Lot Details
Lot 81
William Redmore Bigg British, 1755-1828 A Suspicion of Smuggling
British, 1755-1828
A Suspicion of Smuggling
Oil on canvas
25 x 30 inches (63.5 x 76.2 cm)
Provenance:
The Earls of Aylesford, Packington Hall, Warwickshire (according to an old label)
Private collection, New York
An Associate of the Royal Academy from 1787 and a full Academician in 1814, Bigg painted scenes of English country life, including a number depicting sailors and shipwrecks. Here a prosperous famer--a John Bull type familiar to English collectors of Bigg's time--is shown listening with some suspicion to the story of two shipwrecked sailors. As the young man who found the two men awaits his father's verdict and the younger children crowd around, the farmer suspects that the sailors might be smugglers. Barely hidden is the sly suggestion that the farmer--clearly not a rich man, but one who enjoys his tobacco, whose wife wears a silk dress and whose youngest son is offering brandy--may well himself be a good customer of the smugglers' trade.
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