Gulliver Exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer

Redgrave's 1836 painting of Gulliver Exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer depicts a scene from Swift's Gulliver's Travels in which the tiny Gulliver is displayed by the giant farmer who has found him — a comic reversal of normal scale that Swift used to explore human self-importance. Literary subjects from Swift, Dickens, Shakespeare, and other canonical English authors were standard fare at the Royal Academy in the Victorian period, and Redgrave contributed his share of such literary genre paintings alongside his more socially engaged works. The Gulliver subject allowed him to explore the pleasures of scale contrast and the humor of the satirical narrative within the conventional format of narrative genre painting.

The oil on canvas uses careful scale contrast and warm interior lighting to dramatize Swift's satirical scene, with detailed figure rendering and theatrical composition suited to literary illustration.