The Barrel Organ Player
Charles Samuel Keene (Hornsea 1823 - 1891)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1860 - 1865
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
222 x 165 mm
Place of origin
England
Order this imageCollection
Mottisfont, Hampshire
NT 769736
Caption
Keene was a talented illustrator and caricaturist who did a great deal of work for Punch magazine. He was revered in France but never given artistic credit in England, where the art of caricature had a low status. Derek Hill shared Kenneth Clark’s appreciation of satire, noting in his diary that Keene was “A superb draughtsman and one sees why Degas and Van Gogh admired him so immensely”. This scene probably refers to the ‘plague’ of foreign organ grinders who bothered genteel city dwellers to such an extent in the early 1860s that an Act of Parliament was introduced that would give citizens the right to drive itinerant musicians away from the streets near their homes. Protesters including the novelist Charles Dickens and the mathematician Charles Babbage.
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, The Barrel Organ Player by Charles Samuel Keene (Hornsea 1823 - 1891), 1860-65.
Full description
Oil painting on canvas, The Barrel Organ Player by Charles Samuel Keene (Hornsea 1823 - 1891), 1860-65. This satirical scene probably refers to the ‘plague’ of foreign organ grinders who bothered genteel city dwellers to such an extent in the early 1860s that an Act of Parliament was introduced that would give citizens the right to drive itinerant musicians away from the streets near their homes. Protesters including the novelist Charles Dickens and the mathematician Charles Babbage joined MPs in arguing that the organ players’ noise and harassment must stop. Keene was a talented illustrator and caricaturist who did a great deal of work for Punch magazine. He was revered in France but never given artistic credit in England, where caricature had a low status. Derek Hill shared Kenneth Clark’s appreciation of his satires, noting in his diary that Keene was A superb draughtsman and one sees why Degas and Van Gogh admired him so immensely.
Provenance
Presented by Derek Hill (1916 - 2000) through The National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund), 1996
Credit line
Mottisfont Abbey,The Derek Hill Collection (presented to the National Trust through the National Art-Collections Fund in 1996)
Makers and roles
Charles Samuel Keene (Hornsea 1823 - 1891), artist