Lot Essay
An early work, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859 when the artist was eighteen. Riviere belonged to a family of artists of Huguenot stock and had grown up in Cheltenham, attending Cheltenham College where his father, William Riviere, was drawing master. He began to exhibit at the age of eleven, showing two pictures of kittens at the British Institution in 1851 and making his debut at the R.A. in 1858. Unlike his father, who adhered to the Grand Manner and entered designs for the Houses of Parliament competitions with such titles as A Council of Ancient Britons, he specialised from the outset in animal subjects, the field in which he would later make his name. The subject of the present picture was no doubt one he had witnessed, Gloucester being only nine miles from Cheltenham. According to Armstrong (loc. cit.), the picture 'was sold to a Captain Talbot, for whom, some time before, Mr Riviere, senior, had painted a family portrait on a scale not much less than that of the Great Vandyck at Wilton House.'
Stylistically the picture may owe something to James Ward, while the subject and frieze-like composition were perhaps suggested by Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1853. (A small version was bequeathed to the National Gallery in 1859, the year our picture was exhibited). On the Road to Gloucester Fair has little stylistic connection with Riviere's later work, which concentrates on emotional or sentimental accounts of the relationship between humans and animals, particularly dogs. However, as Christopher Forbes points out in his catalogue of the exhibition of the Forbes Collection pictures shown in America in 1975, there is a hint of things to come in 'the playful interaction between the dog and the cow in the centre of the picture.'
About the time the picture was exhibited, the Riviere family moved to Oxford, where William hoped to impress the University with his theory 'that the study of art should form an essential part of higher education' (DNB, XV1, p.1221). In May 1859 he was commissioned by the Oxford Union to complete the murals in the new debating chamber which had been undertaken by Rossetti and his followers in 1857 but left unfinished after a riotous 'campaign' that autumn. Three bays had to be filled with Arthurian subjects, and in undertaking them William was assisted by Briton. Two, The Education of Arthur and Arthur's First Victory with the Sword, are competent in a conventional way and seem likely to be by William, but the third, King Arthur's Wedding Feast, reveals qualities and defects which point to Briton's authorship. The figures are wooden and an awkward passage is clumsily covered by a shield; but two prominently placed animals - a white hart which bounds through the room and a small hound, or 'brachet', which follows it - are well conceived and executed. If the mural is indeed by Briton, then chronologically it is probably the nearest thing to our picture which exists. Little of his work survives for the next few years, when he attempted Pre-Raphaelite figure subjects which were rejected by the Royal Academy and one of which he is known to have destroyed. It was not until the mid-1860s that he returned once again to animal subjects and to the Academy's walls.
Stylistically the picture may owe something to James Ward, while the subject and frieze-like composition were perhaps suggested by Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1853. (A small version was bequeathed to the National Gallery in 1859, the year our picture was exhibited). On the Road to Gloucester Fair has little stylistic connection with Riviere's later work, which concentrates on emotional or sentimental accounts of the relationship between humans and animals, particularly dogs. However, as Christopher Forbes points out in his catalogue of the exhibition of the Forbes Collection pictures shown in America in 1975, there is a hint of things to come in 'the playful interaction between the dog and the cow in the centre of the picture.'
About the time the picture was exhibited, the Riviere family moved to Oxford, where William hoped to impress the University with his theory 'that the study of art should form an essential part of higher education' (DNB, XV1, p.1221). In May 1859 he was commissioned by the Oxford Union to complete the murals in the new debating chamber which had been undertaken by Rossetti and his followers in 1857 but left unfinished after a riotous 'campaign' that autumn. Three bays had to be filled with Arthurian subjects, and in undertaking them William was assisted by Briton. Two, The Education of Arthur and Arthur's First Victory with the Sword, are competent in a conventional way and seem likely to be by William, but the third, King Arthur's Wedding Feast, reveals qualities and defects which point to Briton's authorship. The figures are wooden and an awkward passage is clumsily covered by a shield; but two prominently placed animals - a white hart which bounds through the room and a small hound, or 'brachet', which follows it - are well conceived and executed. If the mural is indeed by Briton, then chronologically it is probably the nearest thing to our picture which exists. Little of his work survives for the next few years, when he attempted Pre-Raphaelite figure subjects which were rejected by the Royal Academy and one of which he is known to have destroyed. It was not until the mid-1860s that he returned once again to animal subjects and to the Academy's walls.