One of the Family by Frederick George Cotman

One of the Family by Frederick George Cotman, 1880

Dinner, and a visitor at the door

A farming family sits at dinner in a low, panelled room. The top half of the door at the back stands open, and through it a white carthorse, still in its collar and harness, has pushed its head into the room. The young mother, in a yellow blouse with a blue bow at the neck, turns in her chair and holds out a piece of bread to it. That is the joke of the title: the horse is one of the family, and expects to be fed with the rest.

Everyone else is busy with the meal. At the left a little girl with a blue ribbon in her hair reaches across the table with an open hand. A fair-haired boy bends over his plate, cutting his food with knife and fork. In the right foreground a small child in a red-sleeved dress, seen from behind, turns toward the horse, and beside the child the grandmother, in dark clothes with her grey hair drawn back, smiles down as she cuts slices from a loaf held against her chest. In the shadows at the back the farmer, in a battered hat, reaches up to hang something on the wall by the mantelpiece. A brown-and-white dog rests its head on the edge of the table next to the mother, waiting its turn.

The table is laid with a white cloth, a large pie in a dish, plates, a brown jug, glasses of beer, a cruet stand, cups and a blue-and-white plate. Along the left wall a deep window of small leaded panes, half-curtained, holds pots of flowering plants; outside it are a garden and a white building. Pewter and brass shine on the shelf above the mantel. The picture is signed at lower right.

The Black Boy Inn at Hurley

According to National Museums Liverpool, Cotman painted the scene at the Black Boy Inn at Hurley on Thames. The farmer was posed by the innkeeper. The Walker's text on Google Arts & Culture adds that the room is based on one in the inn, and that the figures were modelled by members of the Street family, who owned it.

At the Walker

The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool bought the painting in 1880, the year it was painted. It was the first important painting by Cotman to be acquired by a public institution. Liverpool critics of the time praised its cheerful sentiment and argued that it commended the good treatment of animals. The gallery's first curator bought it as one of its first "subjects of popular character", pictures meant, as he put it, to please visitors not versed in the higher forms of art.

It is painted in oil on canvas and measures 102.6 by 170.2 centimetres, accession number WAG 1029. It is the work Cotman is best known for.

The painter

Frederick George Cotman (1850–1920) was born at Ipswich, the youngest child of Henry Edmund Cotman, a former Norwich silk merchant, and Maria Taylor. His uncle was the watercolourist John Sell Cotman, a leading painter of the Norwich School, and his cousins John Joseph and Miles Edmund Cotman were painters too; it is through his family, rather than his own career, that he is counted among the Norwich School, since he never lived in Norfolk. He was a private pupil of William Thomson Griffiths, head of the Ipswich School of Art.

Cotman worked in oil and watercolour, painting landscapes, portraits and interiors, and spent most of his working life in London. He was a founder member of the Ipswich Art Club and remained a member all his life. He died at Felixstowe on 16 July 1920.

Sources: National Museums Liverpool, One of the Family (WAG 1029) · Google Arts & Culture, One of the Family, Walker Art Gallery · Art UK, One of the Family · Wikipedia, Frederick George Cotman