Thomas P. Hall

N.R. Omell, London;
Sotheby's, 22 March 2000, lot 298;
Christopher Wood Gallery, London;
Private collection

Christopher Wood, The Dictionary of Victorian Painters, 1971, p.615;
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London, 2005, reproduced on the cover

STRUCTURE The canvas is lined. There is a fine craquelure throughout. There are areas of discolouration to the clouds and skin tones, otherwise presented in a clean and stable condition, ready to hang. ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT There are localised spots and flecks of infill and retouching in places throughout the composition. FRAME In a reproduction laurel wreath frame.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

This charming painting shows the view from the interior of an art dealer's shop, looking out through the shop window to the street outside. On display are two paintings in gilt frames as well as various unframed prints, placed against the frame of the window and seen in reverse image as the light of the sky shines through the paper. In the street is assembled a group of wayfarers of different types and stations. On the left a man holds a monocle to his eye to study the works on display, and standing beside him is a boy in a deerstalker's hat. Less privileged perhaps are the two children in the centre, one of them holding a broom and therefore likely to be intended as a crossing sweeper. To the right is a maid servant with a jug of milk, and behind a mariner, wearing a sou'wester hat and smoking a pipe. In the background is an omnibus bound for Bank in the City of London.

No particular moral seems to be intended in the painting, beyond that of representing a cross-section of urban life in the mid-Victorian period. It may well be that Thomas Hall had seen William MacDuff's delightful painting Shaftesbury, or Lost and Found (private collection), shown at the 1863 Royal Academy, in which a shoeblack looks at the display of engravings in the window of the print publishers Henry Graves & Co.

The title is taken from a line in Shakespeare's 'Triolus and Cressida', and implies that the audience gathered outside the shop are looking at a landscape which we are not able to see.