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Thomas Webster’s popular genre paintings offered reassuring images of contented country folk—especially children playing and dancing—while glossing over the shift from the old paternalistic social order to a capitalist market system. They also ignored social problems, like poverty and starvation, exacerbated by a rapid increase in population and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The gulf between Webster’s imagery and reality stretched the credulity of one writer who opined in 1846 that another Webster painting portrayed “the family of an honest yeoman, one of the class which in these days capital and a system of extensive farming have converted into day-labourers: the ancient yeoman . . . now also among the extinct races, a victim to the Moloch of wealth; but we cannot stop to lament his decay,— besides, we should get political, and perhaps angry, which would be out of place and unseemly here.”

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016