William Powell Frith was born at Aldfield, North Yorkshire on 19 January 1819. His parents were both in domestic service, later taking a hotel in Harrogate in 1826. They encouraged their son to become an artist, despite his wish to be an auctioneer. While at school in Dover, Frith sketched caricatures and copies of Dutch genre scenes. He studied at Henry Sass’s academy in London (1835-37) and at the Royal Academy Schools (1837). Frith commenced a career as a portrait painter, using members of his family as models. He first exhibited at the British Institution in 1838 and during the 1840s established himself with his entertaining historical and literary subjects in the popular tradition of C R Leslie, William Mulready and Sir David Wilkie. He was a member of the Clique, which included Richard Dadd, Augustus Egg, Henry O’Neil and John Phillip. Frith’s friendship with Charles Dickens began with commissions for paintings of Dolly Varden (V&A) and Kate Nickleby (untraced) in 1842. Frith’s first exhibit at the Royal Academy of 1840, Malvolio before the Countess Olivia, was followed by others from the works of Scott, Sterne, Goldsmith, Shakespeare, Dickens and Molière. A scene from Goldsmith, the Village Pastor clinched Frith’s election as ARA in 1845. Some of his more ambitious works in this group, such as English Merrymaking a Hundred Years Ago (1847; V&A) and Coming of Age in the Olden Time (1849) demonstrate his detailed study of historic costume, furniture and architecture. In 1852 he was elected RA. His mediocre Diploma Work, a self-portrait in his studio, known as the Sleeping Model (1853), underlines the variable quality that characterises his output. The few pictures that made Frith’s reputation are of contemporary subjects. These started, tentatively, with a picture of a servant girl (c. 1853), which was engraved with the saleable title of Sherry Sir? Encouraged by his friend John Leech and perhaps stimulated by the example of his Punch illustrations, as well as by a visit to Ramsgate in 1851, Frith produced his first modern-life subject: Life at the Seaside (1854; Royal Collection). Despite his doubts about attempting a subject never depicted before, it was a great success. Its purchase by Queen Victoria encouraged Frith to produce the equally popular Derby Day (1858; London, Tate) and the Railway Station (1862; Egham, University of London, Royal Holloway & Bedford New Coll.). Both paintings were successful speculative ventures: Frith received £5,250 for the Railway Station (including copyright and exhibiting rights) from Louis Victor Flatlow and the sale of engravings from it would provide far greater sums for the subsequent owners of the copyright, the dealer Ernest Gambart and the printseller Henry Graves. Frith had studied art with the pharmacist Jacob Bell at Sass’s academy in childhood. A recorded elsewhere, Bell’s time there was not a success, but he would go on to become the founder of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. He was a lifelong friend of Frith’s and had a passion for horse-racing. Although his Quaker upbringing prevented him from betting, Bell offered Frith £1,500 to produce a full-scale painting of Derby Day after seeing a preliminary sketch. The dealer, Ernest Gambart, being aware of the lucrative subject matter, paid Frith the equivalent amount to secure the painting’s copyright and exhibition rights, before the artist had even put his brush to the canvas. In Derby Day Frith painted a representative section of the huge crowd which gathered annually on Epsom Downs, introducing every familiar human type and social class associated with the races. Frith employed Robert Howlett to provide photographs, on which he based the group studies. The popularity of Derby Day was assured owing to the involvement of Gambart, who was something of a showman. The public were so eager to see the newly painted canvas that Bell applied to the RA for a rail when the work was exhibited there on 3 May 1858. In his diary entry for 8 May Bell remarked that he ‘Couldn’t help going to see the rail, and there it is sure enough; and loads of people.’ In addition to commissioning the painting from Frith, Bell supplied the artist with attractive models, and in his autobiography Frith remarked that he had found Bell ‘very useful to me in procuring models. Few people had a more extensive acquaintance, especially among the female sex…’ Derby Day was hailed as the first modern masterwork to tour the Australian colonies. Accompanied by prints for sale, the single-picture exhibition of mid-Victorian revellers at the Derby held up a mirror of English national life to colonials, and was organised by the publisher and dealer Ernst Gambart as a commercial enterprise to capitalise on new markets for art. Frith chose Paddington as the setting for his Railway Station crowd, incorporating nearly 100 figures. His self-confessed interest in the city crowd, its physiognomy and expression inspired both subjects. His aptitude for the dramatic grouping of large numbers of people into coherent units, his eye for the anecdotal and his unabashed inclination to appeal to sentiment were fully exploited and enhanced by his technique. With good reason, Frith studiously avoided portraying the sordid decrepitude of the working classes. At that time, paintings intended for private sale invariably sanitised the lives of the working-class, so that those who purchased them could have such works in their home, untroubled by the price paid by others for their hegemony. Art critic Brian Sewell would write: ‘We have in Frith a painter who, almost as a boy, achieved what he set out to do and did it for the rest of his working life. There is virtually no change, no development in any of his work; I might argue that there is some darkening of the palette late in life, that the canvasses are smaller, the episodes singular and less ambitious, the brushwork perhaps just, but only just, suggesting that the octogenarian hand trembled a little; but if we compare his portrait of pretty Annie Gambart of circa 1851 with After the Bath of 1897, then in half a century or so there was precious little significant change in anything other than the subject – and a frank full frontal adult female nude is surely, at the age of 78, excusable from the hand of a by then reclusive widower always fervently uxorious and at the same time devoted to a mistress almost young enough, at first, to be his daughter (between them, they bore him at least 18 children).’ He died on 9 November 1909. Frith’s painting A Private View may be seen above.