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©
Carmen Thyssen Collection
John George Brown

The Bully of the Neighbourhood

1866
Oil on canvas.
38.4 x 66.7 cm
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Inv. no. (
CTB.1982.5
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop
The mixture of sentimental subject matter and high finish of Brown's small genre scenes of city urchins reflected his conviction that beauty was morally persuasive. "A picture can and should teach", he wrote, "can and should exert a moral influence." He took his subjects from the streets of New York, but he cleaned their faces, idealized their forms and arranged them in narrative tableaux that he painted as a polished surface. The popularity of these images points both to the moral status of "finish" in American painting in the 1860s and to contemporary attitudes toward poverty. At a time when the immigrant children who crowded city slums and supplied cheap labour for factories were regarded with as much suspicion as sympathy, Brown's idealised realism appealed enormously to American middle-class audiences.

Although previously unrecorded, The Bully of the Neighbourhood is typical of the anecdotal titles Brown gave his work. The children's varied ethnic types and the compressed foreground space where they line up to confront the bully are also motifs that reappear throughout his oeuvre. This format reflected early Victorian historical genre scenes, particularly the work and teaching method of Brown's drawing instructor at the Edinburgh Trustees' Academy, Robert Scott Lauder, who place antique casts on casters for easy moving and grouping. It may also reflect the contemporary theatre. During the late 1850s and 1860s, lowlife "story paper" dramas were among the hits of the New York stage. With titles like Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl these plays featured idealised lower-class heroes, occasionally children, speaking high-flown language. The Bully of the Neighbourhood looks life a stage set, with a shallow proscenium, painted backdrop and front lighting. The children function as actors playing stock characters.

The theatrical quality of Brown's art is telling, because during the 1860s several critics believed that drama most truly represented the "mixed materialistic and imaginative spirit" of the USA. The December 1860 Cosmopolitan Art Journal bemoaned American painters' comparative lack of attention to native subject matter: "We have a certain class of subjects which are peculiar to American cities and shores-newsboys, street-sweepers, wood sawyers, immigrants, dock loafers. But singular as it may appear, few of our respectable artists have chosen this field for subjects of study. Brown turned from portraiture to painting urban children at this time and came to be regarded as one of the first to realise "the artistic possibilities of genre and lowlife in America."

Elizabeth Garrity Ellis

19th Centurys. XIX - Pintura norteamericana. CostumbrismoPaintingOilcanvas
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The Bully of the Neighbourhood. El matón del vecindario, 1866
The Bully of the Neighbourhood
John George Brown

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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The Bully of the Neighbourhood. El matón del vecindario, 1866
The Bully of the Neighbourhood
John George Brown

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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