Girl Feeding Pigs

Richard Westall British

Not on view

A productive member of London's Royal Academy, Westall exhibited paintings and watercolors of histories, portraits and rustic scenes. This girl offering water to thirsty pigs demonstrates his mastery of the latter mode, and exemplifies a type of benign rustic imagery popular in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries--leading masters of the mode include Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, and George Morland. By focusing on a sweet girl, whose parents rest by their cottage door in the background in a sunny woodland, the work presents a comforting alternative to the rough realities of rural life. Its success is demonstrated by the fact that two related stipple engravings were published by 1802.

Girl Feeding Pigs, Richard Westall (British, Reepham, Norfolk 1765–1836 London), Watercolor

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