The Latest Arrival

Details

George Elgar Hicks (1824-1914)
The Latest Arrival
signed with initials 'GEH' (lower right)
pencil and red chalk, heightened with white, on grey paper
15 x 10¾ in. (38.2 x 27.4 cm.)

Provenance

with Hampshire Gallery
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, London, 22 May 1979, lot 11.
with Christopher Wood, London, from whom acquired by the present owner in 1979.

Literature

G.E. Hicks, Studies of the Human Figure, 1868, part VI, pl. IV, p. 68.
R. Allwood, George Elgar Hicks (1824-1914), Painter of Victorian Life, no. 53, illus.
A. Briggs, A Social History of England, London, 1983, p. 245, illus.

Exhibited

Hampshire, Hampshire Gallery, Victorian Painters of Hampshire and Dorset, 1978, no. 37 as 'Family group with new baby'.
London, Geffrye Museum and Southampton, Southampton Art Gallery, George Elgar Hicks: Painter of Victorian Life, 1982-3, no. 53.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis

Lot Essay

Hicks made his reputation with animated crowd scenes such as Dividend Day at the Bank, and he also worked as a society portrait painter, but his portraits have none of the lucidity of the genre scenes that he painted in the late 1850s and early 1860s from which period this watercolour probably dates. It was lithographed for Hick's Studies of the Human Figure, part 6, pl. 4, and formed a culmination to this series of sensitive figure studies. The interplay between the parents, their son and their newborn is handled with great feeling, the mother raising a cautious hand over her son who peers at the sleeping baby in his father's large arms.

More from THE FORBES COLLECTION OF VICTORIAN PICTURES AND WORKS OF ART

View All