Uploaded January 2019 | Updated September 2026, 12 hours ago
Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan, will deliver a lecture exploring the intriguing combination of realism and pastoral in the work of Frederick Walker, and artists associated with him. Their work does not so much evade the social and political realities of their time as engage with these realities in complex, if mainly indirect, ways. The relative absence of modern urban and industrial environments and the focus on rural ones was pervasive in later nineteenth-century art, whether naturalist or formally radical. It was by way of their distinctive take on scenes of rural life that the artists represented in the Center’s exhibition were able to fashion a body of work that did at times address serious issues of labor and social class, and as such functioned as a form of social realism—indeed Hubert von Herkomer might well be considered one of the major social realist artists of his time.
Recorded on location:
Yale Center for British Art
Lecture Hall
1080 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT 06510
Image: Frederick Walker, "Strange Faces," 1862–63, gouache, watercolor, and gum arabic on wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund
Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan, will deliver a lecture exploring the intriguing combination of realism and pastoral in the work of Frederick Walker, and artists associated with him. Their work does not so much evade the social and political realities of their time as engage with these realities in complex, if mainly indirect, ways. The relative absence of modern urban and industrial environments and the focus on rural ones was pervasive in later nineteenth-century art, whether naturalist or formally radical. It was by way of their distinctive take on scenes of rural life that the artists represented in the Center’s exhibition were able to fashion a body of work that did at times address serious issues of labor and social class, and as such functioned as a form of social realism—indeed Hubert von Herkomer might well be considered one of the major social realist artists of his time.
Recorded on location:
Yale Center for British Art
Lecture Hall
1080 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT 06510
Image: Frederick Walker, "Strange Faces," 1862–63, gouache, watercolor, and gum arabic on wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund
