Manchester and Salford Children, 1861. Oil on canvas; 30 x 24¼ inches (76 x 61.6 cm). Collection of Manchester Art Gallery, accession no. 1985.16. Kindly released on Art UK on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND).
Armstrong's early works, soon after his return from Paris, primarily dealt with scenes of social realism including themes of social deprivation. As J. F. Boyes noted in his article on Armstrong for The Art Journal: "Some of his earliest pictures showed an attempt at an uncompromising realism, and the presentation of homely, almost squalid subjects. Many of these were from studies made in the streets and slums of Manchester, and depicted scenes of misery and distress among the 'lower classes' of that great city - scenes familiar enough, unfortunately, in every great city, and such as have not so frequently been selected by the artist of the brush as by those of the pen. The curiosity of the thing, however, is not so much that they should have been painted, as that they should have been painted by Mr. Armstrong. This was but a transitional stage of his art" (271-72).
In Manchester and Salford Children Armstrong focuses on the plight of working class children from a slum in his native Manchester. Three children are shown in a dark back alley. Two young boys are seated, apparently playing a game with different sizes of stones laid out on the paving blocks. The redheaded boy, dressed in a torn and dirty white shirt, looks downwards while his friend stares directly across at him and smiles. A young girl with a serious expression stands to the right, leaning against the wall, and holding a hoop in her right hand and an apple in her left. None of the children are wearing shoes. A coal bucket stands in the bottom right hand corner of the composition. A sunny courtyard can be visualized at the other end of the alleyway where a woman is doing washing and hanging clothes on a line assisted by her daughter. Two younger girls stand about while a man lounges against a wall and watches this activity. Other social realist works from the 1860s period include his Head of an Irish Orange Girl of c. 1868.
Bibliography
Boyes, J. F. "Chiefs of our National Museums. No. V. – The South Kensington Museum. Mr. Thomas Armstrong." The Art Journal (1891): 271-73.
Created 19 March 2023