An English Merrymaking a Hundred Years Ago

William Powell Frith's An English Merrymaking a Hundred Years Ago of 1847 is an early work by the painter who would become the master of large Victorian crowd scenes, and it already demonstrates his talent for organizing multiple figures in a scene of social celebration. The painting imagines an English rural festivity of around 1747 — 'a hundred years ago' from the date of painting — invoking an idealized pastoral England through the costumes and setting of the mid-eighteenth century. The backward temporal glance was a common move in Victorian art, allowing painters to celebrate English social life while giving it the protective distance of historical dress. Frith would develop this crowd-scene ambition into his great works of the 1850s and 1860s, but this early picture shows the social energy and compositional instinct already fully developed. The Victoria and Albert Museum's picture is a document of his early career.

Frith manages a multi-figure outdoor scene with the compositional organization that would become his signature, distributing figures across the picture space in varied groups without losing coherence. The costume is rendered with the historical detail appropriate to a period setting. The handling is smooth and accomplished, appropriate to the large exhibiting format he was already aiming at.