Lot 97: A. Erwood , fl. 1860-69 the first place oil on canvas

inscribed and signed on the remnants of an old label attached to the reverse: No. 2/ The First Place/ A. Erwood/ Price £ - oil on canvas

measurements note 31.5 by 27 cm.; 12 ½ by 10 ½ in.

John Hadfield, Every Picture Tells a Story: Images of Victorian Life, 1985, p. 116, illustrated p. 117

Christopher Wood, London, where bought by Sir David Scott in March 1979 for £1,450

'Poor girl! She is suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of home-sickness such as we must all have experienced sometime in our own youth. But judging by the appearance of the room she is dusting, the house is a nice not too large middle class one... and if she has a kind and sympathetic mistress she will soon recover. As regards her status, she is too inexperienced to be a general, nor for the same reason could she be a house parlourmaid. I think she is just a single-handed housemaid, with a cook below stairs, who will as likely as not, I fear, be inclined to push her about to show her superiority, for the hierarchy and class consciousness below stairs and behind the green baize door in those days - and perhaps even now if such things as living in domestic servants existed! - were just as pronounced as they were above stairs. A little gem of its kind.' Sir David Scott The painter of this tender genre subject is known only as the exhibitor of nine works - most if not all domestic of a similar type - at the Royal Academy between 1860 and 1869. These works were sent from addresses in London. A work entitled The Rejected Picture, shown in 1861 and which may be guessed to have been based on his own experience, suggests that Erwood struggled to gain professional recognition.

The present work was the artist's first exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1860. Although recording a moment in time in a manner typical of much Victorian painting of this date, the execution and setting of the work is in some ways very modern. It is an intriguing vision into the current interiors of the 1860s, much of the furniture being near contemporary and very much the fashion at this date. The style of its execution, such as the play of light through the window and its painterly technique, also looks forward to British painting at the end of the nineteenth century.