3-008-971 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The International Exhibition: "The Emigrants' Farewell" by Carl Hübner, 1862. 'The number of German emigrants who pass through Liverpool - the port of final embarkation [to America] to which this poor family is destined, as we see by a label on one of their packages - is often much larger than any one not acquainted with that city would readily credit...It would seem that sometimes a village is half depopulated in this way. Some such a petty exodus is represented as about to take place in the picture...the family...have come to take a last farewell look at the village graveyard, that sacred spot of earth which will be remembered in the far-off home...There is real intense grief in the honest faces of the sturdy man and wife as if at some recent bereavement. The kneeling sister with her humble package, including the family bible...wears an expression of pious sympathy and grief...The old granddams hobbles along to the sad spot with her stick and her bundle as fast as her rheumatic limbs will carry her. Poor old lady! she has not much to look forward to; unless, indeed, she finds the El Dorado in her family's happiness; her sun will soon set if she ever reaches that land of the West where the sun himself goes to his nightly rest'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.