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Lot Essay
Frederick Daniel Hardy was one of the leading members of the Cranbrook Colony, the group of artists who gathered round Thomas Webster when he settled at this small town sixteen miles south-east of Tunbridge Wells in the mid-1850s. From this date on he tended to work to a certain formula, painting genre subjects (like all the Cranbrook artists), with an emphasis on childhood themes, in box-like interiors placed parallel to the picture plane.
The present picture, with its legible relief-like composition, is a rich combination of Cranbrook concerns: the humble but industrious interior, populated with a span of ages, opens out through a window and doorway to a luminous exterior, and shows a group of small children, each with their different reactions, mimicing the actions of their elders and sombrely enacting a village ritual - in this case a poignant, sentimental funeral of a small pet bird.
A contemporary commentator, James Dafforne, writing in the Art Journal of 1875, comments of Hardy: 'Few of our living painters of genre subjects are more deservedly popular than this artist; as a rule, he selects themes that are generally attractive, and they are treated with judgment, feeling, good taste and without the slightest hint of vulgarity in their humour' (op. cit., p. 76).
The present picture, with its legible relief-like composition, is a rich combination of Cranbrook concerns: the humble but industrious interior, populated with a span of ages, opens out through a window and doorway to a luminous exterior, and shows a group of small children, each with their different reactions, mimicing the actions of their elders and sombrely enacting a village ritual - in this case a poignant, sentimental funeral of a small pet bird.
A contemporary commentator, James Dafforne, writing in the Art Journal of 1875, comments of Hardy: 'Few of our living painters of genre subjects are more deservedly popular than this artist; as a rule, he selects themes that are generally attractive, and they are treated with judgment, feeling, good taste and without the slightest hint of vulgarity in their humour' (op. cit., p. 76).