Children Playing at Doctors
Oil Painting
1863 (Painted)
1863 (Painted)
Artist/Maker | |
Place of origin |
Hardy's long and successful career was principally devoted to painting happily nostalgic episodes in childhood, most often of a domestic and humorous nature. As with so many scenes of everyday life, this work is intended to be 'read' like a written narrative. The children here are playing while their mother and grandmother are out of the house; the two children in the centre are pounding bread in a mortar and pestle to make tablets, but the child on the right has taken the game a step further by climbing on a chair to open the medicine cupboard, and is pouring a measure of perhaps poisonous liquid into a glass to administer to the 'patient'. Fortunately, the adults are seen returning through the door, otherwise the patient might become a fatality, an outcome suggested in the right corner of the picture by the doll which has fallen out of her carriage. Hardy also uses a device much enjoyed by painters and their audience in the middle years of the nineteenth century - the mirror on the wall which reflects the view to the outside world through the left-hand window.
Object details
Categories | |
Object type | |
Title | Children Playing at Doctors (assigned by artist) |
Materials and techniques | oil on canvas |
Brief description | 'Children Playing at Doctors' by Frederick Daniel Hardy, oil on canvas, Britain, signed and dated 1863. |
Physical description | Oil on canvas. The children here are playing while their mother and grandmother are out of the house; the two children in the centre are pounding bread in a mortar and pestle to make tablets, but the child on the right has taken the game a step further by climbing on a chair to open the medicine cupboard, and is pouring a measure of perhaps poisonous liquid into a glass to administer to the 'patient'. Fortunately, the adults are seen returning through the door, otherwise the patient might become a fatality, an outcome suggested in the right corner of the picture by the doll which has fallen out of her carriage. There is a mirror on the wall which reflects the view to the outside world through the left-hand window. |
Dimensions |
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Style | |
Marks and inscriptions | 'F D Hardy/1863' (Signed and dated by the artist on toy cart, lower right) |
Credit line | Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon |
Object history | Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon, 1886. Hardy's long and successful career was principally devoted to painting happily nostalgic episodes in childhood, most often of a domestic and humorous nature. As with so many scenes of everyday life, this work is intended to be 'read' like a written narrative. The children here are playing while their mother and grandmother are out of the house; the two children in the centre are pounding bread in a mortar and pestle to make tablets, but the child on the right has taken the game a step further by climbing on a chair to open the medicine cupboard, and is pouring a measure of perhaps poisonous liquid into a glass to administer to the 'patient'. Fortunately, the adults are seen returning through the door, otherwise the patient might become a fatality, an outcome suggested in the right corner of the picture by the doll which has fallen out of her carriage. Hardy also uses a device much enjoyed by painters and their audience in the middle years of the nineteenth century - the mirror on the wall which reflects the view to the outside world through the left-hand window. |
Subjects depicted | |
Summary | Hardy's long and successful career was principally devoted to painting happily nostalgic episodes in childhood, most often of a domestic and humorous nature. As with so many scenes of everyday life, this work is intended to be 'read' like a written narrative. The children here are playing while their mother and grandmother are out of the house; the two children in the centre are pounding bread in a mortar and pestle to make tablets, but the child on the right has taken the game a step further by climbing on a chair to open the medicine cupboard, and is pouring a measure of perhaps poisonous liquid into a glass to administer to the 'patient'. Fortunately, the adults are seen returning through the door, otherwise the patient might become a fatality, an outcome suggested in the right corner of the picture by the doll which has fallen out of her carriage. Hardy also uses a device much enjoyed by painters and their audience in the middle years of the nineteenth century - the mirror on the wall which reflects the view to the outside world through the left-hand window. |
Bibliographic references |
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Collection | |
Accession number | 1035-1886 |
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Record created | December 15, 1999 |
Record URL |
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