6 thoughts on “Victorian / Edwardian Paintings”

  3. Paul: Everything is not contemporary politics, thank God.

    Whitehall: Funny, I focused on the mother, with a kid to feed, and no money to feed him. As to the pawnbroker, I don’t think he looks all that Jewish. And even if he was, there were certainly Jewish pawnbrokers in England at the time. So what. The pawnbroker will pay her the market rate for the watch, and no more, whether he is Jewish or not. The point is this woman’s life is a tragedy, and this is one milestone episode in that tragedy. There was a man who owned that watch, now presumably dead. What happened? How did she end up in this situation? What will happen to her when these last few shillings are gone? Who knows. A lot of these paintings from this era are narrative pictures, where you have to fill in a story. As a parent, the prospect of my family suffering is what I saw in this picture. And the Victorian era was a world with few safety nets, and not much margin if things went badly, and literal starvation as a real prospect.

  4. “Paul: Everything is not contemporary politics, thank God.”

    “And the Victorian era was a world with few safety nets, and not much margin if things went badly, and literal starvation as a real prospect.”

    Yes, not everything is contemporary politics, but that painting is poised to become as much of a political emblem as that snake emblem up on the masthead. Um, its just a picture of a snake, isn’t it, and it doesn’t mean anything unless you read something into it?

    Just sayin’, for this Web site at this time to put that heavily content-laden painting up and then claim “Everything is not contemporary politics”, the irony meter is pegged.

  5. Paul:

    “… that painting is poised to become as much of a political emblem as that snake emblem …”

    I suppose you could look it at that way. I almost put up several other pictures from that site with no political content. I just like the narrative element in this one, and I found it touching.

    I had no subjective intent to make a political statement with it.

    But, sure you can find an analogy to the USA selling the last of its family treasure as it sinks into poverty, etc.

    Not my intention, but irony does not need to be intentional.

    The snake I have expressly said is meant to be political.

  6. I agree with the heart-tugging story being portrayed in the painting and that is the power of it.

    But the contemporary audience would have seen the pawnbroker as a “heavy” driving a hard bargain and as Jewish. That was the stock character in Victorian England. Unfortunate, but I suspect true.

    Today, most of us in the US won’t respond quite that way but some will.

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