VICTORIAN SOCIAL LIFE FROM PAINTINGS

Teaching from Painting

The use of paintings as primary historical source material raises particular issues. They do not always provide reliable evidence of what people or places looked like at a particular time. Artists have to consider such matters as aesthetic effect and composition, and they are often not interested in producing an accurate documentary record.

The artist may have chosen to exaggerate or rely on generalisation to get the message across. The viewer needs to be aware of contemporary stylistic conventions that may have been used.

Many of the paintings in the V&A are scenes from ordinary life. They feature people and frequently have an anecdotal or narrative theme.

The French word 'genre', derived from 'gens', the word for people, is used to describe pictures of this sort.

Recurrent themes include childhood, the plight of women, rejected love, poverty and old age. Because of the openly emotional way in which these subjects are handled, Victorian genre paintings have come to be seen as sentimental. In the Victorian period, artists and writers appealed in a very direct and emotive way to their audiences. Paintings and novels were intended to involve their audience in the way that films or soap operas do today. But art and literature were not just for entertainment. Many artists, such as writers Charles Dickens and Charles Kingsley, had a reforming mission. They set out to evoke compassion and sympathy in the public and bring about a humanitarian response to the evils they saw in their society. Paintings and novels provided examples of good and bad behaviour, supplying ideal characters to be imitated and showing the grievous effects of not following society's rules. The Victorian enthusiasm for displaying paintings to the general public and encouraging the poor to visit art exhibitions stemmed from this.

Learning to look at genre paintings and gather historical information

As preparation for their visit to the V&A and their work with original paintings, students should become familiar with genre paintings and develop confidence in generating their own questions about them. They can do this by using reproductions of paintings in books and postcards, or online images from the V&A's database Search the Collections.

Asking general questions of the kind below will help students to develop ways of extracting information to use critically.

The people

• How many are there?
• What are they doing?
• What is their relationship to each other?
• Are they all of equal importance?
• Which one is higher up, nearer the front of the picture or most centrally placed?
• What are they wearing?
• What do their clothes tell you about them?
• Who is wearing the most eye-catching outfit?
• What is their mood or emotional state?
• How do you know?

The surroundings

•  Where are they? If inside, describe the room, objects, animals and furniture. If outside, describe the environment.
• Is the lighting trying to make you look at one particular area or person?
• Has a certain time of day or weather been chosen?
• What do the surroundings tell you about the people and the picture as a whole?
• Is there a storyline? If so, what's going on?
• Can we tell from the painting what has happened in the past or what might happen in the future?
• Why do you think the picture was painted?
• What was the artist's motivation or intention?
• Where was the picture likely to be hung and who might be expected to own it or see it?
• Might this influence the style or content?
• What would it mean to its owner today?
• How can you test or evaluate the information extracted?
• Are there always answers to the questions posed?
• What other sources of information might be helpful?