The Critics

The Royal Academy Exhibition showing the thronging crowds From 'Fun', April 4, 1868 (Enlarge image)

Eastward Ho! caused a sensation at the Royal Academy when it was exhibited in 1858 at the height of the Mutiny. Home Again received further acclaim when it was exhibited the following year.

Both paintings were tremendously successful with the public and art critics because of their focus on individual sorrows and joys.

The Times praised the uplifting qualities of Eastward Ho! : "Hope and aspiration are busy among these departing soldiers, and if mothers and wives, and sisters and sweethearts, go down the side sorrowing, it is a sorrow in which there is no despair, and no stain of sin and frailty."

The Illustrated London News considered the painting "a national epic. No wonder it is so popular that such crowds assemble around it, scanning every feature of the various actors, till at last they begin to imagine themselves present at, and participators in, the scene."

The Athenaeum felt it had "a simple pathos and truth that will bear an hour's perusal...The grief is wonderfully varied and without self-consciousness".

Not surprisingly O'Neil wanted to repeat his success and in 1859 Home Again was congratulated for its "avoidance of maudlin sentiment" in The Times. "The crowd round the picture delight to spell out the many stories it includes - its joyous reunitings, its agonies of bereavement; the latter kept judiciously down."

A tour of Britain followed where an estimated 540,000 people saw Eastward Ho! before the two paintings were exhibited side by side for the first time in 1860 at Piccadilly, London. Visitors paid 6d to see the exhibition. Printed versions of the paintings were very popular and sold quickly to eager buyers.

The Royal Academy

The Royal Academy of Arts, London was the leading venue in the British art world in the 1850s. It was then based at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and moved to its current home at Burlington House, Piccadilly in 1869. The annual Summer Exhibitions were highly prestigious events, attended by 350,000 at their peak and filled with prominent personalities. If selected, an artist could showcase their work to this wide and influential audience and success could bring fame, social position and vast fortunes. The illustration from a magazine above shows how contemporary audiences would have viewed Eastward Ho! and Home Again and gently pokes fun at the sport of exhibition-going.