This engaging collection of watercolours, produced between the 1870s and 1890s, interprets a range of themes and concepts in pictorial form—from the literal 'stepping stones', 'weather beaten' and 'sunny effects', to the more abstract 'hesitation', 'divided' and 'reminiscence'. The resulting works are visual feast of Victorian thought and feeling: genre scenes that tell of Victorians' love-affair with the past and prevailing tastes for the literary, pastoral and gothic.
The artist was working as part of the Odds and Ends Club—presumed to be a 19th-century arts club, whose very name captures the eclectic spirit of Victorian visual culture, by this date at its apotheosis. The relentless urge of past decades to explore, exploit, classify, convert and improve, is encapsulated in images that combine nostalgia and contemporary middle-class tastes. There are elements of academic narrative, Pre-Raphaelite historical allusion and Romantic landscape painting.
Arts clubs of the 19th-century were gatherings of like-minded individuals, often with a social, ideological or pedagogical dimension. Most famously perhaps, the New English Art Club was founded in London in 1885 as an alternative to the Royal Academy—but there were a multitude of other local clubs, providing new infrastructure for teaching, peer review and exhibition. These charming paintings are an interesting record of Victorian art outside the Academies, and the inexorable rise of an educated and self-improving English middle class.
