When William Powell Frith submitted eight pictures to the Royal Academy of 1875, he was fifty-six, at the height of his celebrity, and between the two phases of his career for which posterity remembers him. Behind lay the great panoramic works that had made his name: Ramsgate Sands (1854, Royal Collection), Derby Day (1858, Tate) and The Railway Station (1862, Royal Holloway), pictures before which iron railings had been set up to protect the canvas from admirers. Ahead lay the moralising series, The Road to Ruin (1878) and The Race for Wealth (1880), taking up the mantle established by William Hogarth in the 18th century. The Academy hang of 1875 stood at the hinge of this transition, and Frith himself acknowledged the weight of what he had attempted. ‘It requires a genius of a Reynolds or a Gainsborough,’ he wrote, ‘to produce eight works in one year that shall be, one and all, worthy of public scrutiny’ (Christopher Wood, William Powell Frith, A Painter and His World, Stroud, 2006, p. 159). Flowers was one of those eight. Hung as no. 893, it represents the public painter working in a deliberately private key, Frith retreating, at the height of his fame, into the single-figure intimacy he had so long reserved for the intervals between his crowd pictures.

The sitter is shown in profile, seated on a wooden bench against the trunk of a great tree, with a shallow wicker basket of cut flowers on the bench beside her. In her right hand, she holds two fresh-cut shrub roses, one pale pink and one a deep magenta, gathered at the stem and raised for inspection; her left hand hovers above the basket, fingers loosely poised, in the act of selecting the next bloom for the bouquet she is quietly assembling.

The basket is a small feat of still-life painting. Against the yellow straw of its weave, Frith has massed cream and crimson camellias, pink and white pelargoniums, a saffron-yellow rose at the right end, and further roses from clotted cream to damask. The bright notes of the blooms anchor the composition and counterweight the paler mass of the dress and landscape beyond.

The dress too is keenly observed and a record of contemporary fashion. A high-collared, cream-coloured day dress in the polonaise cut, trimmed throughout with pale celestial blue, a tiered bow at the throat, a sash at the waist, and a series of flounced ribbons that punctuate the wide bell of the sleeves. An intricate swirled lace runs along the sleeve edges. The hat is the period’s ‘picture hat’, broad-brimmed and tilted forward, with a generous trimming of blue silk bow and ribbon; such hats had come into fashion as women began to dress their hair in complicated plaits and rolls at the back of the head, leaving the forehead clear. She is set within a bright landscape, but the turning of leaves suggest summer’s end and that these might be the last roses of the year, adding to the elegiac note of the sitter.

Frith had painted single-figure pictures of attractive young women in fashionable dress from the mid-1850s and returned to them throughout his career as a private countermeasure to the public panoramics. These include The Sleeping Model (1853, Royal Academy of Arts), his Diploma Work, The Flower Seller (1865, sold Bonhams, London, 13 March 2013, lot 46); and, closest in spirit to the present picture, A Dream of the Future (1865, Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate). In each, the woman is caught in a moment of absorbed self-possession, and in each Frith’s fine observational drawing can be fully appreciated, set free from the organisational mass of his crowded scenes.

It is worth considering the painting against the company it kept in the 1875 Royal Academy exhibition. Mythological and historical works were prevalent, including several of Lawerence Alma-Tadema’s Graeco-Roman interiors, pictures addressed to a past that never was. Frith, characteristically, offered the England in front of him instead: a woman, a basket of flowers, a river, an autumn sky. The refusal of myth, the refusal of costume drama, the plain truth-to-nature of the subject, these are the unfashionable virtues that made his earlier crowds popular, and in Flowers they are distilled into a single figure. The painting may fairly be read as Frith’s quiet argument, at the hinge of his career, for the continued sufficiency of modern life as a subject for serious painting.

Flowers is among the most accomplished of Frith’s single-figure compositions of the 1870s. Between the public Frith of Derby Day and the moral Frith of The Road to Ruin stands this quieter Frith, the painter of a young woman in the autumn light, choosing her next rose.