Lot 118: Edward Hughes , 1832-1908 a first visit to the dentist oil on canvas

signed and dated l.r.: Edward Hughes/ 1866 oil on canvas

measurements note 61 by 51 cm.; 24 by 20 in.

Waddington's, 29 March 1979, lot 611;
Christie's, 18 March 1983, lot 38, where bought by Sir David Scott for £8,736

Paintings of visits to dentist's surgeries had been popular since Hogarth's time, and were usually painted as satirical genre pieces rather than studies of scientific techniques. Hughes' painting depicts a worried little girl and her mother in the examining room of a kindly-faced dentist, whose surgery is part living room and looks less than sanitary. He is hiding a dentistry instrument behind his back, and is wearing an apron. Dentistry was still in its infancy in the Victorian period, and the less well-off were forced to go to 'quack' doctors for cures to various maladies and complaints (including tooth-ache). Edward Hughes was the son of the landscape painter George Hughes, and a regular exhibitor at the British Institution and the Royal Academy between 1847 and 1884. His subjects were mainly of contemporary life, often concentrated on the poor members of society, examples being Ruinous Prices, The District Visitor, Lone and Weary and Sorrowful Tidings. From his list of exhibited works, it appears that in the 1870s Hughes turned to portraiture and painted fewer of the genre pictures that had been his specialty in the 1860s. The present subject of a child's visit to a dentist, treated in comic vein, followed a related composition entitled The First Tooth (Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport), exhibited in 1863.