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| (c) Tate, London 2001 |
The mid-nineteenth century in Britain was a time of invention and experimentation with new technologies and textile processes, allowing the manufacture of a range and diversity of clothing not previously seen. Victorian painters depicted dress in a variety of significant ways. Dress indicated its wearer's social position and moral stature, and artists of the time were quick to understand this fact and use it to convey messages about the subjects of their paintings.
The Victorian painters William Powell Frith, Ford Madox Brown and William Maw Egley each devoted lavish attention to the details of dress in their works, but with quite different motivations, often based on their own political and social attitudes.
In this seminar, based on a paper delivered at the "Locating the Victorians" conference, Christiana Payne, lecturer in art history at Oxford Brookes University, offers a comparative analysis of three Victorian paintings that contain fascinating representations of dress: Frith's Derby Day, Brown's Work, and Egley's Omnibus Life in London. Payne analyses both the works and their creators to reveal the various ways in which dress was important to Victorians and those who portrayed them.
