Signed l.r.: Kilburne

Watercolour with bodycolour, 30.5 by 23 cm

The Pawnbroker is a rare foray into the genre of social commentary by Kilburne, an artist known primarily for his technically impressive interior scenes, often depicting comfortable and sentimental aspects of upper class Regency and Victorian life. Although undated, Kilburne would no doubt have been aware of Emily Mary Osborn’s celebrated painting Nameless and Friendless. The Rich Man’s Wealth is His Strong City painted around 1857 – a painting which bears close comparison both in subject and composition to the present work. In that picture a woman and her young son appear at the premises of an art dealer to assess a collection of her own artwork. Beneath the surface of both these everyday scenes is a strong narrative the tells the story of the precarious line that existed between the breadline and destitution in mid nineteenth century Britain. Such social subjects, frequently with a strong moral undertone were extremely popular with the narrative-hungry Victorian viewing public (who were also reading the work of writers like Charles Dickens in instalments at around the same date) and reached their heights in narrative series such as Augustus Leopold Egg’s triptych Past and Present painted a year after Osborn’s work in 1859. Kilburne’s The Pawnbroker is in the best tradition of these Victorian narrative paintings, full of fine detail and moral and social subtext, delivered through such devices as the sign on the pawnbroker’s panel which reads “Clearance Sale of a lot of Genuine Unredeemed Pledges”.