William Powell Frith was one of the most popular and most successful figures of the Victorian art world yet, until now, there has been no biography about him. In "William Powell Frith: A Painter and His World" art historian Christopher Wood tells the remarkable, lively and colourful life of this reluctant artist. Born in the same year as Queen Victoria, Frith originally wanted to be an auctioneer but was forced by his parents - who were convinced of his genius - to take up art as a career. His work spanned the entire Victorian age and he became famous for large-scale paintings such as "Derby Day" - which, when exhibited, had to be protected from jostling crowds by policemen - and The Railway Station. A favourite of the Royal Family, and friendly with Turner, Landseer and Dickens, Frith was at the centre of the Victorian artistic world. His memoirs reveal him as a humorous and acute observer, while his domestic life was also typically Victorian: he had a wife, a mistress, and nineteen children. As Christopher Wood shows the story of Frith's life is more than an artist's biography; it is a picture of the entire Victorian period, starring one of its greatest characters.
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In this amiably chatty portrait, Wood introduces William Powell Frith, one of the most popular and yet long-forgotten Victorian painters. No great visionary but rather a skilled draftsman famous in his day for crowd scenes that illuminated the strata of the British class system, Frith was one of the first painters of modern life, as opposed to historical subjects, and among the first to become rich. His exact contemporary, Queen Victoria, was a fan, although in later life she failed to reward him with a title, perhaps because she had caught wind of the painter's secret domestic situation: he kept a mistress, had several children by her, and later married her after his first wife died. Happily, Wood emulates Frith's best quality: he was a magnificent raconteur, telling lively, delightfully detailed stories about the London art world and literary circles. Friends with Dickens, Frith testified in the Whistler v. Ruskin trial, and hung out with the cartoonists of Punch. He must have been excellent company; Wood's biography certainly is. Kevin Nance
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Christopher Wood has been an art dealer for over thirty years and is the author of The Dictionary of Victorian Painters, Paradise Lost, The Pre-Raphaelites, Painted Gardens and numerous other books. He appears regularly on The Antiques Roadshow, and has been the curator for a number of exhibitions. He lives in London.
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