Price Realized £3,824
signed with initials 'GEH' (lower right)
pencil and red chalk, heightened with white, on grey paper
15 x 10¾ in. (38.2 x 27.4 cm.)
Hicks made his reputation with animated crowd scenes such as Dividend Day at the Bank, and he also worked as a society portrait painter, but his portraits have none of the lucidity of the genre scenes that he painted in the late 1850s and early 1860s from which period this watercolour probably dates. It was lithographed for Hick's Studies of the Human Figure, part 6, pl. 4, and formed a culmination to this series of sensitive figure studies. The interplay between the parents, their son and their newborn is handled with great feeling, the mother raising a cautious hand over her son who peers at the sleeping baby in his father's large arms.
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