08/05/2020
It's Guinea Pig Friday! "The Favoured Guinea Pig", Henry Turner Munns, 1865
Art notes: This charming British Victorian genre oil painting is by noted exhibited artist Henry Tuner Munns. It was painted in 1865 in realist palette with superb detail in the young boy's face and heavy impasto on his clothing. The subject is a boy in ragged clothing sat on stone steps outside an office, with his cap out for money, still empty. He has with him a wooded guinea pig cage with a large guinea pig on top being hand fed scraps, its young inside. Munns was clearly sympathetic to the plight of the poor in Victorian England, if painting it in a romanticised golden glow, along side compassion for animals.
Henry Turner Munns, (1832-1898), was a Birmingham born artist who specialised in portraits, landscapes, figures and genre subjects. He exhibited from 1882-97 and was father of artist Bernard Munns.
Formerly exhibited at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Art
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