Lot Essay
A.E. Mulready (apparently no relation of William Mulready) belonged to the Cranbrook Colony, the group of artists who gathered round Thomas Webster when he settled at this small town not far from Tunbridge Wells in 1856. All specialised in genre subjects of a sentimental nature, but Mulready was alone in concentrating on the life of the London streets. Our picture belongs to a group of works, all dating from the 1870s or '80s, in which the scene is set at night on one of the Thames bridges. Some, like ours, show a vagrant boy asleep, another example, dated 1880, being in the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; others show two figures - flower girls, crossing sweepers, etc. - with the bridge as a background.
The group as a whole evokes comparison with other Victorian images. George Cruikshank's well known composition of a girl throwing herself off London Bridge was published in The Drunkard's Children, a set of eight prints demonstrating the evils of drink, in 1848. A year or two later G.F. Watts, making a short-lived foray into social realism, painted two grim scenes set under Waterloo Bridge, Found Drowned and Under a Dry Arch (both Watts Gallery, Compton). A comparable subject is the third scene in A.L. Egg's series Past and Present (Tate Gallery), dating from 1858; and a group of homeless slumped on a seat on Waterloo Bridge ('Asleep under the Stars') appears in one of Gustave Doré's plates in London, A Pilgrimage, 1872.
Like the numerous Victorian paintings on the theme of the exploited seamstress, these pictures owed much to Thomas Hood. Just as the 'seamstress' paintings were inspired by his Song of the Shirt, so those of suicides who have thrown themselves off London bridges were anticipated by his poem The Bridge of Sighs, written in 1844. A well-known example of the 'seamstress' paintings, Anna Blunden's 'For only one short Hour', was sold in these Rooms on 5 March 1993, lot 113.
The group as a whole evokes comparison with other Victorian images. George Cruikshank's well known composition of a girl throwing herself off London Bridge was published in The Drunkard's Children, a set of eight prints demonstrating the evils of drink, in 1848. A year or two later G.F. Watts, making a short-lived foray into social realism, painted two grim scenes set under Waterloo Bridge, Found Drowned and Under a Dry Arch (both Watts Gallery, Compton). A comparable subject is the third scene in A.L. Egg's series Past and Present (Tate Gallery), dating from 1858; and a group of homeless slumped on a seat on Waterloo Bridge ('Asleep under the Stars') appears in one of Gustave Doré's plates in London, A Pilgrimage, 1872.
Like the numerous Victorian paintings on the theme of the exploited seamstress, these pictures owed much to Thomas Hood. Just as the 'seamstress' paintings were inspired by his Song of the Shirt, so those of suicides who have thrown themselves off London bridges were anticipated by his poem The Bridge of Sighs, written in 1844. A well-known example of the 'seamstress' paintings, Anna Blunden's 'For only one short Hour', was sold in these Rooms on 5 March 1993, lot 113.