Messrs Rowne🍸y & Co., London (acquired directly from the artist in 1873)

Rosamond Allwood, George Elgar Hicks, Painter of Victorian Life, London, 1982, exh. cat., p. 58

Unlined. Widely patterned stable craquelure. Two pindots of loss upper right corner. Under UV: Heavy varnish fluoresces and makes surface difficult to read.
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George Hicks was the son of a well-to-do Hampshire magistrate and from an early age he was encouraged by his parents to study medicine. Ultimately uninterested in this career path, Hicks indulged his love of painting. Like many of his contemporaries, he garnered critical attention through depictions of modern life. The Return Home is an intimate genre scene of two beautiful young girls (perhaps portraits of his daughters) asleep in a train car. Ian Kennedy writes: "Just as Britain was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, so it was also the cradle of the railways.  In its formative years from about 1830 to 1850, the railway network in Great Britain grew faster and farther than in any other European country" (The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, Kansas City and Liverpool, 2008, p. 45). Artists were compelled by this industrial phenomenon; it not only altered previously held conceptions of space, time and movement, but became the ideal lens through which the Victorian eye could study the intermingling of classes. Julian Treuherz writes: "The railway, used by all classes, was seen as a social leveler" (The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, p. 83). Hicks appreciated this reality, since despite the young girls' modest social status,🌠 their undeniable beauty and🌞 implied innocence elevates them to subjects worthy of the public's attention.

In the artist's ledgers reprinted in George Elgar Hicks, Painter of Victorian Life (London, 1982), Hicks lists the following painting under the heading "1873": The Return Home – Two girls asleep in a railway carriage – 26 ½ by 20 – Sold to Messrs Rowney R Co - £70. It was the third highest price of the year, the top being for an ambitious 72 by 57 inch painting entitled Mother & Child, exhibited at the Royal Academy that same year.  The Rowney family was an artist's supplies dealer, and one of few whose origins began in the eighteenth century and, although no longer in family hands, still exists today. It underwent many manifestations since its inception in 1789, but by the time the company purchased Hicks' painting, it was held under George Rowney & Co (1848-1923).  In Henry Mayhew's chapter on Romney in The Shops and Companies of London (London, 1865), he notes the existence of a new branch of the business as of 1851: chromolithography. George Rowney likely recognized the broad appeal of The Return Home and intended to disseminate the image 🅺to the public through mass reproductions.