JOHN RITCHIE (SCOTTISH 1828-1905)
STREET SCENE ON A WINTER DAY - A SLIDE
Estimate: £10,000 - £15,000
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale | Lots 112- 206 | Thursday 05 June from 6pm
Description
Signed and dated 1854, oil on canvas
Dimensions
61cm x 112cm (24in x 44in)
Provenance
James Keith
M. Newman Ltd, London
Exhibited:
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1854, no.225 (lent by the publisher Mr James Keith)
Footnote
Nineteenth-century Britain underwent an unprecedented demographic expansion and redistribution. Accordingly, Victorian depictions of the crowded unpredictability of urban life felt distinctly contemporary. Social-realists populated their works with ‘larger than life’ characters from across the class spectrum who were often jostling to further their own agenda, charging a work with narrative potential. So it was in the prose of Dickens, Gaskell and Thackeray; so too in the work of painters such as William Powell Frith, Thomas Faed and John Ritchie.
Street Scene on a Winter Day - A Slide is expansive in its scope, allowing Ritchie to comprehensively illustrate the hijinks of a group of boys who have come across an ice slide on the streets of Edinburgh. Ritchie revels in the spectrum of emotion from the determined expressions of those sliding in from the right-hand side, to the shock of the boys in the centre who spot the impending pile-up, culminating in the gleeful tumble of limbs on the left as the children fall to the ground. It is just as well that the boy crouching in the very centre of the composition wears a scarf tied around his ears, which protects his head from the chill of the snowball that has just found its target. Outraged, he wheels round to identify his assailant, who has wisely positioned himself to the lower centre: he is already poised, on all fours, with a further snowball. One adventurous soul wears a wicker trug as a protective shield on his back, the vegetables it previously carried abandoned on the snow. Evidence of further summarily forgotten errands can be found in the letter-bundle and loaves of bread flying through the air, and the upturned basket of onions. A pamphlet affixed to the far-left wall reminds the viewer of the ongoing Crimean War, which had raged since October 1853, but Ritchie’s painting celebrates the suspension of worldly duties and cares for the simple pleasure of playing in the snow - even if only for a few moments. It is evident that the ice slide has proven a delightfully irresistible prospect for these boys.