A pair of English naïve paintings / Par o luniau naïf Saesneg
Wonderful pair of English naïve school oil paintings, depicting two inns in a pastoral landscape in original faux walnut painted frames. Unsigned.
English late 18th / early 19th century
22½” w x 16¾” h (including frame) / 57.2cm w x 42.5cm h (including frame)

£5650 Sold

….So firm a feature of our life is the inn, and so marked its Englishness, that  there is scarcely one English writer or foreign visitor who has not paid tribute to it. Chaucer, Harrison and Fynes Morison began it, and it continued through the centuries up to the specific looking-back laudation of the writers of the nineteenth century and our own times. The Tudor and Stuart dramatists, Isaac Walton, Pepys…

…..The inn of which I had become an inhabitant was a place of infinite life and bustle. Travellers of all descriptions, from all the cardinal points, were continually stopping at it; and to attend to their wants, and minister to their convenience, an army of servants, of one description or other, was kept; waiters, chambermaids, groom, postillions, shoe-blacks, cooks, scallions, and what not, for there was a barber and hair-dresser who had been at Paris, and talked French with a cockney accent…..Jacks creaked in the kitchens turning round spits on which large joints of meat piped and smoked before great big fires. There was running up and down stairs, and along galleries, slamming of doors, cries of “Coming, sir” and “Please to step this way, ma’am” during eighteen hours of the four-and-twenty. Truly a very great place for life and bustle was this inn……

Taken from “English Inns” by Thomas Burke, London 1943