1156 - Joseph Nash, coloured lithograph with architecture and figures, 19th century

Joseph Nash, coloured lithograph with architecture and figures, 19th century Hand-coloured lithograph on paper, laid down on board, lettered in the stone lower right. In front of a late Gothic complex of buildings with a high hipped roof, stepped gables and oriels a crowd of many figures in a fight in colourful historical costume presses together; at the left a group rides up, at the right an archway leads out of the picture. The architecture is washed in pale ochre brown, the figures coloured in strong red and blue, the sky in pale blue. Age-appropriate condition, margins trimmed, air bubbles between paper and support. Image 29 x 40 cm (HxW), mount, overall size 44 x 57 cm (HxW) Joseph Nash (1809–1878) was an English architectural painter and lithographer and became known through his four-volume plate work „The Mansions of England in the Olden Time“, published between 1839 and 1849. In it Nash showed the manor houses of the Tudor and Stuart periods not as empty monuments but enlivened with costumed figures presenting the daily life of the time of their building. This approach made the work one of the most influential pictorial sources of the Victorian Gothic Revival and lastingly shaped the notion of „Merry Old England“.