Selling Out 1901

Augustus Edwin Mulready painted 'Selling Out', and the whole scene feels as though it’s been brushed into being. The girl in the center, with her basket of posies, isn’t so much standing there as wavering into view. I feel for Mulready, wrestling with the weight of observation and the desire to turn life into feeling. It must have been difficult for him to translate a sense of lived experience through observation onto the canvas. Did he stand there until the cold seeped into his bones, sketching furiously, trying to catch the light just so? The street has a way of creating and framing the figures there; in that time, a flower girl’s life was hard and precarious. In this painting, the surface is smooth, the paint thinned out, each stroke carefully placed to build form. It is clear that this was his world, his experience. Painters are in a constant conversation with each other across time, inspiring each other’s creativity. Painting is a form of expression, embracing ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations.