"An itinerant musician is entertaining a cottager and his family with a tune on the fiddle; the father gayly snaps his fingers at an infant on the knees of the mother, behind whom a mischievous boy, with the poker and bellows in his hands, is mimicking the action of the musician. With this exception, all, even the dog standing by the chair of its mistress, appear to be intent upon the music of the blind fiddler." This quotation, from the catalogue of the National Gallery where the original picture is placed, accurately describes it.
CHOOSING THE WEDDING GOWN. FROM A PAINTING BY WILLIAM MULREADY IN THE SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM, LONDON.
To the title of this picture, the painter himself added, as expository of his theme and the source of his inspiration, the following passage from Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield": "I had scarcely taken orders a year, before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but for such qualities as would wear well." The picture thus affords a good instance of the dependence on literature of the painters of Mulready's school. Its title alone would suffice, so well and simply is the story told; but, apparently, with the British public, and in the painter's mind, it gained an added grace by diverting the visual impression of the observer to the realm of literature. The picture is here reproduced from a copyrighted photograph by Frederick Hollyer, Kensington.
William Mulready was of Irish birth, having come into the world at Ennis, in the County Clare, April 1, 1786. In 1809, after a period in the schools of the Royal Academy, he exhibited there a picture entitled "Fair Time," which gave him almost instant success; and until his death, July 7, 1863, though producing fewer pictures than Wilkie, he worked on very much the same class of subjects. His color is less agreeable than that of the Scot, and his execution very much more labored. His life was uneventful, occupied exclusively with his work, which he loved; so much so that two days before his death, an old man of seventy-seven, he sat drawing in the evening life class at the Royal Academy. He had been a member of the Academy since 1816. The picture here reproduced is (even without the quotation from the "Vicar of Wakefield" which accompanies it in the catalogue of the South Kensington Museum) a simple story simply told. It is free from the mannerisms which mar much of Mulready's work, especially in the portrayal of children, and in the original is more agreeable in color than are many of his pictures.
CONTRARY WINDS. FROM A PAINTING BY THOMAS WEBSTER.
The happily chosen title explains sufficiently this pleasant scene. The picture, painted in 1843, is now in the South Kensington Museum.
Thomas Webster, born March 20, 1800, in London, and dying at Cranbrook in Kent, September, 1886, was another painter whose work had enjoyed the full meed of popularity, from 1825 to the time of his retirement from the Royal Academy in 1877. Pictures like the one here reproduced (from the original in the South Kensington Museum, painted in 1843, and entitled "Contrary Winds"), pictures depicting homely rustic life, were his specialty. His work had gained him the title of Royal Academician in 1846.