The Picture Book

Provenance

The Nightingale Family

Description / Expertise

The early years of the 1900s saw Forbes choosing to concentrate in his paintings on smaller groups of figures seen from a closer range. The fall of light on the sitters’ faces and on the page of the picture book suggests that they have gathered together around the only oil lamp in a humble cottage interior.
Living in relative ease in the midst of a humble fishing community, Forbes felt that ‘the many signs which tell of the hardships of poverty … should be faithfully recorded; for without them the story is half told and its value lost’.