Italian Image Makers at the Roadside Alehouse [Image-Boys at a Roadside Alehouse], by James Collinson (1825-1881). 1849. Oil on panel. 31 1/8 x 42 7/8 inches (79 x 109 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of the author.
In the early nineteenth century Italian figure makers began to arrive in Britain to produce and market cheap plaster figures as an itinerant trade. Such image vendors had a long tradition in their native land. The trade outside of London was smaller, but it was still dominated by Italians. Most, but not all, of the street vendors selling the figures were boys and such Italian boys were sometimes called "Image Boys." The figures they sold were produced for all levels of socio-economic consumers and decorated interiors from the most ordinary homes to even grand country houses.
Collinson exhibited his Italian Image Makers at the Roadside Alehouse at the Royal Academy in 1849, no. 273, the same year that Millais exhibited his Isabella and Holman Hunt showed Rienzi. Collinson exhibited the painting later that same year at the Liverpool Academy, no. 338. It is inscribed with the initial P.R.B., making it another of the works he undertook while a member of the Brotherhood before he was to resign the following year. Helen Newman finds the title to be somewhat confusing; "Italian Image – Boys at a Roadside Alehouse bears little or not resemblance to a typical inn. Look for the drinkers. There aren't any" (37). Ronald Parkinson felt, despite it being rendered with a Pre-Raphaelite attention to detail, it retained too much of David Wilkie's influence when compared to the more progressive paintings exhibited that same year by his Pre-Raphaelite Brothers:
While it happily lacks both the touring company melodrama of Hunt's painting and Millais's awkward and pedantic assembly of observed components, it sadly lacks the earnestness and bravado of the former and the compelling strangeness of the latter… I find Collinson to have tried too hard to match his Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, with too little success; there are the same profile portraits, the variety of poses and responses, the carefully observed details, and the overall frieze-like composition. Perhaps the subject Collinson chose to paint is at the root of the failure. If, as one of the many willing victims to Victorian audiences' desire for novelty, he is trying to accommodate several genres in one picture, the result is at the same time bewildering and dull. It is, for example, very difficult at first to read what is happening in the painting. The central episode – the small child in raptures at what we presume is a first realization of the image of the Virgin and Child – is orchestrated by a randomly placed group of players with their own stories to relate. Like so many Victorian artists, Collinson misunderstands the artistic device of dramatic contrast; the boy standing on the same chair as the adoring child to play with the statue of a nodding chinaman, for example, is a clumsy development of Wilkie's famous The Blind Fiddler, where the youth with pair of bellows mimics the violinist on the other side of the room. [69-70]
When it was shown at the Royal Academy a critic for The Art Journal admired its spirited and meticulously detailed composition: "No. 273. Image-boys at a Roadside. Alehouse, J. Collinson. This composition is crowded with figures, of whom those of the Italian boys are the least conspicuous. The circle comprehends persons of all ages, visually canvassing Pio Nono, Jean d'Arc, Cupid and Psyche, Napoleon, and perhaps, Richard Cobden. The scene is rendered with much spirit, and the characters individually with becoming truth" (170).
Links to Related Material
Bibliography
Newman, Helen D. James Collinson (aka "The Dormouse"). Foulsham: Reuben Books, 2016.
Parkinson, Ronald. "James Collinson." Pre-Raphaelite Papers. Ed. Leslie Parris. London: Tate Gallery Publications 1984.
"Plaster figure makers: a short history," The National Portrait Gallery. https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/research/programmes/plaster-figure-makers-history
Rauch, Alan. "'Italian Boys': The Figurini of Italy and London." 1-5. https://webpages.charlotte.edu/~arauch/Figurinai-Rauch-Venicecopy.pdf
"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal XI (June 1, 1849): 165-76.
Created 29 February 2024