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Art, Horseracing and the ‘Sporting’ Gaze in Mid-Nineteenth Century England: William Powell Frith’s ‘The Derby Day’.

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William Powell Frith’s painting, The Derby Day, is still oneof the most popular exhibits at Tate Britain’s permanent collection (Figure 1). But in 1858, when it was first exhibited, it was the iconic narrative painting of its day. The Epsom Derby sweepstake race for three-year-old horses was then by far Victorian England’s leading sporting, cultural and large-scale mega-event. Even Parliament closed for it. It had ‘a dramatic character, mass popular appeal, and international significance’.1 Itattracted ‘significant media coverage’.2 In and around London it was the major holiday of the year, a time free from work. The British viewed it as the most important race in the racing calendar. To William Thackeray, writing in the Cornhill Magazine, the day was more vast and striking than any Roman festival. 3 Illustrated London News sawit as ‘the most astonishing, the most varied, the most picturesque, and the most glorious spectacle that ever ...can be...visible to mortal eyes.’ 4 According to the Sporting Life, for the Derby, ‘all London, nay, all England goes (more or less) racing mad – princes, peers, parsons, peelers [ie policemen] and peasants’.5

The Derby was not just any race. It was London’s greatest annual spectacle, attracting sport tourists, gambling interest and public anticipation not just from nearby London, but from throughout Britain, and from Europe, America and the Empire. Its thrills and excitement, and the enjoyable frissons of indulging in pleasurable sociability, drinking, gambling and carnivalesque performance, temporarily challenged and inverted social norms of respectability at least for the day.

To the mid-Victorians, images of the Derby were already a familiar set piece of illustrated newspaper coverage, magazines like Punch and of sporting prints in public houses, while paintings of the racehorses that won

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could be seen on the walls of the stately homes of their owners. But when William Powell Frith’s painting of the race, The Derby Day, was exhibited at the Royal Academy, hispicture rapidly became a major cultural symbol, emblematic both in its time and of a particular vision ofVictorian society. It was indeed the picture of the age. It drew large numbers of viewers not just in London but also when exhibited in the provinces, the USA, the Antipodes and Europe. In Australia, whose populations in the 1860s craved visual entertainment, it was the first modern art-work to tour its various colonies, and drew substantial revenue through the sale of prints.6 In Britain, where even more prints were sold, it extended the Derby’s impact on popular magazine and newspaper illustration as artists drew inspiration from it, or mimicked its observation and vision for their engravings.7

The painting was instrumental in allocating further symbolic and cultural capital to the Epsom Derby, and became the picture most associated with Frith. A Vanity FairSpy print of 1873, for example, showed him painting at his easel a picture entitled Derby Day. It has since become one of the dominant icons of the Victorian age, still regularly reproduced on book covers and elsewhere. Most readers will recognise it.

Whilst Frith’s painting is not reality, but his calculated construction of racing reality, even many historians of sport gaze at Frith’s painting with littleawareness of its cultural context or of its complexities.Art-historical interest in Frith has recently been renewed, but art scholars’ comments on the racing contextof the painting have at times been in error. Historians of sport have shown surprisingly little interest in racing art, somewhat surprising given that racing in Victorian England was widely viewed as England’s ‘national sport’ until the 1890s, when more modern team sports began to attract comparable crowds and more press attention.

But in recent years there has been something of a visual turn in the historiography of sport to which I have myself contributed. 8 So this paper draws on social and art history, cultural studies and ‘gaze theory’ to explore the way in which the picture, and the various

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responses to it, shed new light on the way the Derby Day racemeeting was represented, and its meanings produced and exchanged, in Victorian society. The way in which Frith’s picture was created and the multiple ways in which it was interpreted and deconstructed by viewers, provide the main focus of the analysis. The study also picks up on many of the issues found in ‘new’ art historyapproaches: class, occupation and income, access to leisure and comfort, gender, reception and spectatorship,the relationship between popular and elite culture, and the representation of workers, women and ethnic minorities. 9 . The context The Derby, named after the 12th Earl of Derby, whose country house was nearby, was first run in 1780 on Epsom Downs, as part of what became a regular three-day annual racemeeting. The land was unenclosed, so the event was highly accessible, and freely open to the public. By the 1820s the race was high in public esteem and attracted substantial crowds, probably rising towards 100,000 by the afternoon of Derby day. A London and Southampton Railway excursion in 1838 saw the beginnings of rail transport to the event, though most used road transport, from carriages to costermongers’ carts. Railways soon brought huge crowds, and also brought down the leading northern thoroughbreds. These previously had to be walkedand so rarely competed, and this greater competition increased national and international betting interest. By the late 1850s, when Frith’s picture was painted, it is possible that up to a quarter of a million attended the meeting over the three days. Because access was free,men, women, children and babies were all to be found, unlike gate-money events

The Derby meant different things to different people. Some disliked it because it subversively mixed the classes, and failed to observe the ‘proper’ distinctions between them. But such mixing of classes could equally be read as positive, dependent upon the spectator's point of view and social origin. Reformist and Nonconformist voluntary associations variously opposed the gambling, vice, betting, drinking and sexual

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misbehaviour, with which the Derby and other race meetings were associated. Moral reformers regarded racingwith deep distrust, seeing it as threatening and dangerous. The experiences of reformers were intensely social, self-confirming and mutually reinforcing, even ifthey never actually visited a horse race. They strongly opposed race meetings, and their opposition grew strongeraround mid-century. They attacked what they saw as racing’s ‘evils’: idleness, drunkenness, mis-spending of money, theft, dishonesty, profanity, cruelty to animals and gambling. 10 They held meetings, preached sermons, sometimes bringing along reformed ‘sinners’, organised rallies and anti-race excursions and gave out tracts and preached on Epsom Downs itself. Anti-race printed propaganda were common, though it is unlikely many attendees read them. But opposition had very limited success. Racing was too central to popular culture, and too well supported in Parliament and by magistrates in racing towns such as Epsom.

Opponents were in a minority. For many others, ante-post betting was a major attraction of the Derby. It was

1 Maurice Roche, Megaevents and Modernity (Abingdon: Routledge 2001), .1.2John Horne,. ‘The Four ‘Knowns’ of Sports Mega-events’, Leisure Studies26, 1 (2007) p. 81. See also John Horne. and W. Manzenreiter, (eds) Sports Megaevents: Social, Scientific Analysis of a Global Phenomenon (London: Blackwell, 2006) .3 William Makepeace Thackeray, Roundabout Papers (CSP Classic Texts, 2008),.222.4 Illustrated London News, 23 May 1866.5 Sporting Life, 28 May 1859..6 Andrew Montana, ‘From the Royal Academy to a Hotel in Kapunda: theTour of William Powell Frith’s Derby Day in Colonial Australia’, Art History 31, 5, 2008. 754-785. 7 Alex Werner, ‘The London Society magazine and the influence of W. P, Frith on modern life illustration in the early 1860s’, in Mark Bills and Vivian Knight (eds) William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian Age (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 2006), 95ff.8 See for example Mike Huggins, ‘The Sporting Gaze: Towards a Visual Turn in Sports History – Documenting Art and Sport’, Journal of Sport History, 35, 2, Summer 2008, 311-329; Mike Huggins and Mike O’Mahony (eds), The Visual in Sport (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 9 See Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002)10 Mike Huggins, Flat Racing and British Society 1790-1914 (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 204-228.

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a major betting race, despite much latent dishonesty in its running. Some racehorse owners and trainers would increase potential profits by manipulating their horse inthe betting market, keeping form secret or spreading false rumours. Their horses might be deliberately run badly in previous races. Even in the 1830s the inner ‘ring’ of turfites was very much cross-class, with working-class bookmakers taking bets on and against a number of horses in a race, to seek potential profit, while middle and upper-class owners, layers and backers, all likewise tried to outwit each other. By the 1840s, the bribery of jockeys, starters or handicappers to ensure horses were disadvantaged in their races, and attempts to nobble horses by damaging limbs, providing feed to slow them down or even worse, were regularly hinted at in the press. Race stewards were often reluctant to act, not least when they might have backed the winner.

The Derby was not immune from such manipulation. The1844 Derby was particularly notorious. Although the race was solely for three-year-olds, two horses (Running Rein and Leander) were entered that were older and therefore stronger, even though there were press rumours about the latter’s age well before the race. The favourite, Ugly Buck, was almost certainly knocked out by deliberate foulriding, and Lord Bentinck’s horse, Ratan, was pulled backby its jockey. An investigation into the race took place,but only because of the furore when Running Rein won.11 Headlines such as ‘More disgraceful transactions on the turf’ were associated with the meeting through the decade, and even in 1855 the Times noted the ‘foul mysteries of the turf’, ‘atrocious tricks’ and ‘rascality’ to which runners could be subject.12

Despite such machinations, and the low prestige of the Jockey Club, the organisation which was most closely associated with the running of racing, in the mid-1850s the race retained huge British betting interest. This wasin part stimulated by ever-greater press coverage,

11 Mike Huggins, 'Lord Bentinck and the Jockey Club; Racing Morality in Mid-Nineteenth Century England', International Journal of the History of Sport, 13, 3 (996, 432-444.12 Bells Life in London, 1 June 1845; Times, 24 May 1855.

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further fostered by the abolition of Stamp Duty in 1855. The detailed reports from training areas about horses’ fitness, future runners, and the activities of owners, trainers, bookmakers and jockeys, were helping to eliminate a great deal of the more overt fraud. High-status newspapers carried substantial racing news, and from early each spring reported the changing odds on the Derby runners not just from Tattersalls, the City and West End betting centres, but also from Manchester. Sunday papers covered the lead-up to the race, and betting odds. The weekly sporting press, though still largely read by the London-based and the better off, wasexpanding its readership. Bell’s Life, the leading racing paper, first published in 1822, was joined by the Racing Times in 1851, The Field in 1853 and the Sporting Life in 1859.13

The newly-introduced electric telegraph transmitted the Derby results to London in 1847, and in 1853 the ElectricTelegraph Company erected wires from Croydon to a temporary office in Epsom grandstand. By 1857 the course had a special permanent circuit set up to carry the many public and private messages transmitted during race week.

Credit betting was only for the rich and for racing insiders, but by the mid-1840s a new form of betting, advance cash betting, with list-makers posting their lists of runners in offices and small shops, had emerged in towns such as London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham or York which contained sufficient numbers interested in racing.14 Such working-class betting was illegal but widespread, and largely ignored by the police. The introduction in 1853 of an Act for the Suppression of Betting Houses, to deal with this new betting form, and making cash bets illegal except on the racecourse, had little effect even in London, and still less elsewhere.15

And for those to whom luck appealed, by the 1850s, Derby sweepstakes were very popular for those who dreamed of a big win. Sweeps were a form of lottery, in which each subscriber paid anything from perhaps sixpence in a local

13 Mike Huggins, The Victorians and Sport (London: Hambledon, 2004), 141-166. See also Matthew McIntire, ‘Odds, Intelligence and Prophecies: Racing News in the Penny Press, 1855-1914’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 41, 4, 2008, 352-372.

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public house to £10 in a fashionable London club, for thechance of drawing a ticket for a horse in the Derby. The lucky winner would get a substantial sum. Some sweepstakepromoters advertised Derby racing sweeps in the press.

To Londoners the Derby was a regular social occasion, sometimes talked of as ‘an annual pilgrimage’, with its associated narrative tropes of journey, event and return. All classes attended the Derby. Queen Victoria visited in 1840, and Prince Albert took the Prince of Prussia there in 1856.16 Many members of the aristocracy and gentry, Liberals as well as Tories, couldbe found in its grandstands. The Houses of Parliament formally adjourned for Derby Day from 1847, initially by the motion of private members. From 1860 the government took the lead. Research has also shown how substantial middle-class involvement in racing was in terms of horse ownership, attendance, betting, organisation and shareholding in grandstand companies.17 MPs, councillors,magistrates and aldermen were likely to attend, to watch the race, make contacts and be seen, since attendance gained votes. London’s working classes attended in very large numbers, travelling on foot, in carts, omnibus or train. Factories closed. By the 1840s farm servants roundEpsom had built attendance into their hiring day agreements and the perennial written and visual representations of school children crowding the roads andon the course suggests widespread absenteeism or school closure.

For many attending, the racing was not the main attraction, and even Frith’s picture only captures a partof the vibrant course life and the complex and nuanced social mingling regularly described in the press, magazines, letters, diaries and novels. Experiences were

14 David C. Itzkowitz, “Victorian Bookmakers and Their Customers,” Victorian Studies 32, 1988, 6-30. On betting overall, see Mark Clapson, A Bit of a Flutter: Popular Gambling in England c. 1820-1961 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Carl Chinn, Better Betting with a Decent Feller: Betting and the British Working Class 1750-1990 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).15 See Huggins, Flat Racing and British Society, 98.16 Times, 29 May 185617 Mike Huggins, "Culture, Class & Respectability, Racing and the English Middle Classes in the 19th Century’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 11, 1, 1994, 19-41.

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characterised by ‘liminality’ (in Victor Turner’s sense),with the suspension of ‘normal’ rules of ‘respectable behaviour’, an acceptance of excess and new experiences. A detailed description in 1858 by The Times, for example, referred initially to the grandstands, in which the better off could be distanced by price from the poorer and enjoyed a clearer view of the race. But it went on todescribe course life, the eating, drinking, gambling, socializing and various commercial activities. These included the boxing booths, the gypsy 'daughters of Egypt' at work amongst the carriages, the 'card sharpers,organ grinders, “nigger” melodists-genuine and counterfeit, dancers upon stilts, acrobats, German bands,gentlemen, ladies, thieves and policemen ... performing dogs ... tender infants turning somersaults ... banjo menand tambourinists', whilst newly-discovered electricity was being exploited to stimulate the spirits of the crowdby men who used coil, machines and batteries to offer electric shocks for a penny.18 What the paper tactfully did not mention were the prostitutes, a perennial featureat all race meetings of the time.

People came from across the globe to experience the Derby’s pleasures, even if, like Frith or Charles Dickens, they had little interest in racing, betting or horseflesh. In 1859, for example, the Sporting Life claimed that ‘to see the Derby run men pack up their bags and travel from the Continent, the Americas and the burning zones of India’. 19 The race was used as a model for manyforeign races, and was emulated by foreign race clubs. 20 India’s Royal Calcutta Turf Club instituted its Derby stakes in 1842. After visiting Epsom in 1872, Colonel Meriwether Lewis Clark jun. went back to Louisville, raised money for a track, and founded the Kentucky Derby,run over a similar distance.

A dominant image used by most visiting foreigners and some British writers was that of excess, variously represented as a ‘Saturnalia’ or a ‘mania’, a time when ‘the whole metropolis went ‘mad in concert’, an occasion

18 Times, 20 May 1858. The Illustrated London News 26 May 1860 provides a picture. 19 Sporting life, 28 May 185920 Sporting life, 28 May 1859

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when inhibitions were temporarily relaxed, and respectable roles were shed.21 Others described it, more positively, as a ‘carnival’ or a ‘glorious’, ‘varied’, ‘astonishing’ ‘spectacle’.22 The sheer diversity, complexity and multi-sensual variety of activities available, and substantial cross-class mixing, even in the grandstands, meant that the individual experience of racecourse life would shift and switch erratically. People went to see, and also to be seen. Reformers might disapprove, but most there ignored their strictures.

The Frenchman Hippolyte Taine, first visiting in the1840s, saw it as ‘a time when we are all things to all men, but only for the day, as in the Saturnalia of old’. He watched (with shock) to see how heavy-drinking ‘gentlemen’ even went up to a carriage containing ladies and young girls to ‘ease themselves’.23 In 1851 even Charles Dickens, writing with W. H. Wills, provided a detailed description of his visit to Epsom for the readers of Household Words, despite his own lack of interestin racing.24 He was fascinated by the preparations, the huge amount of food and drink needed, the Fortnum and Mason hampers, the visual spectacle, the huge crowds, butreturned home still not sure of the name of the winner, and knowing nothing of any other race of the day. Novelists used the race as a powerful way of attracting readers. Disraeli’s Sybil or The Two Nations (1845), for example, used the 1837 Derby as its opening literary device. In his Pendennis (1848-50) Thackeray used the Derby to bring his cross-class group of characters together: gentry, journalists, a surgeon, MPs, mothers and daughters, men and women. The playwright Dion Boucicault used it for his sensation drama, The Flying Scud, in 1866. And the Derby’s result was sent by the new electric telegraph right across the globe. As a result, as Andrew Hassam has noted, by the 1870s images such as the Epsom Derby dominated Australian perceptions of imperial Britain.25

21 Times, 20 May 1858.22 E.g. Illustrated London News, 23 May 1863.23 Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England (London: Caliban, 1995), 32-36.24 Charles Dickens, ‘Epsom’, Household Words, 3, 63, 7 June 1851.25 Andrew Hassam, Through Australian Eyes : Colonial Perceptions of Imperial Britain (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2000), 87-118.

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Kate Flint’s recent work on Victorian visual imagination has stressed how important spectatorship and the recognition of subjectivity in art was.26 So given theevent’s popularity it was unsurprising that visual representations of racing were already commonplace well before Frith constructed his painting. Such images help determine the issues and meanings broadly, widely and prominently circulated around the race, and how they werestructured and framed. Wealthier purchasers of racing artwere usually proud owners, who wanted portraits of their Classic winner, often shown in the stable or loosebox, inmore bucolic contexts, or alone on Epsom course being saddled. The absence of the crowd, as on their estates, and the emphasis on the thoroughbred’s breeding in the accompanying text, a reminder of the gentlemanly breedingof the owner, need little stressing. Such paintings weresomewhat static and repetitive, but painters such as JohnFearnley, Charles Hancock, J. F. Herring or Harry Hall earned substantial incomes from them.27 Although visitor Theodore Gericault painted the finish of the Grand Derby d' Epsom in 1821, British artists rarely painted races in progress, partly because galloping horses were more difficult to execute, and partly because they were less attractive to individual owners. Initially in pictures ofrace meetings, it was the horses that were the focus though paintings often included spectators and the stands.28 But by the 1850s, as J. E. Millais showed with his pen and ink work The Race Meeting, attention was shiftingto the crowd rather than the horses.

Prints of paintings linked to the Derby were produced throughout the century. They were attractive to the less wealthy, and were often exhibited in ‘sporting’ public houses. They might include scenes on the road to Epsom, as well as the race itself, and thus had a far more ‘democratic’ appeal. Thomas Rowlandson brought out

26 Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).27 See for example, Oliver Beckett, J. F. Herring and Sons (London: J. A. Allen, 1981); Charles Lane, Harry Hall’s Classic Winners ( London: J. A. Allen, 1990). 28 John Nixon, Brighton Races, 1805, a pen and watercolour semi-affectionate, uncritical caricature of a meeting of the time, shows how such scenes were gaining favour quite early.

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The Road to Epsom as early as 1812. Pollard covered the Derby more than once in the 1830s. J. F. Herring producedThe Start for the Memorable Derby of 1844 in 1845, with as much attention paid to the crowd as the horses and riders.

As Julia Thomas makes clear, the Victorians were image-obsessed, and the middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry, as technological advances such as the daguerreotype and lithographic prints became more detailed and complex. This enabled the Victorians fashionof adorning the pages of their books and the walls of their public houses, clubs and homes with visual images.29

Although from the 1840s onwards the numbers of prints of races in progress was somewhat fewer, the number of visual representations in the media grew, as illustrated newspapers and magazines began to reflect back to their readership images of themselves, the socially aspirant lifestyle of the elite, or the comfortingly shocking misbehaviour of others at the races. Images of horses became less central. From its beginning in 1842 the Illustrated London News regularly represented the race, often negotiating texts and images on the printed page. In 1856, for example, it had engravings of ‘Going to the Races’,‘The Winner after the Race’ and a full page showing Prince Albert in the grandstand.30

Even Punch Magazine, which usually showed little interest in sport, always included a representation of the Derby, regularly exploiting its potential for political satire and comic effect. John Leech and other leading cartoonists all tackled the theme in its pages, again usually emphasising the people, not the races themselves. A clear precursor of Frith’s Derby Day was to be seen in the Derby picture for Punch’s series Ye Manners and Customs of Ye Englishe, in 1849 (see Figure 2). Like Frithwas to do later, Richard Doyle’s View of Epsom Downes foregrounded the crowd. The lightly sketched racehorses were seen only in the far distant background, with littledetail. The variety of social classes, the carriages, beggars, gypsies, eating and drinking and the gambling

29 Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Words and Images (Ohio University Press., 2004).30 Illustrated London News, 31 May and 7 June 1856.

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games were all represented, whilst Percival Leigh’s satirical text below the picture captured the exuberance and excitement of the event, focussing positively on people, activity, appearance and feelings. The spectatorswere ‘merry’, ‘very happy’, with ‘smiling faces’, much ‘mirth’, ‘delight’ and ‘pleasant discourse’. 31

Gaze TheoryOne way of approaching Frith’s painting of the Derby is through gaze theory. Visual culture has been of growing scholarly interest, and several specialised monographs have focussed on sporting themes. 32 While visuality and scopic approaches mean different things in different disciplinary contexts, they all emphasise how both what is seen and how it is seen are culturally constructed. AsGillian Rose has pointed out, the focus has variously been on visual effects and compositional interpretation, genre, transmission and circulation, display, inter-textuality, content analysis, psychoanalysis, iconology and iconography. 33

‘Gaze theory’ became popular with the rise of post-modernism. Gaze is more than a simple act of seeing. It is a process of looking that constitutes a complex network of relationships. In part it stemmed from the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan, who argued that the gaze gives structure and stability, framing views of self, others and the outside world, and expresses attitudes of which one might be unconscious. For Lacan, ‘Gaze’ can refer to the ways in which viewers look at images of people in visual media, and the gaze of those depicted in visual texts. In lower case, ‘gaze’ refers to a specific instance. 34 Lacan argued that paintings involving linear perspective trap the gaze. Because the visual image puts the spectator in the position of the eye, ‘the Gaze’ looks at everyone, and turns them into a spectacle, and so is a crucial feature of spectacular public sporting experience. His work helps31 Punch, 26 May 1849, 218. 32 E.g. Aaron Baker, Contesting Identities: Sport in American Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Mike O’Mahony, Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture, Visual Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).33 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (London: Sage, 2001)

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us to engage with issues of identity and subjectivity as articulated through the processes of looking (and being looked at) and to explore what the implications of this might be. It can draw attention to valuable, often problematic, socio-historical constructs, and help us understand universalising psycho-analytical engagements with issues of identity - here bound up with gender, raceand sexuality.

In part gaze theory is also linked to Michel Foucault’s inspecting, surveillance gaze. To look is to assert power. Gender, sexual orientation, class and race all help to shape the gaze, so its nature is dependent upon who is doing the looking, and why, whether artist, spectator or characters in a painting. Different types ofgaze such as the ‘tourist gaze’, ‘male gaze’ or ‘sportinggaze’ can been identified. The concept of the ‘gendered gaze’ was sharply articulated in Laura Mulvey’s famous work on ‘scopophilia’, the pleasure in looking.35 In looking at Derby Day a number of different gazes can be analysed, including those of the artist, the characters, the critics and the spectators visiting the work.

The artist’s gaze Derby Day was painted by the then leading Victorian realist narrative painter of contemporary subjects, William Powell Frith (1819-1909) who won a place at the Royal Academy Schools in 1837, supporting himself by painting portraits. In 1845 he was appointed an associateof the Royal Academy. He was made a full member in 1853. Frith exhibited the first of his three great modern-life subjects, Life at the Seaside: Ramsgate Sands in 1854. It attracted great interest, was hugely successful, and was purchased by Queen Victoria.

Recent work by inter alia Caroline Arscott, Mark Bills, Mary Cowling, Vivien Knight, and Christopher Wood has

34 Chandler, "Note on the 'Gaze'," http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/ Documents/gaze/gaze; Norman Bryson, ‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field’in: Hal Foster, (ed.): Vision and Visuality Seattle: The New Press, 1988),87-113; Sara Murphy, “The Gaze”, in: Hugette Glowinski, et al.(eds): A Compendium of Lacanian Terms (London: Free Association Books, 2000,) 79-82.35 Mulvey, Laura: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in: 16 Screen, 3, 1975, 6-18. 

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done much to shed light on Frith’s approach, method, planning and thinking, and set Derby Day in its painterly context. They have explored such themes as his relationship with Hogarth and Dickens, his influence on popular illustration, the place of costume in his paintings, his female models, his painting materials and practice and his picture frames. 36

In an interview later in life, and in his Reminiscences, Frith claimed that it was a visit to Hampton races at Molesey Hurst in 1854 that gave him the idea forthe painting.37 Certainly, these races, known as ‘the ‘Cockneys’ Derby’, another plebeian festival with large crowds, booths, drinking and dishonesty, had many similarities to the Epsom Derby. Frith saw a man there trying to cut his throat after experiencing substantial losses. He was also taken in by one of the gambling sleight of hand games, and had to be restrained by his artist friend Augustus Egg. According to his autobiography, Frith first visited Epsom in May 1856. He was impressed by the kaleidescopic effect of the crowd, and made a charcoal sketch of its ‘life and character’, its ‘carriages filled with pretty women’, ‘acrobats’, gypsies, and ‘the sporting element’.38

Then he painted a small careful oil sketch, and Frith’s old friend, the art collector Jacob Bell, who owned a pharmaceutical business and who had a passion for horses,offered £1,500 for a five to six foot painting. The agentand picture engraver Ernest Gambart was keen on exploiting the commercial potential of a print of the Derby and offered £1,500 for copyright and exhibition rights. These were substantial amounts, although Gambert made far more than he paid out by selling subsequent engravings.

Derby Day was largely a studio compilation, a ‘narrative painting’ of an imaginary Derby scene. So it was fictional, or perhaps ‘factional’. Despite its layered meanings it appeared beguilingly realistic to 36Bills and Knight, William Powell Frith; Christopher Wood, William Powell Frith: A Painter and his World (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2006).37 The Graphic, 18 January 1908; Nevile Wallis, A Victorian Canvas: the Memoirsof W.P. Frith (London: Bles, 1957), 86.38 William Powell Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, Vol. I. (London: Richard Bentley, 1887), 162.

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contemporary observers and was based on observation and previous representations.39 Frith worked on the project for about fifteen months. He made two large sketches, andbegan creating groups and figures. Despite his visit to the racecourse, the figures are not based on the visit. He used a photographer, Robert Howlett, to photograph groups of people from the top of a cab, and used the photographs in his composition.40 He asked a jockey calledBundy to pose on a hobby horse in his studio to get riders to look right. He hired an acrobat and his son, seen at a pantomime in Drury Lane. He called on family, friends and professional models for figures. Bell sent him further young models, and his friend Richard Tattersall, the racehorse auctioneer, provided advice andcontacts. Frith’s friend J. F. Herring, the leading expert on horse painting, helped with painting the horses. Herring sent detailed notes on how a jockey held the reins, how legs were angled and the way horses moved.He also provided some sketches and models, including a water colour sketch to suggest how the horses might be fitted into the background, part appearing above the crowds.41

The immensely complex and nuanced composition of thejostling Derby crowd, not the race, finally contained eighty-eight distinct foreground figures, and many more in the background, dramatically and coherently organised into three main groups and clusters, representing apparent frantic disorder in an orderly way. The composition is fairly static, and is really a series of stories that are deliberately anecdotal in style, emphasising individual human experience, in a context containing strong elements of sentiment. On the far left is a woman, seen in profile, in a dark riding habit.She could be read in several ways, perhaps representing one of the girls used by Tattersall, to ride out his horses in Hyde Park (a pretty ‘horsebreaker’), or even a high-class prostitute. Then there is the Royal Reform Club’s tent, one of many tents and booths paying

39 . Julia Thomas, Victorian Narrative Painting (London: Tate, 2001).40 Journal of the Photographic Society 15 January 1863.41 Oliver Beckett, J F Herring and Sons, (London: JA Allen & Co, 1981), 63, 77.

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subscriptions to the Race Committee for a site, often setup for commercial reasons by gamblers and innkeepers to sell their services. To its right a group of top-hatted men watch the thimble-riggers at work. Thimble-rigging was a gambling game, a perennial feature of open race meetings and fairs, despite being illegal as a game of chance. A man would manipulate three thimbles, one of which hid a supposedly single pea, on a small, collapsable table, aiding his sharp exit on the appearance of the police. Various accomplices, often looking respectable, are encouraging mug punters to ‘invest’ their money and win when they identify the thimble containing the pea. Experienced attenders, perhaps once caught themselves, were usually tacit, watching the gullible buying their experience. A young girl tries to restrain her companion, who wears a smock, from joining in, while nearby a pickpocket is stealing a gold watch. Another stiking figure, a young man, probablyto be read as a clerk or shop assistant trying to look like a swell, stands disconsolate, hands in pockets, as if having lost his money. A Jew and a Scotsman together examine a watch chain, probably stolen. Towards the centre, the crowd watches an acrobat and his young assistant, who look right towards a meal being laid out by a servant. A perspiring policeman, one of over 300 keeping order and detering obvious criminality on the course by this time, ignores what is going on (the limited numbers of prosecutions, and the reported ‘forbearance’ and ‘tolerance’ of police, makes this a typical response). To the right two cardsharps work on the three-card-trick. The debauched, villainous, jeeringfaces of the more criminal provide a contrast with the more child-like shock of the clerk. The right-hand group portrays the richer folk, in banks of carriages, one containing pretty aristocratic girls,another declasse courtesans, who are approached by various men and women, including a foppish young man and standard stereotypes ofbegging gypsies and their children. The upper classes facially portray the stock stereotypes shown in Punch and elsewhere, with long faces, acquiline noses and a superior, elegant and refined look, in line with Victorian sensibilities. Gypsy travellers, a constant

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and ubiquitous symbol of ‘otherness’ and of social peripherality, were a perennial feature of race meetings.Their caravan and tent encampment was a feature of Derby week, visited and gazed upon by some curious better-off visitors as part of the experience. The course was often described as ‘overrun’ with gypsies. 42 They variously begged, sold ‘lucky’ heather, or told fortunes. In the middle distance on the right, are horses and jockeys making their way towards the start.

In looking at Frith’s panoramic, representational painting the viewer is put in the false position of the painter’s eye. Derby Day thus traps the gaze. How can notions of the gaze be played out with regard to Frith’s crowd scenes? One way is through Foucault’s point that 'vision is power'. Thanks to Frith’s power to organise, manipulate and control his picture he could, through his painterly gaze, make his painting a moral, political and social weapon. In representing on canvas his jostling crowd Frith constructed a notional cross-section of Victorian society. Like most Victorians, Frith believed the pseudo-science of physiognomy, and had a self-confessed interest in London street life, the city crowd,its physiognomy and expression. He believed that by looking at the human face, morality, intellect and certain psychological traits were readable. He used his sketchpad to record various ‘perfect examples’ of mouths,eyebrows, noses or chins that he felt were revelatory of a ‘type’.

Like some other artists and photographers of the time, Frith found such study fascinating. He had studied phrenology, and he believed that both character and classshowed in physical features.43 In constructing his painting he therefore portrayed the series of ‘types’ in which he believed, and which were equally readily recognisable to many of those who were likely to view it.In Derby Day Frith quite deliberately gazed at and then 42 David Mayell, Gypsies in Nineteenth Century Society (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), 41.43 See Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge, CUP, 1989, chapter 2; Mary Cowling, ‘The Artist as Anthropologist in mid-Victorian England: Frith’s Derby Day, the Railway Station and the New Science of Mankind,’ Art History, 6,.4,1983), 461-77.

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painted a representative section of the huge crowd that gathered annually on Epsom Downs. The characters were allfamiliar, stock racing characters and types, figuring regularly in literature and visual material, introducing familiar human types and social classes associated with the races. Frith brings into his visual discourses notions of the ‘other’, such as Scotsmen, Jews and gypsies, all of whom are here associated with less respectable activities. He set out to enshrine his characters as particular ‘types’ by utilizing the effectsof vision, gaze and expression as well as other important, meticulously observed dimensions of comportment, ethnicity and clothing, which helped to distinguish social hierarchy, income, occupation and moral stature through millinery materials, fashion and colour.

His characters are carefully constructed therefore, bearing the public in mind, and attempting to ensure thattheir visual expectations were met.   He wanted to make it as easy as possible to distinguish rich and poor, the well-bred and the arriviste nouveau riche, and the virtuous andthe disreputable. The smock, for example, is used to identify the agricultural labourer, though people got dressed up for the occasion, and would not usually have worn such working clothes.

Frith provides a complex web of power relationships,but the cultural construction he represented was heavily loaded in terms of normative, respectable middle-class values, even though his own personal life was less so. Hewas to have eight children by his mistress Mary Alford, whilst still living with his wife Isabelle and ten children in Bayswater. In the painting, figures of authority and crime both appear, articulated at least in part through the Foucaultian surveillance context of the work. Women’s representation is telling, with a clear attempt to distinguish between respectable and unrespectable. Frith was also able to draw on wider Victorian concerns about the mixing of classes at leisureactivities such as fairs and race meetings, especially towriters from the cities. His work also fed on contemporary publications like Henry Mayhew’s textual and

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visual classification of types in his 1849 and 1850 newspaper articles on London labour and London poor.

Yet Frith also offers a further reading, in that thepainting assumes a general acceptance of Derby Day disreputable behaviour, allowing it to be read as a rich pageant of an essentially cohesive populace, a signification of British social unity and integration. Todo this Frith’s painterly gaze has had to be selective. The selectivity meant that he deliberately chose to overlook some aspects seen at the races.

So it is important to remember that it is in his striking omissions as much as what he chose to portray that the picture needs to be read. The race itself, for example, is almost ignored, and its equine and human stars, the horses and jockeys, are very marginal, although ten horses can be discerned right at the back. Frith later stressed that horses were in the backgound because he wished human interest to be paramount, although Herring’s letters suggest Frith lacked understanding of harnesses, jockeys and racing in general, and was reluctant to paint such aspects.44

Even though in the wider press, by this time, the race had generated substantial interest and coverage because of the popularity of betting, and people’s focus on the dream of a winning bet, the actual picture pays very little attention to this, despite its centrality to the event. There are no bookmakers with their stands, andthese were becoming more common on popular parts of the course by this time, although one peripatetic bookmaker is shown. While more serious gamblers would have clutchedtheir betting books with their records of bets made with people they knew, these are not conspicuous either. Frith’s message was more about the morally and socially degrading activity of gambling games such as thimblerigging than about racehorse betting, which was popular amongst all classes.

Frith also understressed both the copious amounts ofalcohol consumed at the Derby, and the resultant fights, which contemporary textual narratives almost always

44 Sally Woodcock, ‘Very Efficient as a Painter; The Painting Practice of William Powell Frith’, in Bills and Knight, William Powell Frith, 152

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provide, alhough some bottles of champagne are evident. Hippolyte Taine, for example, described how twenty-four ‘gentlemen’ had ‘triumphantly set up seventy-five bottles[of champagne] on their omnibus. They had drunk them all’, while ‘two parties of gentlemen had got down from their omnibus and were boxing’.45 For Frith, antagonisms and excess drinking had to be laid aside.

While Frith, in his wish to depict a stratified but comfortingly harmonious society, sanitized ‘reality’ by omitting themes such as these which divided Britain, his painting still offered some opportunities for alternativereadings, most especially about alienation for wealthy society and about class divisions. Some elements are perfectly possible to read as betraying some sympathy forthe ‘deserving’ poor and castigation of the greed of the rich. For example, the apparently wistful, hungry eye of the tiny, underweight tumbler, which is gazing at the abundance of pork pie and boiled lobster laid out for an elegant patrician group, is ignored by all but one of thewealthy diners.

The characters’ gazeFoucault is also relevant in terms of the characters’ gazes. Frith uses the direction and intensity of the characters’ gaze to help represent the complex web of power relationships between them, especially those of class, gender and race. In terms of their gaze, men and women are often treated differently, as are the differentsocial classes, with the middle classes being most positively represented. Frith must have been aware of thestakes entailed in ensuring that figures would be seen inparticular ways. In making decisions over who was lookingat whom, and thereby raising the questions why and what they might be thinking, Frith was also trying to signal what the various visual narratives might mean, and this provided a rich and fruitful issue for critics and viewers to explore. Moreover, within and across his groupings, Frith allowed for certain gender and class boundary crossings. Such socially illicit 'gazes' from one social group to another provided interest and speculation, helping create the multiple readings 45 Taine, Notes on England, pp. 32-6.

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provided by the painting. Some of the painting’s viewers may well have enjoyed such illicit looks. It was part of the Derby’s appeal. But as Caroline Arscott has made clear, for some likely viewers of the painting the mixing, rather than the more acceptable segregation of classes in the tightly packed crowd context of the Derby was shocking, and inappropriate. 46 No one in the picture,or in real life, could be protected from the gaze of social inferiors or superiors, and in Derby Day there is much looking and counter-looking being carried out by thecharacters, while one well-dressed man gazes intently through his binoculars not just at the start, but also directly at the viewers of the painting.

Laura Mulvey’s work on the gendered gaze is relevanthere, since in the painting, as in life, young women’s bodies are used as objects of desire for the gaze of disreputable (or even normally respectable) males. Male voyeurism, the pleasure in looking, is shown through the way Frith makes more apparently passive, modest women itsobject. The women become part of the erotic spectacle, and even the way they were dressed could help to encourage fetishist and voyeuristic desires. Many of the women’s eyes are downcast, and avoid looking at the male viewer. Women’s role is sometimes also morally restraining, as in the case of the young girl looking imploringly at the young man in a smock, whose gaze is towards the thimble-rigging table. She holds his arm, indicating her attempt to restrain his desire to gamble. Frith represents men as having a more active gaze, looking at something specific. So gaze forms part of Frith’s painterly narrative, providing for the spectator an added interest in following the various gazes to and fro across the painting and/or in constructing possible back-stories about the individuals concerned.

.The critics’ gazeIn the spring of 1858 the Royal Academy chose Derby Day to be amongst the paintings hung at their highly prestigiousannual exhibition. The Derby was popular. So too was

46 Caroline Arscott, ‘The Railway Station: Classification and the Crowd’, Bills and Knight, William Powell Frith, 79-94

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Frith’s work. The Royal Academy was a powerful reality constructor, helping to encode certain ideals of and expectations about art through its exhibitions, the resultant media coverage, and thus out into wider society. Following their private viewing of the Academy paintings at the beginning of May 1858, the newspaper critics seemingly had no problem ‘reading’ the images, and the picture received almost universal acclaim in the popular press, both in its overall composition and in itsdetails. In general the predominantly male, middle-classwhite writers focussed on the supposed moralistic messages of the painting from a hetero-sexual perspective. This was clearly reflective both about the ways in which such critics viewed or projected themselves, and how they thought about those characters in the painting whose transgressions threatened the supposed respectability of their readers. By providing respectable, moralistic readings of the picture they helped readers interpret it, especially focusing on sexual immorality, as with what they saw as the roué leaning against his mistress’s carriage. The Morning Herald, for example, looked at him and detected ‘consumption on his cheeks’ and ‘exhaustion in his colour’.47 To the Athenaeum , which praised the picture as ‘dazzling’, he was a ‘vicious voluptuary’.48 The Daily News noted the ‘dissipated men and loose women’, and saw him as a ‘heartless, rich coxcomb’, who was talking to ‘a splendidly dressed but evidently wretched English Traviata’. 49

Others stressed the painting’s lifelike nature. The Illustrated London News saw it as offering ‘photographic glimpses of character’ as they were found at this leadingnational event.50 The Times felt that ‘no closer nor completer transcript of a scene of English amusement has been painted since Hogarth’.51

But their views of the actual painterly qualities ofthe picture were more mixed, and in a rather elitist way

47 Morning Herald, 1 May 185848 Athenaeum, 1 May 1858.49 Daily News, 3 May 1858. 50 Illustrated London News, 1 May 185851 Times, 1 May 1858.

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antagonistic to its populist thrust. The critic John Ruskin, for example, offered only limited praise, though he thought it quite proper and desirable that this English carnival should be painted. He accepted the painting’s ‘great ability’, its long and ‘careful study’,‘considerable humour’, and ‘untiring industry’ but described it as ‘a kind of cross between John Leech and Wilkie, with a dash of daguerreotype here and there, and some pretty seasoning with Dickens' sentiment’. For Ruskin, as with many other critics within the art establishment, Frith’s work was not really acceptable. Indeed, its very popularity demonstrated that it had limitations. Many of his comments made that clear. Although he recognised that it had qualities that would entitle it ‘to high praise, which I doubt not they will receive from the delighted public’, he then pointed out that Derby Day was ‘of the entirely popular manner of painting, which, however, we must remember, is necessarily, because popular, stooping and restricted’. 52

Many others in the traditional art establishment showed resentment of Frith’s popularity and the income hegained from his paintings. They dismissed his work as ‘vulgar’, giving the contemporary public what it wanted, i.e. comprehensible stories told on canvas, rather than ‘higher’, ‘elevated’ and more complex paintings, which could only be understood by the more sophisticated (such as themselves). The Saturday Review, for example, damned it with faint praise, as having merely ‘the grandeur of the commonplace’, and concentrated on its weaknesses.53

The spectators’ gazeThe viewer’s is an important position in terms of the gaze, though in terms of reception we know least about the formation of the painting’s viewers and their understandings. It is likely that their familiarity with the genre’s conventions would have helped achieve Frith’sdesired-for ‘reality’ effect. Viewing a picture at the socially high-status Royal Academy would also help shape 52 John Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy: the old and new societies of painters in water colours, the Society of British Artists and the French exhibition,Vol 5, Issue 4 1858.(London: Smith Elder, 1859), 20-21.53 Saturday Review, 15 and 22 May, 1858

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and frame possible responses. How many had read the critics’ description is unknown.

But when the exhibition was opened to the public on the 3rd of May 1858 Derby Day caused an immediate sensation. From the first day, crowds flocked to see it, though exhibitions were largely attended by the middle-class, art review-reading public. It became a spectacle in itself, just as was the Derby. The public were so eager to get close enough to gaze at length at the canvaseven on opening day that the Academy secretary had to geta policeman to stand guard and keep them off. The crush was so great that Bell successfully applied to the Royal Academy Council for a protective rail to keep them back. This was introduced on May 8th. The crowd was three or four deep, almost inhaling the picture, enjoying its multiple narratives unashamedly. 54 In his diary entry Frith remarked that he 'couldn’t help going to see the rail, and there it is sure enough; and loads of people'.55

The spectators both consumed and helped to shape theculture in which the painting was set. It is clear that people wanted to spend as much time in gazing at the picture, in order to fully read it, as they would a printed text. Many people would stand in front of the picture for a long period, ‘reading’ each of the scenes in turn. They reportedly devoted lavish attention to the work. They had the freedom to stare and scrutinise more safely, without the risk of stare, hostility, unpleasant aggression or violence, something not always possible in a real Derby crowd. For some the gaze could be long and intensive. They could stay for an hour or more. In crowded London at mid-century there was a desperate concern to ‘read’ appearances, to discern danger, difference or possible acquaintance. There was a great interest in visual classifications of all kinds, from phrenology and physiognomy to anthropology. Many could therefore have followed Frith’s representations of types.But because the painting’s possible meanings were fluid rather than fixed, and capable of change not immutable,

54 Bells’ letters of early May, and the reports of the two policemen guarding the picture, are in the archives of the National Art Library, MSL/1922/18655 Frith, Autobiography, vol.1, .289.

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gazes, viewers and context would combine in a number of different ways, rather than residing in the painting itself.

The Illustrated London News published a print of that year's Royal Academy exhibition. But most significantly instead of depicting the crowded walls and rooms of the exhibition, it concentrated on the crowded scene around Derby Day. Most clearly, it was of prime social significance, so much so, that it rapidly became important to be able to say the painting had been seen, and discuss it. The visit became part of the tourist gaze, one of the things to do.

For some, social emulation may also have been a factor. Queen Victoria enjoyed Frith’s work and went straight to his picture when she and Albert visited the exhibition. Her reception by the Epsom crowd on her firstvisit in 1840 with Albert had been mixed, and she much preferred more select Ascot Races, but she was able to enjoy the contemplation of the painted spectacle of Derby Day in a way that she could not enjoy the reality of racing. According to Frith, by no means a neutral observer, she complimented him ‘in the highest and kindest manner’, and said it was ‘a wondrous work’. Prince Albert’s gaze was clearly different since he made suggestions for improvement in terms of light, shade and other details, which Firth claimed to have taken up afterthe exhibition. 56

For others, who had actually attended the meeting, there was yet another attraction. According to the Times, ‘all the frequenters of the course will be seeking to identify friends and acquaintances for the next three months’.57

But despite Frith’s actual intentions , multiple readings of the painting were possible. Indeed this is one of the more valuable insights that Lacanian psychoanalysis has brought to study of visual culture andis an integral part of dealing with the historically specific reception of the work. Mid-Victorian audiences were sophisticated consumers and so there were always opportunities to provide oppositional readings and

56 Wallis, A Victorian Canvas, 92.57 Times, 2 May 1858.

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challenge dominant ideologies. Self-identity, moral viewsabout gambling, criminality and vice, attitudes to art and the extent of understanding of racing would all have shape people’s gaze, whilst being uncomfortable in a claustrophobic crowd might also have affected responses. It is, for example, less than clear how respectable female viewers gazed at the picture, and this brings us back to Mulvey’s work on the gendered gaze. Did they identify with Frith’s passive representations of respectable womanhood? Did they get a frisson of excitement at their contemplation of the disreputable? Were they able to challenge and critique the painting?

Amongst the spectators is the historian, whose gaze should also not be ignored. As postmodernist Alan Munslowhas pointed out, ‘the past is only as fixed as our imagesof it’, and Firth’s painting and people’s responses to itprovide a range of realities and possible alternative readings.58 So the picture works on the historian as much as the historian works on the picture. Any response has to be provisional, and interpretation uncertain. Each gaze is shaped by what is brought to it. The way I look at the painting, for example, is shaped by my professional background, my substantial published work onracing, and my interest in visuality, as well as factors such as my class, age and gender. Equally the way of viewing the painting developed here draws heavily on the contemporary currency of theories of the ‘gaze’. The historian’s gaze, clearly contingent as it is, thus helpsto create the other gazes.

Conclusion.Derby Day was characteristic of its age, but by the time Frith died in 1909 the Aesthetic movement had denigrated his work. He had become outdated and forgotten. He continued to be ignored by the art establishment for muchof the twentieth century. Despite this, the actual painting, donated by Bell to the National Collection, remained a major popular attraction. To critic Walter Sickert, writing in the Burlington Magazine in 1922, it was amasterpiece that was still the ‘most unaffectedly enjoyed

58 Alan Munslow, ‘Foreword’, in Murray Phillips (ed), Deconstructing Sports History: A Postmodern Analysis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), . viii.

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painting’ in the Gallery, and accounted ‘for more sixpences at the turnstile than all other paintings put together’.59

To this day seeing it still draws the gaze. And the painting has much to tell us about how it could be used as a signifier of the English nation and its people, and about Victorian class, gender and social relationships. Approaching it through gaze analysis is suggestive about the methodology’s potential utility for exploring multiple voices and perspectives. It helps to provide access to the painting’s ideologies, meanings and representations, as well as to the multiple ways it could be read. Derby Day, and the various responses to it, also shed light on the way the mega-event itself was perceived and represented in Victorian society, and how its meanings were produced and exchanged. It says something too about the complexities of Victorian respectability and how contingent it could be, and the the extent to which respectability took a very temporary one-day holiday at the races. The picture shows much disreputable behaviour, ignored by the police and gazed at curiously even by the more respectable in the crowd both on the course and later at the Royal Academy. It suggests how fluid respectability was, and how in certaincultural contexts, especially in those of leisure, behaviour could be tolerated that would not be in other contexts. At Epsom, seeing and being seen were almost equally important. For some of the respectable, just as with the contemporary guided tours of the slums so well analysed by Seth Kovan, gazing at the less licit behaviour of others, whether at the event itself, or depicted in Frith’s Derby Day, was very clearly a source ofinterest, fun and pleasurable excitement.60

59 Walter Sickert, ‘The Derby Day’, Burlington Magazine, January 1922, 276. 60 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princetown:Princetown University Press, 2004).