The picture was exhibited at Liverpool in the autumn of 1876, and was probably painted the previous spring. When it was sold in 1978 it had a companionpiece, The Mall, St. James's Park, which also showed a girl selling lavender (in this case seated), with a lady being carried in a sedan chair in the distance. The two works probably owe something to Francis Wheatley's famous Cries of London, and certainly belong to the 'Queen Anne' revival which was such a notable element in 'aesthetic' taste at this date. Kate Greenaway perhaps offers the most obvious parallel, and the pictures are contemporary with the building of Bedford Park, Norman Shaw's innovative garden suburb in Chiswick, with its neo-Georgian architecture and self-consciously 'aesthetic' lifestyle. Hughes must have had friends among the many artists who lived there - for instance, T.M. Rooke, who, significantly enough, lived in Queen Anne's Gardens (see lot 332). As the label on the back confirms, Hughes himself had recently moved to Wallington, near Carshalton in Surrey, where he had inherited a property from a cousin, Miss Mary Ann Dredge, which he re-named 'Wandle Bank'; but in 1891 he too would move to an eighteenth-century ambient, settling in a charming red-brick house (still standing) on Kew Green.

We are grateful to Leonard Roberts for his help in preparing this entry.