“Plants for your Garden!”

“Here’s all a Blowing, Alive and Growing – Choice Shrubs and Plants, Alive and Growing”

Artists have long been fascinated by itinerant street sellers in cities like London as they hawked their goods, anything from hot cross buns to brick dust (used for cleaning knives), and services from mending old chairs to sweeping chimneys. Each seller had a distinctive cry or melody as they advertised their wares giving rise to the various Cries of London chapbooks that were published during the early nineteenth century.

This small watercolour is reminiscent of those portraits and shows a young man carefully balancing a selection of flowering plants in pots. The image is quirky and colourful and is edged with a narrow gold paper border and set in a maple veneer frame with a stained outer edge.