Thomas P. Hall

N.R. Omell, London

Sale: Sotheby's, London, 22 March 2000, lot 298

Christopher Wood Gallery, London

Private collection (sale: Sotheby's, London, 19 November 2013, lot 18)

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

This charming painting shows the view from the interior of an art dealer's shop, looking out through the shop window to the street outside. On display are two paintings in gilt frames as well as various unframed prints, placed against the frame of the window and seen in reverse image as the light of the sky shines through the paper. In the street is assembled a group of wayfarers of different types and stations. On the left a man holds a monocle to his eye to study the works on display, and standing beside him is a boy in a deerstalker's hat. Less privileged perhaps are the two children in the centre, one of them holding a broom and therefore likely to be intended as a crossing sweeper. To the right is a maid servant with a jug of milk, and behind a mariner, wearing a sou'wester hat and smoking a pipe. In the background is an omnibus bound for Bank in the City of London.

No particular moral seems to be intended in the painting, beyond that of representing a cross-section of urban life in the mid-Victorian period. It may well be that Thomas Hall had seen William MacDuff's delightful painting Shaftesbury, or Lost and Found (private collection), shown at the 1863 Royal Academy, in which a shoeblack looks at the display of engravings in the window of the print publishers Henry Graves & Co.

The title is taken from a line in Shakespeare's 'Triolus and Cressida', and implies that the audience gathered outside the shop are looking at a landscape which we are not able to see.