William Frith Powell's Portrait of "Charles Dickens" (1859)

Charles Dickens in His Study at Gadshill

William Powell Frith

Oil on canvas

1859

Framed height: 98cm x width: 84cm x depth: 10.5cm

See below for commentary, and mouse over the text for links

Monochrome version from Charles Dickens: An Exhibition....

William Frith Powell, 1818-1909: A Life in Art

Dickens's Study at Gadshill

The Chalet in the Shrubbery at Gadshill

Dickens's Writing Desk at the Chalet

Frederick G. Kitton's The Empty Chair: Gad's Hill, Ninth of June 1870

W. H. Boucher's The Empty Chair (22 June 1870)

Charles Dickens among his Characters in Judy (22 June 1870)

Charles Dickens's Legacy to England in Fun (25 June 1870)

Image acquisition and text by Philip V. Allingham

Commentary

What strikes us immediately about the writer's casual pose in the Frith painting is how comfortable the sitter seems to feel in this armchair, how relaxed and at ease in this private portrait for the family, dating from eleven years before Dickens's death at Gad's Hill.

The chair itself first appeared to a public viewership only a few days after the novelist's death, in cartoonist W. H. Boucher's The Empty Chair in the comic magazine Judy, or the London Serio-Comic Journal, in the issue published on 22 June 1870. The most famous version of the chair is that in Luke Fildes' watercolour view of Dickens's study at Gadshill, the sketch for which Study for "The Empty Chair", focuses exclusively on the chair, without the informing context of the atmospheric study in Fildes' highly finished watercolour The Empty Chair, Gad's Hill - Ninth of June, 1870. It appears again in the rather more fanciful Dickens's Dream or A Souvenir of Dickens (1875) by illustrator Robert William Buss.

Bibliography

Charles Dickens: An Exhibition to Commemorate the Centenary of His Death. London: Victorian and Albert Museum, 1970. No. 85.

Choe, Jian. "Luke Fildes' The Empty Chair: Innovation and Influence." Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (March 2025): 86-105.

Frith, William Powell. Charles Dickens in His Study. 1859. Victoria and Albert Museum. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O17333/oil-painting-charles-dickens/charles-dickens-oil-painting-frith-william-powell/

Orestano, Francesca. "The Empty Chair: Nostalgia, Celebrty, Heritage." Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (March 2025): 71-85.

Created 23 October 2002

Last modified 21 April 2025