Schoolgirls, Haverstock Hill

More schoolgirls, though rather mature ones, with milkmaid and flower-seller, from 1880, at the Yale Center for British Art. This is one of a series of pictures of women in London streets done mainly in 1880 and early 1881, though we see one even in the watercolour Flora of 1883. The series includes Winter Afternoon, London and In the Street, and the major statement in this vein, A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill. They look straight at us in a dead-pan way, painted by a still single young man. He married in the summer of 1881 and left London. By 1882 the interest would have been entirely with the milkmaid or, in Spring Morning, with the road-diggers.

This picture, like Spring Morning, is good classroom material. What do we see here? What does this picture tell us about Victorian social divisions? Illustrated in Judith Flanders’s The Victorian House, Harper Collins, London, 2003.

Schoolgirls

Comments

[Bill]

We saw this as part of the Edvard Munch exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Don't miss it.

The class tension here is palpable.

Bill