拍品专文
When exhibited at the Royal Academy this painting bore the following quotation from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure:
'Man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.'
The picture, previously thought lost, receives an interesting discussion in Susan P. Casteras' chapter 'Images of life on the Streets in Victorian Art' in the catalogue to the Hard Times exhibiton held at the Manchester City Art Galleries in 1987. An officious beadle, of whom The Illustrated London News (op. cit.) wrote 'the poor and needy tremble at his approach; the widow and orphan flee before his scowl... and poverty is a sin which, in his opinion, nothing can palliate', is trying to restrain a benevolent middle class lady from helping a destitute mother and child. A poster advertising the London Missionary Society's activities hangs above them. Susan Casteras reminds us in her essay how pressing were the problems of urban deprivation following the rapid industrial expansion of the mid-nineteenth century, and how many sections of society, as exemplified by the beadle, felt acute apprehension and antagonism towards the poor, fearing them to be a source of disease, as well as of moral and social instability. Casteras points out that Rebecca Solomon was one of the first artists to encourage compassion towards the poor in her paintings, although nowhere in her art does she encourage the viewer to feel guilt or urge reform, as artists were later to do in the 1870s.
The picture was exhibited at a time when Rebecca Solomon was one of the most prominent female artists of her day: indeed the Art Journal of 1860 fêted her as one of 'the many who receive honour as great women of our age'. Trained by her brother Abraham Solomon, she lived after his death in 1862 with her closest sibling Simeon, and shared the misfortune of his subsequent disgrace. She exhibited widely at the Royal Academy, the British Insitution, Suffolk Street and the Dudley Gallery, as well as following the accepted practice of exhibiting in the provinces when her pictures failed to sell in the capital. She was one of many artists who felt that her following was perhaps stronger in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow than in London. Initially a copyist after Phillip, Frith, Millais, Faed and the Old Masters, as was then common practice amongst female artists, she found her true vocation in depicting the confrontation between rich and poor, good and evil, as seen in the present picture.
'Man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.'
The picture, previously thought lost, receives an interesting discussion in Susan P. Casteras' chapter 'Images of life on the Streets in Victorian Art' in the catalogue to the Hard Times exhibiton held at the Manchester City Art Galleries in 1987. An officious beadle, of whom The Illustrated London News (op. cit.) wrote 'the poor and needy tremble at his approach; the widow and orphan flee before his scowl... and poverty is a sin which, in his opinion, nothing can palliate', is trying to restrain a benevolent middle class lady from helping a destitute mother and child. A poster advertising the London Missionary Society's activities hangs above them. Susan Casteras reminds us in her essay how pressing were the problems of urban deprivation following the rapid industrial expansion of the mid-nineteenth century, and how many sections of society, as exemplified by the beadle, felt acute apprehension and antagonism towards the poor, fearing them to be a source of disease, as well as of moral and social instability. Casteras points out that Rebecca Solomon was one of the first artists to encourage compassion towards the poor in her paintings, although nowhere in her art does she encourage the viewer to feel guilt or urge reform, as artists were later to do in the 1870s.
The picture was exhibited at a time when Rebecca Solomon was one of the most prominent female artists of her day: indeed the Art Journal of 1860 fêted her as one of 'the many who receive honour as great women of our age'. Trained by her brother Abraham Solomon, she lived after his death in 1862 with her closest sibling Simeon, and shared the misfortune of his subsequent disgrace. She exhibited widely at the Royal Academy, the British Insitution, Suffolk Street and the Dudley Gallery, as well as following the accepted practice of exhibiting in the provinces when her pictures failed to sell in the capital. She was one of many artists who felt that her following was perhaps stronger in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow than in London. Initially a copyist after Phillip, Frith, Millais, Faed and the Old Masters, as was then common practice amongst female artists, she found her true vocation in depicting the confrontation between rich and poor, good and evil, as seen in the present picture.