Matt & Dan Stretch caricature: C.5G-1949

Titles

Matt & Dan Stretch caricature

Maker(s)

Production: Barnard, Frederick

Entities

• Tile

Categories

• Lead-glazed earthenware
• Art Pottery

Description

Square, white earthenware tile with over-glaze image painted in brown enamel.

Two comic figures stand between two tall flowers, between them is a small pear tree and above an upturned horseshoe radiating light. The man on the left wears tight hose and braces; he has a long, ragged moustache and wears glasses and a small hat and gazes off to the upper left. The other man is portly, with mutton-chop whiskers, and wears a guard’s uniform with a horseshoe containing a wine glass cap-badge; he is face-forward and saluting. At bottom left is a monogram, ‘MS’, and at bottom right the initials ‘D.S’. The tile is an industrially produced blank; on the reverse is an impressed diamond pattern. It is fixed in a (later) wooden frame and stand.

Notes

History note: Bequeathed by Miss Dorothy Barnard, the artist’s daughter

Acquisition and important dates

Method of acquisition: Bequeathed (1949) by Barnard, Dorothy

Dating

19th Century, Late
Production date: circa AD 1880

Note

Fred(erick) Barnard (1846-96), the son of a silversmith, was an illustrator, caricaturist, genre painter and portraitist. After training in Paris, he contributed to journals, such as 'Punch', ‘Harper’s Weekly’ and the 'Illustrated London News' and became known as an illustrator of Dickens and Bunyan. He also showed large-scale canvasses at the Royal Academy which commented on urban social conditions; a reviewer greeted his ‘Saturday Night in the East End’, 1876, as amongst ‘the most remarkable illustrations of London low-life […] full of grime and flare, and of human uncouthness’. He settled for a time in Broadway, Gloucestershire, where John Singer Sargent painted his wife Alice Faraday (‘Mrs Frederick Barnard’, 1885), and his two daughters Polly and Dorothy (‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’, 1885-86) [Tate, nos. N05901 and N01615] , and his neighbours included Henry James and Edmund Gosse, the latter recording him wearing an ‘enormous stage slouch hat’. The Fitzwilliam Museum also holds a portrait of Dorothy Barnard, the donor, painted by Sargent in 1889.

One of a series of seven tiles, each depicting a fellow contemporary artist, this design is a caricature of both Matt and Dan Stretch; like Barnard they were both painters/illustrators. A pen and ink drawing of William J. Hill (William Hill Jones) (1834-1888), actor, 1876, by Matt Stretch (active 1872-96), is held by the National Portrait Gallery. The image here seems to depict the two (brothers?) as actors

School or Style

Arts and Crafts (movement)