that kind of painting became despised, but the wheel of fortune turned and for the past 20 years Victorian narrative art has become valued again.
The work of Frith, once dismissed as the epitome of detailed, anecdotal, academic painting without any real artistic value, is considered a rich source of social documentation and comment as well as artistic delight.
Frith was a member of the Royal Academy and when he showed his work it invariably drew enormous crowds, so much so that on half-a-dozen occasions a railing was built to keep people back from paintings like Derby Day, which was shown in an 1858 exhibition. A police officer was also posted to prevent too much pushing. The only comparable situation today is the arrangement around the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.
Derby Day, on loan from the Tate Gallery, is the centrepiece of the show at the Guildhall. It is one of those paintings that take a lot of reading.
Derby Day was a big occasion for rich and poor who all crowded to the racecourse in Epsom. The painting shows a wide spectrum of society. A crowd of open carriages is lined up on the edge of the course. Masses of people are skilfully grouped around them. Their interaction makes a wide range of stories held together in a moment of time.
In the foreground is a family of acrobats. A boy in costume is supposed to somersault to his father who is poised to catch him. The child looks longingly at a lavish picnic that a footman is laying out for a raffish crowd in a nearby carriage. A mother with a baby is passing the hat around. Nearby an ignorant rustic is fooled by a trickster. There are soldiers, a tipster, women in beautiful dresses and ragged children.
An indolent young toff leans tipsily against a carriage while his bored girlfriend has her fortune told by a gypsy. There are dozens of other little human dramas going on while the jockeys and horses pass with the grandstand in the background. The figures and incidents must number in the hundreds.
Frith usually sent a large complex painting like this to the Academy every year and the paintings' success made him wealthy.
As well as Derby Day the exhibition includes The Railway Station (1862), which shows some of the features that are still part of that grand station, Paddington. As well as the engine - tall funnel (no cab for the driver and fireman) - the platform is crowded with people and porters, a bailiff, dogs, boys going to boarding school (one holds his treasured cricket bat), soldiers, trunks, parcels and hatboxes to be loaded on top of the carriages.
The vast bustles of the dresses of the well-to-do add to the sense of crowding. As in Derby Day every face is individualised.
The artist hired an architectural draughtsman to help with the perspective of the building. Other aspects of his working methods are on show too.
Frith followed the academic prescription of making careful preliminary drawing of details, some of which he copied from photographs. Then he made a quick sketch of the whole composition. This was enlarged to a big painting finished with great polish and detail.
The quick sketchiness of his preliminary studies actually suits some compositions, especially Noon, Regent Street with its crowd of horse-drawn carriages and cabs, a flower-seller and a crossing-sweeper who cleared the horse dung out of the way of the trailing dresses of the fashionable.
In the foreground is a blind man led by a little dog and held by his daughter with her bare feet red with cold. Bare feet are a feature of the poor in Frith's work but they are isolated signs of sympathy. Frith has a middle-class point of view that puts him closer to the novels of Trollope rather than his friend Dickens.
Middle-class attitudes fill another of his big paintings, Private View at the Royal Academy. Trollope is shown in a crowd of the socially accepted, contrasted with the figure of Oscar Wilde. You sense that the artist mistrusted the brilliant Oscar.
Frith lived until he was 90. He was successful early and his style never developed. He was not a great artist, as he acknowledged himself, but he was a successful one. His work is of incalculable historic interest.
