vallierojas: A thousand words

Both the story of William Powell Frith's life and his art had strong affinities with the literature of the day, and behind the realism of his paintings lies a moral undertone reminiscent of Dickens

Of all the Victorian artists, William Powell Frith (1819-1909) is the one who most resembles a character from a Victorian novel. Etty spent seven years as a printer's devil; Turner's early life with his wig-maker father in Maiden Lane sounds like a cancelled chapter from The Old Curiosity Shop, but somehow it is the creator of Ramsgate Sands in whom the twin streams of Victorian art and Victorian literature most narrowly converge. There is the (relatively) humble background ? Frith senior was a Harrogate inn-keeper ? and the unabashed delight in celebrity and the high-powered socialising that went with it. Above all ? a vital component of the Victorian jigsaw ? there is that sense of secretiveness. In time-honoured sensation-novel fashion, Frith maintained a second family, of whose existence his wife became aware only when she caught her husband ? supposedly in Brighton ? posting a letter three streets away.

One always expects a steely juvenile resolve from the biographies of Victorian painters. Frith, however, seems scarcely to have wanted to become an artist in the first place. His original scheme was to be an auctioneer, and it was only when his talent-spotting father dragged him off to London and advertised his sketches to a pair of Academicians that he got the bit between his teeth. There followed a somewhat tedious apprenticeship at the Charlotte Street art school run by Henry Sass ("Gandish's Academy" in Thackeray's The Newcomes), but by the early 1840s, still barely out of his teens, he was luxuriating in his first Academy success ? a subject from The Vicar of Wakefield that went for 100 guineas ? and an order from Dickens for portraits of Kate Nickleby and Barnaby Rudge's Dolly Varden. A sharp operator, even in his apprentice days, Frith recognised the symbolic significance of the Dickens commission: he and his mother are supposed to have burst into tears on receipt of the letter.

If the 1840s was a good time to be a novelist, then, in certain respects, it was an even better time to be a painter. From an early stage in his career, Frith was able to benefit from the two great professionalising tendencies of Victorian art. The first was the enormous sums of money that could now be made out of a vocation that had previously got by on shabby gentility. The Railway Station, from 1861, was sold to the celebrated London dealer Louis Victor Flatow for 8,800 guineas, with a 750 guinea bonus for keeping it out of the Royal Academy exhibition; 83,000 people subsequently trooped through Flatow's gallery to inspect it. The second ? closely connected to the first ? was the rising social status of the artist. "The Artists" of Thackeray's knowing sketch of 1840 are down-at-heel bohemians, the steps of whose Soho ateliers resound to the tread of duns and potboys ? the greatest insult flung at Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp, after all, is that her father was a drawing-master. But the sanitising process that picked up Dickens and Thackeray and deposited them in noblemen's drawing- rooms, brought them to Holland House salons and the terraces of country estates quickly extended to the art world. Frith was taken up by royalty and invited to paint the marriage of the Prince of Wales, but not the least of his achievements was to marry one of his daughters off to the celebrated Victorian medic Sir George Hastings.

If all this sounds like a very minor variation on the standard Victorian principle of self-help, with easel and oil paint taking the place of railway shares or discounted bills, then Frith would have been the first to admit his materialism. His attitude to his art was straightforwardly mercenary. "I know very well that I never was, nor under any circumstances could have become, a great artist," he maintained, "but I am a very successful one." But if at one level he was an all-too-pliable opportunist, quite happy, during his reputation-forging 20s to churn out the historical panoramas or scenes from Goldsmith that the early-Victorian public ? and the early-Victorian art critic ? demanded, then, at another, he was profoundly irritated by some of the constraints that it placed on his imagination.

Here, too, he was helped by a development in the wider landscape. This was the art world's increasing tolerance of a straightforwardly representative treatment of contemporary subjects. Ramsgate Sands, a sensation at the Royal Academy summer show of 1854, laid the foundation stone of Frith's commercial success ? it was sold to a London dealer for 1,000 guineas and later bought by Queen Victoria ? but it also established him as a technical innovator. As the art historian Christopher Wood points out, his vista of Victorian ladies at the beach is the first attempt to paint large numbers of people in modern dress, predating Manet by 10 years and Degas, Renoir and Caillebotte by nearly 20.

To the novelist ? as opposed to the art critic ? Frith's fascination lies in his closeness to the literature of his day, the sense that what the viewer is examining is not so much a painting as a wide-angle illustration to a book that has not yet been written. In this he is thoroughly representative of one of the great aesthetic tendencies of his age. The boundary between early-Victorian art and early-Victorian literature is blurred to the point where it sometimes seems hardly to exist at all. It was not merely that most novels were issued in illustrated, serial form, but that a significant fraction of novelists were keen to maintain a presence in both camps. Thackeray, to take the most obvious example, originally fancied himself as an artist ? his introduction to Dickens came when he offered himself as a replacement for Seymour, The Pickwick Papers' first illustrator ? and much of his early work takes the form of "sketchbooks" in which the drawings are sometimes quite as important as the text that surrounds them. The original title of Vanity Fair was "Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society", and even though the book soon turned into a conventional novel, there is a constant reminder of its visual dynamics in Thackeray's illustrations, many of which improve on the plot by adding odd bits of symbolism, choice allusions that bring out the significance of what may only be implicit in the prose itself.

If Thackeray uses his artistic skills to irradiate his literary work, then Frith, it might be said, plays the trick in reverse by carrying the techniques of literature over into his art. From one angle, this was simply a matter of ballast, and the wholesale importation from books and magazines of the kind of people with whom he populated his pictures. One of his great friends, for example, was the Punch artist John Leech, whose "social types" became a staple of his paintings. It involved both the use of interior narrative, and the well-worked profusion of his backdrops, which are as heroically cluttered and faithfully rendered as any Dickensian stage set: "I put no trust in fancy for the smallest detail of the picture," he once declared. All these tendencies come together in The Derby Day, sent to the Royal Academy at the end of April 1858 in time for its private view of 2 May. "Opening day of the Exhibition," the artist noted in his diary shortly afterwards. "Never was such a crowd seen around a picture. The secretary obliged to get a policeman to keep the people off."

Frith had first visited the Epsom turf two years previously, less interested in the race itself than the off-course antics of the acrobats and the fortune-tellers, nearly getting swindled by a thimble-rigging gang fronted by a bogus clergyman (all these figures appear on the canvas) and watching a ruined gambler attempting to cut his throat in one of the refreshment tents. Although he made rough drawings of the composition, he admitted that he "had difficulty in composing great numbers of figures into a more or less harmonious whole". The Derby Day, consequently, involves a number of different techniques. Its basis ? something Victorian painters tended to keep quiet about ? is a series of photographs taken by his friend Robert Howlett. Its figures ? all 88 of them ? are not the racegoers he had seen at Epsom two years before but models brought to his studio in Pembridge Villas and painted in threes, or even portraits of friends: the man in the fez standing behind the policeman is modelled on his deranged fellow artist Richard Dadd, already in prison for the murder of his father.

The picture is, in effect, a series of individual stories: the thimble-riggers clustered to the left of the pop-eyed boy who has clearly just been fleeced by them; the aristocratic rou� lounging by his mistress's carriage; the two gentlemanly exquisites paying languid court to a brace of racecard-toting young ladies. Frith's genius lies in what he sees, but also in what he does not, or chooses not to see, in what he puts in and also what he leaves out, and the result is both an impossibly detailed panorama and also an impression, where the viewer, apparently shown everything, still wants to know more.

Critics diagnosed works of scrupulous realism: "just the right classes which may be seen at our chief railway stations," the Era observed of The Railway Station, "and every one of them extraordinarily true to life." But Frith was never a realist in the strict sense: ultimately his approach is as devious and selective as any 1880s aesthetician. One sees this most obviously in his cast of characters, who, however sharply drawn, are always carefully calibrated to the public's expectations of them. The Victorian art fanciers who stood in front of The Derby Day saw, in the end, what they thought they ought to see. As a piece of art, the painting is a gigantic paradox: full of individual life and vigour, oddly static when seen in the round. But Ruskin, who reckoned it "a kind of cross between John Leech and Wilkie, with a dash of daguerreotype here and there, and some pretty seasoning with Dickens' sentiment", was absolutely right. No Victorian artist quite so successfully incorporated the tricks of narrative into his paintings, or knew what his audience wanted from both art and the life they saw reflected in it.

DJ Taylor's novel Derby Day is published by Chatto & Windus.

D J Taylor

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