Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 53,775 GBP
signed and dated l.r.: FRANK HOLL 1873
oil on canvas
76.5 by 64cm.; 30 by 25¼.
The present painting of a young woman dressed in black and seated on a bench on a railway station platform is a re-working of a single figure from Frank Holl's 1873 Royal Academy subject Leaving Home (fig.1). The exhibited painting shows the girl at the right side of the composition, as she quietly counts the money in her purse. Beside her on the bench is a soldier - presumably on his way to join his regiment, and anxiously attended by a wife - and an old man. Standing at the left of the complete composition is a ticket collector, and beyond further travellers are seen as they crowd on to the platform. The Royal Academy exhibit Leaving Home was bought by Holl's brother-in-law Henry Hill, whose distinguished collection combined works by British and French social realists.
Six years after appearing at the Royal Academy, the oil version in its complete form was reproduced as a line engraving in the Art Journal, and was described in some detail in an accompanying article: `There are few places of public resort presenting more numerous and greater variety of materials for the study of incident and character than a great railway station: it is at certain times of the day a vast field of observation wherein one sees much that is manifest to all, while imagination suggests to the mind even more, which may take any form of good or ill that thought may prompt or indicate. Mr Frith, in his large, and now well-known, picture [The Railway Station (Royal Holloway College Collection, Egham)], has made good use of the materials supplied by the bustle and excitement of such a scene; and Mr Holl, acting under more circumscribed limits, has availed himself of a similar opportunity, only he has been contented with what appears to be the representation of the temporary occupants of a platform of some country railway station, instead of following Mr Frith's example, and showing the vast area of one of our principal metropolitan terminuses.' Of the woman who forms the subject of the present version of the painting, and who the Art Journal described as `a young and ladylike female, whose dress indicates, in some degree, her lonely condition', her actions were watched with interest: `She has opened her purse, evidently not too plentifully furnished, and is counting out the money it contains after paying the cost of her ticket to her place of destination' (Art Journal, 1879, p.16).
The subject of Holl's Leaving Home originated as a wood engraving illustration for the Graphic, which periodical in the 1870s gave particular encouragement to the realistic representation of scenes of social distress. It was apparently originally intended to be called Third Class, a title suggested by the lettering on the plate glass of the window, but seems to have been entitled At a Railway Station - A Study, when it appeared in the magazine on 10 February 1872. The circumstances of Holl's making this engraving, and its submission to the editor of the Graphic, Mr Thomas, are described by the artist's daughter A.M. Reynolds in The Life and Work of Frank Holl (1912, p.97). Holl's graphic work was much admired by Vincent Van Gogh, as he explained in a letter to his brother Theo: `I have enough decoration for my studio - I bought very cheaply some beautiful wood-engravings from the Graphic, in part prints not from the cliché but from the blocks themselves. Just what I had been wanting for years, drawings by Herkomer, Frank Holl, Walker, and others' (letter dated 7 January 1882), or: `For me the English black-and-white artists are to art what Dickens is to literature. They have exactly the same sentiment, noble and healthy, and one always returns to them' (letter to Rappard, mid-September 1882). The Graphic subject At a Railway Station - A Study was referred to twice in Van Gogh's letters.
The present painting of a young woman dressed in black and seated on a bench on a railway station platform is a re-working of a single figure from Frank Holl's 1873 Royal Academy subject Leaving Home. The exhibited painting shows the girl at the right side of the composition, as she quietly counts the money in her purse. Beside her on the bench is a soldier - presumably on his way to join his regiment, and anxiously attended by a wife - and an old man. Standing at the left of the complete composition is a ticket collector, and beyond further travellers are seen as they crowd on to the platform. The Royal Academy exhibit Leaving Home was bought by Holl's brother-in-law Henry Hill, whose distinguished collection combined works by British and French social realists.
Six years after appearing at the Royal Academy, the oil version in its complete form was reproduced as a line engraving in the Art Journal, and was described in some detail in an accompanying article: `There are few places of public resort presenting more numerous and greater variety of materials for the study of incident and character than a great railway station: it is at certain times of the day a vast field of observation wherein one sees much that is manifest to all, while imagination suggests to the mind even more, which may take any form of good or ill that thought may prompt or indicate. Mr Frith, in his large, and now well-known, picture [The Railway Station (Royal Holloway College Collection, Egham)], has made good use of the materials supplied by the bustle and excitement of such a scene; and Mr Holl, acting under more circumscribed limits, has availed himself of a similar opportunity, only he has been contented with what appears to be the representation of the temporary occupants of a platform of some country railway station, instead of following Mr Frith's example, and showing the vast area of one of our principal metropolitan terminuses.' Of the woman who forms the subject of the present version of the painting, and who the Art Journal described as `a young and ladylike female, whose dress indicates, in some degree, her lonely condition', her actions were watched with interest: `She has opened her purse, evidently not too plentifully furnished, and is counting out the money it contains after paying the cost of her ticket to her place of destination' (Art Journal, 1879, p.16).
The subject of Holl's Leaving Home originated as a wood engraving illustration for the Graphic, which periodical in the 1870s gave particular encouragement to the realistic representation of scenes of social distress. It was apparently originally intended to be called Third Class, a title suggested by the lettering on the plate glass of the window, but seems to have been entitled At a Railway Station - A Study, when it appeared in the magazine on 10 February 1872. The circumstances of Holl's making this engraving, and its submission to the editor of the Graphic, Mr Thomas, are described by the artist's daughter A.M. Reynolds in The Life and Work of Frank Holl (1912, p.97). Holl's graphic work was much admired by Vincent Van Gogh, as he explained in a letter to his brother Theo: `I have enough decoration for my studio - I bought very cheaply some beautiful wood-engravings from the Graphic, in part prints not from the cliché but from the blocks themselves. Just what I had been wanting for years, drawings by Herkomer, Frank Holl, Walker, and others' (letter dated 7 January 1882), or: `For me the English black-and-white artists are to art what Dickens is to literature. They have exactly the same sentiment, noble and healthy, and one always returns to them' (letter to Rappard, mid-September 1882). The Graphic subject At a Railway Station - A Study was referred to twice in Van Gogh's letters.
Van Gogh's comparison of such images to the novels of Dickens is particularly interesting in relation to the present painting, because in both the exhibited version and the present related composition Holl has included a billboard advertising an illustrated edition of Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. A.M. Reynolds wrote of her father's admiration for Dickens, explaining that although he never made literal illustrations of themes from the novels, nonetheless, `as one stands before certain of my father's earlier pictures ... one seems to be looking backward at a dead tradition, the very life of the middle classes of the Victorian era' (The Life of Frank Holl, London, 1912, p.315). Some connection was perhaps intended between the sombre figure of the young woman in Holl's painting - whose clothes indicate that she has suffered the loss of a parent, and whose position is one of financial insecurity and personal loneliness, and Dickens' heroine Kate Nickleby - the gentle sister of Nicholas, who on the death of their father is left penniless and who therefore seeks work as a dress-maker and is at the same time exposed to the evil machinations of her uncle Ralph Nickleby.
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