3-028-664 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"The Doubtful Coin," by W. Hunt, 1870. Engraving of a painting depicting '...a boy in charge, apparently, of an apple-stall. There is the bushel-basket, the whole stock-in-trade, perhaps, of the proprietor; and there are the penny lots temptingly set out in order...It is an evening or night scene; and a coin received by the boy from a purchaser presenting some peculiarity, the poor child suspects it may be a base coin passed under cover of the darkness, so he snatches up the candle to scrutinise it. The candle is screened from the wind by paper, and thus, its light being diffused over the paper, this humble substitute for a lantern appears as a luminous mass, the soft emanations from which faintly irradiate the boy's anxious face and the surrounding objects. One feels at once, despite the quaint, out-of-the-way, unpromising, unambitious nature of the subject, that the effect is artistic...and we need scarcely add that it is rendered with the feeling of a true artist, and with that peculiar broken, seemingly indeterminate, yet most descriptive execution so characteristic of William Hunt's practice through life, and eminently well suited to express the doubtful vague lighting of the half-veiled rushlight of our apple-merchant'. From "Illustrated London News, 1870.