Oil Painting of a Village Maypole Celebration by Thomas Clater

#18277: Oil Painting of a Village Maypole Celebration by Thomas Clater
By Clater, Thomas (British, 1789–1867)
British, 19th century
Canvas: height 72cm, width 92cm, depth 2cm
Frame: height 90cm, width 110cm, depth 8cm
This scene by the British painter Thomas Clater shows a village gathered in the open air around a garlanded maypole. At the centre, a young woman in a white dress trimmed with flowers, a wreath in her hair, stands arm in arm with a fair-haired youth in a blue coat hung with a garland; a companion in a coral dress adjusts the flowers in her hair, while behind them a man in a straw hat climbs a ladder to dress the ribboned pole with swags of blossom.
Around this central group the whole community is at play. To the left, under a thatched booth, men in eighteenth-century dress talk and drink beside a table laid with a joint of meat, hampers, bottles and a barrel, a fiddler tuning up among them; in the foreground a young couple in green and brown sit together on a red cloth, threading a chain of flowers. At the right, children in white dresses with blue sashes gather blossoms into garlands, a tambourine set down beside them, while further groups dance in a ring and stroll into the distance. Beyond the figures the ground opens to a wide, gently wooded landscape with a distant town and hills under a bright sky.
The subject belongs to a long English tradition of May Day festivities, in which villages welcomed the arrival of spring by raising a tall pole wound with flowers and ribbons and crowning a May Queen. Celebrated since the medieval period and revived with fresh enthusiasm in the Victorian era, these gatherings combined dancing, feasting and the making of floral garlands, and were seen by nineteenth-century audiences as an emblem of rural community and old country custom. Clater sets his scene in an earlier, eighteenth-century past, evident in the dress of the older figures, lending the picture a nostalgic, backward-looking character in keeping with contemporary taste.
Thomas Clater (1789–1867) was an English painter of genre and domestic subjects who exhibited in London from the 1820s, showing at the Royal Academy, the British Institution and the Society of British Artists. He was known for anecdotal scenes of everyday life, painted with careful attention to costume, expression and incident, and his works are today represented in several UK public collections. This crowded composition, with its wealth of individual vignettes, is characteristic of the storytelling approach that made such genre subjects popular with Victorian audiences.
The painting is executed in oil on canvas, signed lower right, 'TClater', and is presented in a giltwood frame.
$27,000