William Holyoake (British, 1834-1894)
Derby Day
oil on canvas
61 x 51cm (24 x 20 1/16in).
Footnotes:
Provenance
Anon. sale, Christie's, London, 3 February 1978, lot 215.
Private collection, UK.

The present lot clearly draws influence from William Powell Frith's monumental work of the same title (1856–8, Tate Britain). From the 1840s onwards, publications such as The Illustrated London News, Punch and London Society presented scenes of contemporary life through wood engravings, leading to a change in the way that modern life was portrayed by artists such as Frith. As Alex Werner notes 'by the mid-1850s...modern life painting had established itself as a type of genre art...Frith's ground-breaking works, Life at the Seaside (Ramsgate Sands), Derby Day, and The Railway Station contributed to this change1.

1A. Werner, 'The London Society magazine and the influence of W.P. Frith on modern life illustration in the early 1860s', in M. Bills and V. Knight (eds), William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian Age, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 95.)