William Powell Frith

• 1. Introduction

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  William Powell Frith caused a scene at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1858. Officials had to install a special rail around his new painting to hold back the crowds pressing in to see it. The canvas captured the crowds gathered for a horse race at Epsom Downs.

  One writer described Frith as the "greatest British painter of the social scene since Hogarth." For decades he painted the Victorian public back at itself, in seaside towns, train stations and crowded public gatherings. Yet the man who filled his canvases with tidy domestic order kept a second family that few people around him ever suspected.

  What made an ordinary observer of crowds into an artist the public could not stop watching?

• 2. Early Life And Training

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  William Powell Frith was born in Aldfield, a village near Ripon in Yorkshire's West Riding, on the 9th of January 1819. His father ran a hotel in Harrogate and pushed young Frith toward art rather than the career the boy had planned. Frith had originally intended to become an auctioneer. His mother, Jane Frith, born Powell, lived from 1779 until 1851. Decades later Frith became great uncle and an advisor to Henry Keyworth Raine, a portrait painter born in 1872 who died in 1932.

  In 1835, Frith moved to London and began formal training at Sass's Academy on Charlotte Street. From there he advanced to the Royal Academy Schools. He worked first as a portrait painter and exhibited for the first time at the British Institution in 1838.

  By the 1840s Frith was drawing subjects from the writing of Charles Dickens and Laurence Sterne. He later painted a portrait of Dickens in 1859. Frith belonged to The Clique, a group of young painters that included Richard Dadd. In 1853 the Royal Academy elected him a member, and he presented The Sleeping Model as his diploma work.

  Within a few years, the group's example would pull Frith away from single portraits and toward the crowded, multi-figure scenes that made his name.

• 3. Crowd Scenes Of Victorian Life

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  Sir David Wilkie's popular domestic scenes became the strongest influence on Frith's own work, especially Wilkie's painting The Chelsea Pensioners. Following Wilkie's example, and also drawing on the technique of his friend Dickens, Frith built complex compositions filled with many figures. These paintings captured people from every level of Victorian society meeting in public places.

  In Ramsgate Sands, also known as Life at the Seaside and painted in 1854, Frith depicted holidaymakers and entertainers at the seaside resort.

  The Derby Day followed, showing the crowd at the horse race at Epsom Downs, a composition based on photographic studies by Robert Howlett. Jacob Bell bought the 1858 painting for £1,500.

  The Railway Station, another well known Frith work, showed a scene at Paddington station. In 1863 Frith was chosen to paint the wedding of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, and Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

  His 1858 painting The Crossing Sweeper has been described as breaking new ground. One account credits it with capturing "the collision of wealth and poverty on a London street."

  Frith's next major works would turn away from single tableaux and into full five-picture morality tales.

• 4. Two Series Of Moral Tales

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  Road to Ruin, a series of five paintings from 1878, tracked the dangers of gambling.

  Frith paired it with Race for Wealth, another five-picture series from 1880, this time centered on reckless financial speculation.

  Both series followed the storytelling style of William Hogarth, guiding viewers through moral lessons across sequential scenes. Frith retired from the Royal Academy in 1890 but continued exhibiting there until 1902.

  Retirement did nothing to soften Frith's opinions about where art was heading next.

• 5. Enemy Of The Avant Garde

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  In two autobiographies, My Autobiography and Reminiscences from 1887 and Further Reminiscences from 1888, Frith made his dislike of modern art developments plain. He was also an outspoken opponent of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement.

  Frith mocked the Aesthetic Movement directly in his 1883 painting A Private View at the Royal Academy, now held in a private collection. In it, Oscar Wilde is shown holding forth on art while Frith's friends look on with disapproval. The traditionalist painter Frederic Leighton also appears in the scene, alongside the painter John Everett Millais and the novelist Anthony Trollope.

  Frith painted his friends' disapproval onto that canvas, even as he kept a private arrangement of his own hidden from view.

• 6. Two Households

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  Frith married twice and fathered twelve children with his first wife, Isabelle. At the same time, a mile from his family home, he kept a mistress, Mary Alford, once his own ward. They had seven more children together.

  This double household stood in sharp contrast to the tidy family scenes he painted, including Many Happy Returns of the Day. Isabelle died in 1880, and Frith married Alford the following year.

  One daughter from his first family, Jane Ellen Panton, published a memoir titled Leaves of a Life in 1908. It recalled her childhood and the family's circle of artist and literary friends, chiefly members of The Clique. Walter Frith, the third son of Frith's first marriage, wrote fourteen plays and three novels.

  None of this reached wider notice until long after Frith himself was gone.

• 7. Legacy And Later Years

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  In 1856, Robert Howlett photographed Frith at The Photographed Institute as part of a series of portraits of fine artists. That photograph was shown at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857.

  In his later years Frith painted many copies of his own famous works, alongside more sexually uninhibited pieces such as the nude After the Bath. He built a reputation as a well known raconteur, and his conversational autobiography proved very popular.

  Frith died on the 2nd of November 1909 at the age of 90 and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London.

  The first major retrospective of Frith's work in Britain in half a century opened at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London in November 2006. It transferred to the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, in March 2007. The gallery now holds Frith's study for The Private View, 1881, considered his last major work.

  Decades earlier, Frith's work had also featured in an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. It ran from the 25th of October to the 1st of December 1951. Today his paintings remain in the collections of Derby Art Gallery, Sheffield, Harrogate and the Victoria and Albert Museum.