Choosing the Wedding Gown

Choosing the Wedding Gown
Artist	William Mulready
Year	1845
Type	Oil on panel, genre painting
Dimensions	52.9 cm× 44.7 cm(20.8 in× 17.6 in)
Location	Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Choosing the Wedding Gown is an 1845 genre painting by the Irish artist William Mulready. It illustrates a scene from Oliver Goldsmith's novel The Vicar of Wakefield . ^[1] Mulready originally created the image as a frontispiece for an 1843 edition of the novel. ^[2]

Such pictures based on popular literature were popular in the early Victorian era. The painting was displayed at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1846 at the National Gallery where it was considered one of the major highlights. ^[3] Today it is in the Victoria and Albert Museum having been donated by the art collector John Sheepshanks in 1857. ^[4]

References

1. Herrmann p.216-17
2. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O77224/choosing-the-wedding-gown-oil-painting-mulready-william-ra/#object-details
3. https://chronicle250.com/1846
4. https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/choosing-the-wedding-gown-30725

Bibliography

• Herrmann, Luke. Nineteenth Century British Painting. Charles de la Mare, 2000.
• Moran, Maureen. Victorian Literature and Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006
• Roe, Sonia. Oil Paintings in Public Ownership in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Public Catalogue Foundation, 2008.
• Wright, Christopher, Gordon, Catherine May & Smith, Mary Peskett. British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections: An Index of British and Irish Oil Paintings by Artists Born Before 1870 in Public and Institutional Collections in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Yale University Press, 2006.