I really enjoyed this article and I love the painting. It's very different from most things you usually see. I love all the symbolism. It's just warm, lovely and packed with deeper meaning.
This is a good meditation for Lent. You point out that every part of the painting points to the Christ’s suffering, yet there is also an emphasis on the Holy Family. Do you know if any Catholic art critics of the time praised it?
Thank you! There was one magazine, the Guardian, I believe, that cautiously praised it. This magazine was associated with the Anglo-Catholic Anglicans.
Amelia, thank you for choosing this unexpected image to share. But it’s not unusual to an artist’s way of seeing. It has the beauty of everyday light and air typical of 19th century painting. But, you are right in describing the historical revulsion felt by the critics of its own time. The same type of challenge faced the painters of British Romanticism bucking the conventions of the Academy. In addition to the rich symbolic iconography that you note so well, the basic poses and arrangement of space is so quotidian as to be a modern painting, really. Looking at it today, it also seems like the grandchild of Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece – the in and out space of the workshop and the carefully chosen visual roles for everyone in the image. It’s very much worthy of its place in the PRB archive. While Dickens may have panned the characters as slum dwellers, I would say Giotto would be proud to have made this gathering of souls in a human workshop that is a sacred, but veiled, visual narrative. Would you ever write about William Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death?
I really enjoyed this article and I love the painting. It's very different from most things you usually see. I love all the symbolism. It's just warm, lovely and packed with deeper meaning.
Very good work.
Thank you Alice. It does look a little strange at first, but after looking for a little while things start to come together harmoniously.
It's different. Makes you think
Thank you for this! Extremely well done
Thank you Hannah!
This is a good meditation for Lent. You point out that every part of the painting points to the Christ’s suffering, yet there is also an emphasis on the Holy Family. Do you know if any Catholic art critics of the time praised it?
Thank you! There was one magazine, the Guardian, I believe, that cautiously praised it. This magazine was associated with the Anglo-Catholic Anglicans.
Amelia, thank you for choosing this unexpected image to share. But it’s not unusual to an artist’s way of seeing. It has the beauty of everyday light and air typical of 19th century painting. But, you are right in describing the historical revulsion felt by the critics of its own time. The same type of challenge faced the painters of British Romanticism bucking the conventions of the Academy. In addition to the rich symbolic iconography that you note so well, the basic poses and arrangement of space is so quotidian as to be a modern painting, really. Looking at it today, it also seems like the grandchild of Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece – the in and out space of the workshop and the carefully chosen visual roles for everyone in the image. It’s very much worthy of its place in the PRB archive. While Dickens may have panned the characters as slum dwellers, I would say Giotto would be proud to have made this gathering of souls in a human workshop that is a sacred, but veiled, visual narrative. Would you ever write about William Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death?