New River, at Islington with a Family Going Awalking, a Cow Milking, and the Horns Archly Fixed Over the Husband's Head

Francis Hayman's New River at Islington, painted for Vauxhall Gardens between 1741 and 1742, belongs to the famous series of decorative paintings Hayman created for the supper-box alcoves at London's most celebrated pleasure garden. Vauxhall commissioned Hayman to provide a programmatic series of genre scenes depicting English leisure and social life, and this scene — depicting a family walking along the New River with its comic secondary narrative of the cuckold's horns fixed over the husband's head — exemplifies the mixture of innocent domesticity and bawdy humor that characterized Vauxhall's entertainment culture. The New River was an early seventeenth-century artificial waterway supplying London with fresh water from Hertfordshire, and by the mid-eighteenth century its banks at Islington had become a fashionable promenade. Hayman's Vauxhall paintings are an important early document of English pictorial genre.

The wide horizontal format, designed for a supper-box setting, encourages a narrative scan across the composition from left to right. Hayman's handling is fresh and accessible, the figures drawn with confidence and placed against an open landscape background. The palette is light and airy, appropriate for the outdoor subject and the decorative setting.