3-028-194 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Saved From The Flood," by F. W. Topham, in the exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, 1871. Engraving of a painting. 'Every lover of water-colour art...will look for unfailing grace of treatment, however humble the subject, and for peculiar picturesqueness of execution...he will be sure to meet with a certain type of Celtic rustic beauty, with wild, unkempt hair and bare feet and legs, half-clad in picturesque rags and tatters...In the subject before us we are disappointed in none of these particulars. This little Welsh lass - as Welsh we take her to be - is of the old familiar stock, though her youthful charms have not yet ripened into the witchery of full maturity. She is a wild creature of the moor and mountain; her only care in life is to tend a few sheep. She knows the stepping-stones and fording-places of every rivulet in the vicinity of the family cabin; and she knows the danger of these being suddenly effaced when the streams are swollen by the showers of spring. Who so likely, therefore, to rescue any stray lamb from the flood threatened by that dark impending rain-cloud? That she has saved the little charge she bears in triumph under her arm we see by the arch smile of satisfaction that lights her elfin features'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.