Joseph Edward Worrall - Music versus work

signed with monogram and dated '1864' (lower right)
oil on canvas
12¼ x 9 in.
Price Realized £4,200

Worrall belonged to the group of Liverpool Pre-Raphaelite painters who formed an important local offshoot of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Though they were well aware of what the leaders of the movement were doing in London, much of their inspiration derived from the pictures that Hunt, Millais, and Madox Brown sent to the Liverpool Academy in the 1850s, and which were often awarded the Academy's £50 prize. Worrall was younger than the senior members of the Liverpool group such as William Davis, W.L. Windus, and Daniel Alexander Williamson, but his career parallels that of James Campbell and John Lee, who flourished in the late 1850s and 1860s, specialising in genre subjects depicted with a Pre-Raphaelite intensity of feeling and a minute attention to detail.