Beggars Gallery

The Old Curiosity Shop, Nell and grandfather in the shop

The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, first published in the weekly serial Master Humphrey's Clock from 1840 to 1841 and then as its own book in 1841. "Let us be beggars," said the child, passing an arm around his neck. "I have no fear but we shall have enough." Nell comforts her grandfather in the shop while the malicious dwarf moneylender Daniel Quilp perches on the back of an armchair and watches them. Date: C.1850

© Mary Evans Picture Library

Gentleman giving out medicines to beggars, 18th century

English gentleman dispensing his medicine cabinet to beggars at Ivry-sur Seine, 18th century. He gives aerated salts to a one-armed soldier, Bruchsal elixir to an old woman, and magnetic drops, Glauber salts and dry biscuit. Liberality to infirm beggars on leaving Yvri. Handcoloured copperplate engraving after an illustration by Thomas Rowlandson from Journal of Sentimental Travels in the Southern Provinces of France, translated and abridged from Moritz August von Thummel's Reise in die mitt??glichen Provinzen van Frankreich im Jahre 1785'??1786, Rudolph Ackermann, London, 1821

© Florilegius

Boy with Vegetables

Boy with Vegetables. Ceruti, Giacomo 1698-1767. Born in Milan, Ceruti trained there and absorbed the north Italian interest in still-life painting associated with the work of Caravaggio. In northern Italy during the eighteenth century a fashion developed for paintings of peasants and beggars. Ceruti developed this genre by incorporating still-life details of game and vegetables and giving his peasants a new sense of dramatic solemnity. His work earned him the nick-name ?il pitocchetto? the painter of beggars. In 1721 Ceruti moved to Brescia where he produced an important early series of beggar and pilgrim scenes depicting the ragged poor that were quite unlike any previous representations of the genre. Ceruti?s Brescian beggar scenes are large in scale and devoid of the comic and anecdotal qualities usually associated with this style of painting. This late work is one of a pair of possible ?over ?doors? in which Ceruti returns to his early theme of ?portaroli? or basket-carriers

© National Museums NI / MARY EVANS