Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1981.25.472
Classification:
Paintings
Collection:
Paintings and Sculpture
Subject Terms:
dancing | genre subject | recorder | oboe | jug | hat | ring | collar | entertainment | man | music | woman | interior | boys | girls | father | mother | children | musician | roses | feather | nursery rhyme
Currently On View:
Not on view
Exhibition History:
Pleasures and Pastimes (Yale Center for British Art, 1990-02-21 - 1990-04-29)
Publications:
Malcolm Cormack, Concise Catalogue of Paintings in the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1985, pp. 240-241, N590.2 .A83 (YCBA)Painting in England 1700-1850 from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, The Royal Academy of Arts Winter Exhibition 1964-65., , Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK, 1964, p. 37 (v.1), no. 128, N5220.M45 R69 1964 (YCBA)
Gallery Label:
Thomas Webster’s popular genre paintings offered reassuring images of contented country folk—especially children playing and dancing—while glossing over the shift from the old paternalistic social order to a capitalist market system. They also ignored social problems, like poverty and starvation, exacerbated by a rapid increase in population and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The gulf between Webster’s imagery and reality stretched the credulity of one writer who opined in 1846 that another Webster painting portrayed “the family of an honest yeoman, one of the class which in these days capital and a system of extensive farming have converted into day-labourers: the ancient yeoman . . . now also among the extinct races, a victim to the Moloch of wealth; but we cannot stop to lament his decay,— besides, we should get political, and perhaps angry, which would be out of place and unseemly here.” Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016