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The Wolf and the Lamb
William Mulready·1819
Historical Context
Mulready's 'The Wolf and the Lamb' (1820, Victoria and Albert Museum) was one of his most celebrated early works, depicting a bullying schoolboy confrontation that moralizes without sentimentality. The subject adapts the Aesopian fable to a contemporary English setting, showing Mulready's characteristic method of grounding timeless moral lessons in specific observed social reality. The painting's extraordinary critical success at the 1820 Royal Academy exhibition established Mulready's reputation as the preeminent English genre painter of his generation and set the terms for his subsequent career.
Technical Analysis
Mulready's technique in this period achieves an exceptional luminosity through building up thin, warm underpaint with cooler glazes — a process influenced by the Old Masters and by his study of the Flemish technique of painting on white grounds. The figures are carefully posed within a specific architectural setting that has been identified as a schoolyard in Kensington.
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