| The Crossing Sweeper | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | William Powell Frith |
| Year | 1858 |
| Medium | oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 43 cm× 45.5 cm(17 in× 17.9 in) |
| Location | Museum of London, London |
The Crossing Sweeper is an 1858 painting by William Powell Frith which has been described as breaking "new ground in its description of the collision of wealth and poverty on a London street." [1] Frith later painted several versions of the same subject, updating the fashions.
The painting depicts a crossing sweeper offering his services to a young woman who is looking out for a gap in traffic to cross the road. Crossing sweepers offered to sweep the streets in front of wealthy-looking pedestrians in the hope of a tip. The roads at that time were often smeared with horse dung because of the prevalence of horse-drawn vehicles. The woman has already lifted her dress to avoid its becoming soiled as she crosses.
The sweepers were often regarded as nuisances who were little more than beggars. [2] The woman in the painting may be pointedly trying to ignore the boy. This was a common theme in commentary on sweepers. An 1853 Punch cartoon entitled "the crossing sweeper nuisance" depicted a hapless middle-class man surrounded by importunate boys holding out their hands for money. [2] In an 1858 issue of Building News similarly negative sentiments were expressed of "those juvenile highwaymen who, broom in hand, take possessions of our crossings and level black mail upon the public in general, and timid females in particular." [3]
Frith's sweeper is ostentatiously deferential, while also pushing close to the woman, setting extremes of poverty and wealth up against one another, a theme the artist explored in other works such as Poverty and Wealth, For Better, For Worse and The Derby Day .
The 1858 painting is in the Museum of London; [4] it was also reproduced in the same year as an engraving, becoming a well-known image.
Frith created several copies in the 1890s, at a time in his career when much of his output comprised variations on his famous works. An 1893 version covers the brief glimpse of red stocking seen in the original with a lace undergarment. Another version from the same year updates the image by depicting the woman wearing the fashions of the 1890s.
William Powell Frith was an English painter specialising in genre subjects and panoramic narrative works of life in the Victorian era. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1853, presenting The Sleeping Model as his Diploma work. He has been described as the "greatest British painter of the social scene since Hogarth".
Events from the year 1858 in art.
The Chandos portrait is the most famous of the portraits that are believed to depict William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Painted between 1600 and 1610, it may have served as the basis for the engraved portrait of Shakespeare used in the First Folio in 1623. It is named after the 3rd Duke of Chandos, who formerly owned the painting. The portrait was given to the National Portrait Gallery, London, on its foundation in 1856, and it is listed as the first work in its collection.
Augustus Leopold Egg RA was a British Victorian artist, and member of The Clique best known for his modern triptych Past and Present (1858), which depicts the breakup of a middle-class Victorian family.
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A crossing sweeper was a person working as a street sweeper who would sweep a path ahead of people crossing dirty urban streets in exchange for a gratuity. This practice was an informal occupation among the urban poor, primarily during the 19th century. It was the focus of fairly intense study and commentary, and attitudes toward the presence of crossing sweepers on city streets varied greatly among urban residents, ranging from appreciation for their work to feelings that they were a public nuisance. Crossing sweepers also found their way into 19th-century fiction and artwork, including a novel by Charles Dickens and a popular painting by William Powell Frith.
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The Duel After the Masquerade is a painting by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, of which multiple copies exist. The original, Suite d'un bal masqué, first shown in 1857, is in the Musée Condé in Chantilly, France.
In the art world, if an artwork exists in several versions, the one known or believed to be the earliest is called the prime version. Many artworks produced in media such as painting or carved sculpture which create unique objects are in fact repeated by their artists, often several times. It is regarded as a matter of some importance both by art historians and the art market to establish which version has "priority", that is to say was the original work. The presumption usually is that the prime version is the finest, and perhaps the most carefully done, though some later versions can be argued to improve on the originals.
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