William Powell Frith

An English Merry-Making a Hundred Years Ago was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1847 - a canvas measuring 44 by 73 inches (Christie's, London, 16 December 2009, lot 34). It was among Frith’s most famous pictures and an entire chapter was devoted to it in Frith’s autobiography published forty years later. The present painting is a smaller version or replica of the Royal Academy exhibit. Frith had married in 1845 and his wife gave birth to their first child in 1846 in their new lodgings on Charlotte Street. With a family to support and a newly established reputation, the twenty-eight-year-old Frith worked industriously at this time, painting large pictures to be exhibited and smaller paintings for immediate sale. Another replica of An English Merry-Making is illustrated in Christopher Wood's William Powell Frith - Painting the Victorian Age (p. 6).

The painting, first titled A Village Festival and later retitled An English Merry-Making a Hundred Years Ago was based upon Milton’s L’Allegro. The following lines were printed in the catalogue for the 1847 Royal Academy;

‘When the merry bells ring round,

And jocund rebecks sound

To many a youth and many a maid

Dancing in the chequered shade,

And young and old come forth to play

On a sunshine holiday.'

Every element of the painting was studied from nature. The oak tree was painted from a venerable specimen growing at Windsor Park. The models for An English Merry-Making were a diverse group, found among the professional artists models and people that Frith encountered in the street. The sisters and friends of Frith's wife Isabelle were persuaded to sit for the young women in the picture. The woman on the extreme right, seated at a tea-table was based upon Isabelle Frith's washerwoman, Mrs King who was illiterate and had not heard of Shakespeare. The grandfather being cajoled into dancing was based on an old man from the Paddington Workhouse and the model for the gypsy fortune-teller on the left was a woman who sold matches outside the houses in Regent's Park where the Frith moved shortly afterwards - she was terrified by a suit of armour in Frith's studio. The young man in the centre of the composition, shyly asking a girl if she would dance with him was modelled by Tommy Banks, an artist who Frith had known since their school days in Harrogate. Another artist friend, Thomas Creswick helped Frith with the painting of the landscape background of the prime version. On 'Show Sunday' a visitor to Frith's studio remarked to Creswick how lamentable it was that figure painters were so bad at painting landscape, pointing at the areas in the painting that Creswick himself had painted.

Frith was delighted to hear that his artistic hero J.M.W. Turner had remarked that the painting was 'beautifully drawn, well composed, and well coloured' (William Powell Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, 1887, 2 volumes, Vol. I, p. 127). The painting was also well-received by the art press - the critic for the Times described An English Merry-Making a Hundred Years Ago as ‘one of the happiest pictures of rustic enjoyment that can be conceived’ (1 May 1847, p.6) and the correspondent for Athenaeum thought it ‘one of the most complete and successful pictures of the season’ (29 May 1847, p. 576).