Private Collection, the Channel Islands

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting has been recently restored. The canvas is lined. The paint layer has been cleaned and varnished. We are unable to detect any abrasions or damages or restorations anywhere to the picture and clearly it is in lovely condition.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

In The Goldfish Seller, George Dunlap Leslie captures the Victorian fascination with the interaction of different social classes. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who explored this new phenomena through ambitious scenes of crowded train stations or busy city streets, Leslie chooses instead a more intimate moment, as a traveling peddler offers a goldfish for sale to a middle-class mother and child and presumably their governess in the suburbs of London. The potential buyer – the lady of the house – looks bemusedly at the peddler while the governess leans absent-mindedly against the porch railing, the young boy pressed closely to her side. The peddler kneels before them in a demonstrative show of deference; he is characterized by a pleasant countenance and relatively neat, tidy dress. In true Victorian fashion, the peddler, and by extension the lower-class, has "been sanitized, ordered and made acceptable to the middle-class audience" (Christopher Wood, Victorian Painting, 1999, London, p. 65). The frieze-like arrangement of figures and distinctive linearity (created by a series of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines) impart a strong internal order to the c💦omposition, and the significant spatial gap between the peddler and his audience further reinforces the existing social gap.

With the opening of the first ever public aquarium at the Zoological Gardens at Regents Park in 1853 in London, keeping fish as pets became a popular hobby in Victorian England as both an affordable and educational pastime for the newly emerging middle-class. In his book on the British fascination with aquaria entitled The Family Aquarium, Henry D. Butler retrospectively wrote: "The aquarium was on everybody's lips. The aquarium rang out in everybody's ears. Morning, noon and night it was nothing but the aquarium" (as quoted in Bernd Brunner, The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium, Princeton, 2005, p. 55). In 1854, the German malacologist (a scientist who studies the zoological group of soft-bodied animals) Emil Adolf Rossmässler published the article Der Ocean auf dem Tische (The Ocean on the Table) in his popular magazine Die Gartenlaube, in which the author deals "with this strange British apparatus known as the aquarium" (Brunner, p. 60).  By 1860, aquaria mania had died out in England, but as late as 1917, fish bowls were considered popular elements in home décor in American households; in The Art of Interior Decoration (New York, 1917), authors Grace Wood and Emily Burbank devote a chapter to the decorative "Treatment of Work Tables, Bird Cages, Dog Baskets and Fish Globes." They write "[t]he f𓂃ish-globe can be of white or any colour glass you prefer, and your fish vivid or pale in tone; whichever it is, be sure that they furnish a needed—not a superfluous—tone of colour in a room or on a porch" (p. 106). In the present work, Leslie's lady of the house is perhaps musing over whether to add this fashionable home décor novelty to her existing aesthetic scheme.