At the same time as the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren were starting to paint narratives in their new style, the influence of William Hogarth was about to result in a transient but distinctively visual narrative form: human or social panoramas painted almost exclusively by William Powell Frith (1819–1909).

Frith’s early paintings started to incorporate groups of figures, often in scenes with literary links, such as his rustic An English Merrymaking a Hundred Years Ago (1847), drawing on John Milton’s poem l’Allegro.

As he finished that painting, Frith started work on what was to prove his breakthrough, Ramsgate Sands, completed in 1854 and exhibited that summer at the Royal Academy.

Before 1846, Ramsgate had been an unassuming and quiet seaside town on the coast at the eastern tip of Kent. Then the railway came, and brought the masses from London to bathe in Ramsgate’s waters. Frith holidayed there in 1851, when he made his first preparatory sketches.

On the beach is an eclectic mixture of different classes, reflected in their clothing and activities. Many of these are stereotypes who became stock characters in his paintings, and Frith included himself as the man behind the group at the far right.

Critical reception was mixed, with some dismissing the painting as vulgar, but it proved enormously popular with the public, and was bought for a thousand guineas by a publisher to turn into prints. Queen Victoria then bought the painting, ironically to hang in Osborne House, her holiday palace on the Isle of Wight.

Encouraged by this success, Frith turned his attention to another famous gathering of people from all walks of life, the Derby horse races at Epsom, south of London.

This late study for Derby Day was probably painted in about 1856, and is very close to the finished work shown below.

Jacob Bell commissioned Frith to paint his finished Derby Day (1856-58) for the huge fee of £1,500, and the artist was paid a further £1,500 for rights to make prints. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858, and this time proved so popular that a guard rail had to be installed in front of it to protect the work from the admiring crowds.

It concentrates innumerable scenes and visual anecdotes within its seething mass of people, to form a human landscape epitomising the moment and its era.

From the left, the closest tent is the Reform Club’s, a private gentlemen’s club in London which had been formed in 1836, and then had a strong association with radical politics. The centre of attention here is a ‘thimble-rigger’, a confidence trickster who is out to relieve the men in top hats of their money. He is stooped over a small portable table to the right of centre. A young farmer in a smock is about to part with his money despite his wife trying to restrain him. Behind the young lad in a top hat at the right is another con man, this time using the three-card trick to obtain money.

Frith next set to work on his greatest painting, this time showing the interior of one of London’s major railway stations. The best image that I can find is this print engraved by Francis Holl, working for Henry Graves & Co, who bought the painting for over £16,000. Frith had been paid over £5,000 by the dealer who commissioned it, and that dealer made a handsome profit when he sold it on for Holl’s prints.

The Railway Station (1862) is set in the crowded and busy Paddington railway station in London. Frith was not only thoroughly modern and commercial in its exhibition – it wasn’t shown at the Royal Academy, but in a private gallery which charged one shilling (£0.05) per visit – but he used photographs in its execution. It’s rich with little social vignettes, and among its many faces are associates and friends of the artist, including the dealer who paid for it.

Paddington Station, completed a decade earlier, had been built by the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It was a cutting-edge building, constructed from cast iron and glass and lit by gaslight, and the London terminus of Brunel’s Great Western Railway. The scene shown takes place on the platform, where a large and disparate group of people are assembled preparing to board the train.

The centre of action is at the right of the painting, where an arrest is being made. A man dressed in brown clothes is about to board the train, within which a woman stares aghast at the scene. Two Scotland Yard detectives, complete with top hats, are in the process of serving him a warrant for his arrest, the other stood ready with a pair of handcuffs. At the far right is the train’s guard, who is holding the carriage door open.

The policemen were modelled by the artists John Brett and Benjamin Robert Haydon, who were re-enacting a well-known story at the time. We don’t know what event has preceded or precipitated this arrest, nor do we have any inkling as to whether the alleged criminal will try to run off, or be taken into custody. The viewer is left with an open-ended narrative, a ‘problem picture’, as I’ll consider in the next article.

Frith’s last great human panorama is A Private View at the Royal Academy, which he completed in 1883. Although he was a Fellow from 1853 until his retirement in 1890, his can’t have been an easy relationship with the British art establishment. This work gives some insight into the frictions within the Academy, as Oscar Wilde is seen at the right holding forth about art, to the dismay of Frith’s friends nearby. Frith had opposed the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements, and, like Frederic, Lord Leighton (also shown in this painting), was a great traditionalist.

Frith’s human panoramas weren’t unique to him. The painting normally considered to be Ford Madox Brown’s masterwork adopts the same approach, and was commissioned by the collector Thomas Plint, who died in 1861, four years before it was completed. While still working on that original, now in Manchester, Brown was commissioned to paint a second, now in Birmingham.

This crowded street scene is set in Heath Street, Hampstead, one of London’s ‘leafy’ suburbs at the time, into which Brown has crammed references to many aspects of contemporary Victorian society, including an election campaign.

At its centre is a gang of navvies, the term originating from the word navigators, usually Irish labourers, who had dug the canals during the previous century. Here they’re engaged in digging up a road to lay a sewer as part of the campaign to improve the hygiene of Victorian London. Again inspired by William Hogarth, Brown is effectively giving a meticulously detailed account of the breadth and depth of contemporary society, using multiple interwoven narratives in this single image.

At the left is a file of people making their way down the pavement. To the rear, heading uphill, is a porter carrying a green case on his head. Next down are two well-dressed women carrying parasols. The woman behind is carrying religious tracts, one of which has floated in front of the navvies, while the woman in front of her represents ‘genteel glamour’. In front is a barefoot flower-seller who lives in a flophouse in Flower and Dean Street in Whitechapel. She is on her way to scrape a living from the wicker basket full of freshly picked wild flowers.

In front of the younger navvy is the shovel of the older man, putting lime through a standing sieve. Between those, shown only as a disembodied hand holding a shovel, is another navvy digging underground. The face of a hod carrier and the bricks he is taking down the hole are visible to the right of the younger navvy. In the immediate foreground is a pet dog in a scarlet coat.

Posters on the wall at the extreme left advocate voting for Bobus, and warn of a man wanted for robbery. Bobus is a character in the writing of Thomas Carlyle who uses ill-gotten gains from his business to sell himself as a politician.

Although Ford Madox Brown went on to paint several more narrative works, none was as rich in stories as this, a worthy successor to Frith’s social panoramas, and a complete illustrated textbook on work.

These human panoramas demanded a great deal of work, and took long to complete. Following them was a less demanding narrative form whose return could be even greater: the ‘problem picture’, that I’ll consider in the next article in this series.