Flying the Kite, a Windy Day

Flying the Kite, a Windy Day, painted in 1851 and in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, is one of David Cox's most joyful mature works — a scene in which the wind that animates his atmospheric landscapes becomes explicitly the subject, visible through the kite's soaring flight and the children's excited figures below. The windy day subject was Cox's signature contribution to British landscape painting, and by 1851 he had explored it across dozens of canvases. Children flying kites on open ground allowed Cox to show the wind's force from multiple angles: through the kite's angle and string's curve, through the figures' leaning stances, and through the field grasses and distant trees. The Walker Art Gallery's collection of Victorian painting is among the finest in Britain outside London, and Cox is well represented there. The painting's date coincides with the Great Exhibition of 1851, a moment of national confidence in industrial progress that makes Cox's nostalgic pastoral scene all the more pointed as a record of a landscape under threat from urban expansion.

The kite string's diagonal line is the composition's organising principle, connecting the small but animated figures at the bottom to the kite's bright point high in the sky. Cox painted the sky with exceptional freedom here — scudding clouds rendered in broad loaded strokes create the sense of rapid movement. His figures have the summary but expressive quality of his best late work.