3-008-869 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The International Exhibition: "The Auction - Last Day of the Sale", by G.B. O'Neil, 1862. Auction after a clergyman's death. '...the aged partner and his comely daughter, in the first bloom of womanhood, are left without the means of preserving the family treasures endeared by so many associations of affection...Already-although both are still in the deepest mourning - everything must be sold...Not one person in the room has a look or a care for the widow and the fatherless...Our auctioneer is the very type of his class - an arch-hypocrite, hard-featured, impassible, yet perfectly aware of everything going forward; extremely plausible, though a somewhat injured, ill-used, and unappreciated Individual - a fact which he condescends to forget in the intense preoccupation of his melancholy duty. We can almost hear him exclaiming, "Going! going! for the small sum of - ; going!-positively for the last time - going - going! gone!".' From "Illustrated London News", 1862.