Richard Redgrave (British, 1804-1888)A helping hand
signed and dated 'Richd Redgrave 1863' (lower right)
oil on canvas
71.1 x 110.5cm (28 x 43 1/2in).注脚Exhibited
London, Leicester Galleries, 1956, The Victorian Scene, no. 117.

Born in Pimlico to a large family of moderate means, Richard Redgrave began exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1825, and enrolled in the schools the following year. Bridging the financial constraints of these student years with private tuitions, Redgrave made his breakthrough on the art scene eleven years later, with Gulliver on the Farmer's Table. Elected ARA in 1840 and RA in1851, Redgrave combined a busy artistic life with a number of official duties. He was first keeper of paintings at the South Kensington Museum; he took over from William Dyce on the national art education project and was Inspector of the Queen's pictures.
Having established his reputation, Redgrave turned his attention to contemporary scenes of the Victorian world. His genuine concern for the poor, and in particular the plight of women and children, became the subject of moralising genre paintings (The Seamstress; The Poor Teacher; The Outcast; The Emigrant's Last Sight of Home The Poor Children).
From this point of view, the present painting of Figures in a Woodland Scene may appear as a parenthesis in artist's oeuvre. However, the pre-eminent role of the lush landscape provides the artist the opportunity to display his talent as admirer and (re-creator) of Nature. The delicate hues of leafy greens lifted with individual strokes of the brush, set off the party of three against a background of true artistry. The delicacy of the overall image, from the depiction of the landscape to the weightlessness of the figures, recalls the fêtes-galantes pieces by the French eighteenth-century artist Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). Indeed, the genre had been introduced to England over a century earlier; Philip Mercier (ca.1689-1760) had settled in London and found a growing demand for this form of painting. The gallant attitudes of these performing characters are set against the undulating movements of light and shadow in the surrounding countryside in a most creative moment of landscape genre painting.