Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 inches. Manchester City Art Galleries, Manchester.
Sometimes the allusion to Shakespeare in a painting is so slight as to be nonexistent. This painting is inspired by a quotation from Richard II: "In winter's tedious night, sit by the fire / With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales / Of woeful ages long ago betid." (V. i. 40-42) But other than the quotation, there is little about the painting that is "Shakespearean."
This beautifully structured painting, illuminated by the fireplace and the dying light of a winter's day, is a good example of its genre; nostalgic scenes from rustic life and the countryside were quite popular, and the quotation from Shakespeare could only heighten the poignancy of this idealized country family where the central object in the composition is the spinning-wheel and the grandmother telling her "winter's tale." Although some Victorian painters were beginning to depict the harsh realities of rural life and the workers, many painters chose to look back at a romanticized English countryside in which Victorian city-dwellers could find some pleasure. Two recent books describe this particular genre of painting: Adrian Vincent, Victorian Watercolours: Rural Life (Bloomsbury Books, 1987) and Christopher Wood, Paradise Lost: Paintings of English Country Life and Landscape, 1850-1914 (Barrie and Jenkins, 1988).