Footnotes

Provenance
Anon. sale, Bonhams, London, 22 April 2010, lot 148.
Private collection, UK (acquired from the above sale).

The present lot was painted at a time in Hicks' career when he was traversing between two styles of painting. As the fashion for historical subjects faded in the late 1840s, modern realism began to achieve prominence. Works such as Frith's Ramsgate Sands (1854) and Abraham Solomon's Waiting for the Verdict (1857) brought a relatively short period of popularity to the subject of modern realism, which by 1859 had inspired Hicks to produce Dividend Day at the Bank and six subsequent paintings in the early 1860s, including The General Post Office (1860) and Billingsgate (1861). Although these paintings were much talked about, they received relatively poor reviews and by the late 1860s the fashion for such highly detailed, realistic paintings began to fade. The early 1870s represented a time of transition for Hicks, as he switched from the now unpopular modern realism to the seemingly lucrative society portraiture by the later years of the decade.

Although the present lot is closer in date to the beginning of Hicks' period of portrait painting, the style of the work harks back to the realism of his larger works of the 1860s. Hicks' acute sense of timing and a high–keyed colour palette were attributes of his earlier work, marking them out as distinct and, even to some, superior to that of the original modern realist, Frith. Hicks was adept at capturing a moment in time; in The Barber's shop he captures a point of contemplation, a question posed perhaps by the barber himself on the day's politics as he reads it from the newspaper. The intense bustle captured by his earlier works has been scaled down here, and relaxed to an almost Sunday afternoon repose. The atmosphere however is no less immediate, and holds the viewers attention in an inclusive and almost personal way.