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No Walk Today
Sophie Anderson, 1823-1903
1856-57
Oil on canvas
49.5 × 39.5 cm)
Collection: ex-Sotheby's
See below for commentary by Pamela Gerrish Nunn. Mouse over the text for links.
Image scan, by kind permission of Sotheby's, and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Although Sophie Anderson has not been ranked as a major Victorian painter, this work has almost iconic status, representing mid-century taste and certain key features of the art that the newly self-confident British middle class favoured. This is due not so much to its being Anderson's outstanding work as to its availability to advocates of Victorian painting at crucial stages of the rehabilitation of nineteenth-century British art in the last quarter of the twentieth century — when it went from being seen as an embarrassing backwater of art history to the positive opinion of it that makes it so visible today. This roll-call of appearances was well rehearsed in the catalogue that Sotheby's prepared for the picture's sale from Sir David Scott's collection in 2008, from its use as the poster image for Agnew's 1965 exhibition promoting the Victorian Society, through its inclusion in Graham Reynolds' influential publications Painters of the Victorian Scene (1953) and Victorian Painting (1966, 1987). Its inclusion in the 1985 exhibition The Treasure Houses of Britain at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, presented the work as emblematic of Victorian painting to North American gallery-goers as well.
As Lindsay Errington observed in 1991 (also in relation to the Scott collection), No Walk Today deals with emphatically topical elements of middle-class life, from the gaudy new dyes in clothing through the use of plate glass for new house-building to the fashions in shrubs for the gardens of these new residences. Its sentiment, too, is very much of the time: although they can seem facile and vacuous to twenty-first-century eyes, compositions such as this had a wide appeal at the middle of the century, with infants and children of both sexes – but especially girls - presented for the gallery-goer to gush over. In this regard, Anderson was following a well-established path, although hers is a particularly vivid example of the trend. Her use of minute finish and vivid colour beg the question of how much Pre-Raphaelite painting Anderson had seen at this point. She could in theory have seen three Academy exhibitions between her arrival from the USA and the painting of this picture, but details of her activities and acquaintances at this time are, tantalisingly, at present quite unknown.
It has been speculated that the model in No Walk Today was the artist's daughter, who was born in 1852. She can certainly be seen in other paintings by Anderson from this time, namely Prophecy of the Destiny (1856) and I am helping Mamma (1857), but this goes no way towards confirming the little girl's identity. While models might often be drawn from an artist's family, they might just as easily be found within neighbours' and servants' families, as Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) makes clear in the record of his interactions with the artist in the mid-sixties.
Although it seems today such a tour-de-force, there is no evidence that Anderson exhibited this painting. (Unfortunately, no records were kept in this period of artworks submitted for exhibition but rejected, even for the Academy exhibitions, the best organised of the mid-century London venues.) However, an engraving of No Walk Today was published in March 1857. The artist's early career in the USA alerted her to the currency of lithographic and other reproductions, and it was clearly her habit to get her most appealing paintings reproduced in graphic form, either as free-standing prints or as illustrations in the press. Later paintings comparable with the present work to get this treatment include On the Tiptoe of Expectation (1866) and Red Riding Hood (1868), both reproduced in the Illustrated London News, whose consistent support for Anderson's work indicates its persistent attraction for the urban middle class.
Errington, Lindsay. Sunshine and Shadow: the David Scott collection of Victorian paintings. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1991: cat. no. 10.
A Great British Collection: the pictures collected by Sir David and Lady Scott. London: Sotheby's, 2008: cat. no. 96.
Green, R.L. ed. The Diaries of Lewis Carroll. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971.
Created 28 April 2022