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©
Carmen Thyssen Collection
John George Brown

Tough Customers

1881
Oil on canvas.
76 x 63.5 cm
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Inv. no. (
CTB.1987.23
)
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
John George Brown has been characterised as the painter of "the children of the poor, the disinherited, the waifs and strays, the orphans", as the artist "who has so successfully caught what one might call the elf-life of New York-that flickering phantasmal humanity of our streets and alleys." As Brown stated to an early biographer, "I want people a hundred years from now to know how the children that I paint looked." The painter, who grew up in poverty in England, was sensitive to his impoverished childhood when he helped to support his mother, brothers and sisters. After he had achieved economic success, the artist proudly acknowledged his beginnings as a working man, stating that I do not paint street urchins "solely because the public likes such pictures and pays me for them, but because I love the boys myself, for I, too, was once a poor lad like them."

At the time Brown painted Tough Customers, homeless youths, their faces "preternaturally aged, brutalised, and defrauded of all that belongs to childhood" numbered by the tens of thousands in New York City. Some were the product of a rapidly growing urban society swelled by an influx of immigrants, some were abandoned by dissolute parents, others were orphaned by the Civil War, while still others resulted from the rural poor migrating to the cities. Young girls were numerous among the street vendors selling matches, toothpicks, cigars, newspapers, songs, and flowers. "The flower-girls are hideous little creatures", noted a contemporary observer, "but their wares are beautiful and command a ready sale." The trade of these flower-merchants was not limited to the selling of flowers, but was often a "cover for any number of pursuits, from setting up for pickpockets to child prostitution." Compared with the graphic contemporary photographs by Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine or the sardonic street children in the canvases by David Gilmour Blythe, the waifs in Brown's paintings are remarkably healthy, well-scrubbed, and resoundingly cheerful.

The title of Brown's painting is ironic. The "Street Arabs", as the homeless children in New York were called, surround the flower seller wearing her button hole bouquets which would sell for ten cents. As the critic, S. G. W. Benjamin, described the painting in 1882, the group "represents a little flower-girl, besieged by the admiring but penniless ragamuffins, who are endeavouring by a little blarney to win the roses they cannot afford to buy." There is an obvious rapport between the girl and her "tough customers." The young flower seller wears a knit wool hat, cotton dress torn at the elbow, white cotton knit socks and black leather boots. Only the gold ring, which is too large for her and she wears on her middle finger, calls into question a legitimate ownership and suggests the unsavoury conditions of street life. The same young model also appears in Brown's Buy a Posy, c. 1881, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. The isolated flower seller, wearing the identical knit hat and stockings, but in different dress, is now selling larger bouquets as she plaintively looks for a customer. Martha J. Hoppin has noted that the girl wears worn, but decent clothes, as often the models that Brown carefully recruited from the streets would be cleaned up and scrubbed by their benefactors when presented to the artist in his studio. Brown's greatest problem would be to get his sullen-faced models to smile -"for to paint a smile is one of the difficulties of figure-painting- a successful smile, I mean; a smile that will make the spectator smile."

It was this positive quality of Brown's painting, which stressed smiling youthful entrepreneurs, often bootblacks, that appealed to his audience. The cohesive bonding of the male youths, recipients of the largess of the flower seller in Tough Customers, could be seen by the wealthy patrons of Brown's paintings as reflective of the male rapport of their own social strata. In the 19th century the street vendors, newspaper sellers, and bootblacks were seen as independent merchants, working for profit rather than wages. The activities of the waifs of the streets in Brown's canvases suggest a rags-to-riches Horatio Alger scenario that the artist himself experienced.

Kenneth W. Maddox

19th Centurys. XIX - Pintura norteamericana. CostumbrismoPaintingOilcanvas
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Hotel Room. Habitación de hotel, 1931
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Products and publications

Tough Customers

Tough Customers

17.00 €

Los impresionistas y la fotografía. Exhibition catalogue. Spanish Hard Cover

Los impresionistas y la fotografía. Exhibition catalogue. Spanish Hard Cover

38.00 € 25.00 €

Catalogue Hyperreal. The art of trompe l'oeil (Spanish)

Catalogue Hyperreal. The art of trompe l'oeil (Spanish)

34.00 € 25.00 €

Alex Katz (exhibition catalog. Spanish with texts in English)

Alex Katz (exhibition catalog. Spanish with texts in English)

32.00 € 30.40 €

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Charles Marion Russell
Charles Marion Russell
The Piegans preparing to Steal Horses from the Crows
1888
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Private and/or didactic use
Tough Customers. Una clientela dura, 1881
Tough Customers
John George Brown

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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Tough Customers. Una clientela dura, 1881
Tough Customers
John George Brown

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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