William Powell Frith: The People's Painter

This highly illustrated book provides fresh assessments of the life and work of William Powell Frith, one of the most celebrated visual chroniclers of the mid-Victorian scene.William Powell Frith (1819-1909), famous for his picture The Derby Day which normally hangs at Tate Britain, was not only the most celebrated painter of modern-life subjects in mid-Victorian England, but the most popular British artist of that time. Published to mark the bicentenary of his birth and in association with an exhibition at the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, this richly illustrated volume of essays offers fresh and fascinating perspectives on Frith’s career and context. Despite dramatic shifts in taste with regard to Victorian painting during subsequent generations, Frith’s name has never been eclipsed, let alone forgotten - unlike those of most of his genre-painter contemporaries - as an introductory survey of critical responses to the artist’s work reveals. This provides a starting point for investig