- 41
George Dunlop Leslie, R.A.
Description
- George Dunlop Leslie, R.A.
- The Goldfish Seller
- signed G. D. Leslie (lower right)
- oil on canvas
- 29 1/2 by 43 1/2 in.
- 74.9 by 110.5 cm
Provenance
Condition
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."
Catalogue Note
With the opening of the first ever public aquarium at the Zoological Gardens at Regents Park in 1853 in London, keeping fish as pets became a popular hobby in Victorian England as both an affordable and educational pastime for the newly emerging middle-class. In his book on the British fascination with aquaria entitled The Family Aquarium, Henry D. Butler explains: "The aquarium was on everybody's lips. The aquarium rang out in everybody's ears. Morning, noon and night it was nothing but the aquarium" (as quoted in Bernd Brunner, The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium, Princeton, 2005, p. 55). In 1854, the German malacologist (a scientist who studies the zoological group of soft-bodied animals) Emil Adolf Rossmässler published the article Der Ocean auf dem Tische (The Ocean on the Table) in his popular magazine Die Gartenlaube, in which the author deals "with this strange British apparatus known as the aquarium" (Brunner, p. 60). By 1860, aquaria mania had died out in England, but as late as 1917, fish bowls were popular elements in home décor in American households; in The Art of Interior Decoration (New York, 1917), authors Grace Wood and Emily Burbank devote a chapter to the decorative "Treatment of Work Tables, Bird Cages, Dog Baskets and Fish Globes." They write "[t]he fish-globe can be of white or any colour glass you prefer, and your fish vivid or pale in tone; whichever it is, be sure that they furnish a needed — not a superfluous — tone of colour in a room or on a porch" (p. 106).