Victorian Monkey Business

I continued with the Victorian theme yesterday. The painting I made, another direct watercolour, was based on a monochrome sepia toned photograph.

In the original photograph I really didn’t like the background, which was boring and very indistinct. So I put the accordionist against a background I found in another Victorian photo of a street performer. The tatty billboard on the right is for Crowders Music Hall in Greenwich. This became Greenwich Theatre. When I was at Uni in the mid 80s I used to spend some Sunday lunchtimes in the bar of the latest incarnation of Greenwich Theatre, doing the Sunday Telegraph Crossword and listening to a live jazz band. Street entertainers in Victorian times were pretty common, especially in big cities - and London at the time was the biggest in the world. Like chimney sweeps, itinerant musicians had been around for several centuries, but by the middle of the 19th centuries not only musicians, but many other kinds of street performers had proliferated, a huge variety. If you read contemporary novels by London based writers like Dickens or Thackeray you can see that all levels of Victorian Society had a great thirst for live entertaiment. 

As you can also say about a huge number of Victorian professions and occupations, if you were managing to support yourself through street performances you were doing a lot better than some. What became known as busking during the next century was made more precarious by the rather fuzzy legal status street performers enjoyed. A street performer would often be ordered by police to move on from a favourable location, and if they didn't comply they could find themselves in court or even in a lock up. Street performers were also a target for petty criminals, who would steal the performer's takings or equipment or both, often with violence. As if that wasn't enough in the middle of the century the Times started regularly publishing snotty letters about the rising level of street noise in London, for which street musicians were allocated a disproportionate amount of the blame. In 1864 the Westminster Parliament passed a law enabling residents to complain to the police about street musicians, although it was still fuzzy as to what police should do about such complaints. Street performers suffered from an extremely low social status. Complainants against them often did so in the kind of terms we'd use today for an infestation of vermin.

Okay, let’s get to the elephant, er, monkey in the room. The accordionist has a monkey attached to him with a chain. I don’t excuse this or condone it because it was a long time ago. I think it was – and is – wrong to exploit animals. I reckon it’s a pretty foregone conclusion that animals used this way were subjected to great cruelty – after all, think of the ways that master sweeps treated children at the same time. There are countries in the world where this still goes on, and it should be stopped. Monkeys were still being exploited like this in England in the 1980s. I remember in about 1982 I went to Wembley market on a Sunday Morning and a young bloke approached me, with a monkey sitting on his shoulder attached to a leash. He offered to take my photo with said monkey for a fiver. Being a gentleman I merely told him to fuck off go away. This wasn’t just  because I’m a cheapskate. I mean, I AM a cheapskate, but this turned my stomach.

Okay, let's get back to the picture. I say it as shouldn't, but I'm pretty pleased with what I've achieved with it. My decision to keep going with Direct Watercolour has paid off in as much as I don't think that this would have been any better if I'd sketched the outlines in graphite pencil before picking up a paintbrush. When you use monochrome photos for reference then you have to use your best guess for the colours. With the background it wasn't difficult, for many brick built buildings of London of the time and the first half of the 20th century were built with distinctive yellow London bricks. With the billboard, well I felt that a blue ground would contrast well with yellow letters, and the whole thing would contrast well with the predominantly brown and grey palette used for the figures and the rest of the background.