Charles Dixon was born in Goring-on-Thames, UK on 8th December 1872. His parents were the artist Alfred Dixon and his wife, Mary Jane Dixon, nee Whitwam. Charles had a brother, Frederick Geroge Dixon, who was born in 1877. In 1891, the family lived in Alfred’s studio in Marylebone, London.
Encouraged by his father, Charles became a professional artist, and soon had a successful practice producing nautical scenes, both watercolours of coastal life and large oil paintings of historical or contemporary naval subjects. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and several of his paintings are now in the collection of the National Maritime Museum in London. Charles first exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of 16 before contributing regularly to the magazines “The Illustrated London News”, “The Graphic” and “The Sphere”. He was a fried of Sir Thomas Lipton, grocery magnate and travelled with him on each of the five Shamrock boats that Lipton entered for the America’s Cup races.
Charles also exhibited at the New Watercolour Society and various other venues and was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1900. He was a keen yachtsman and lived in Itchenor on the Sussex coast in the UK. Charles died at his home on 12th September 1934.
The little boy in the painting is Alfred Dixon’s young son, Charles Edward Dixon, in an actual incident when he had been lost and picked up by the police. Having escaped the clutches of the law, the boy grew up to become a famous painter of water traffic on the Thames. The “Morning Post” carried an amusing review of the painting when it was exhibited at the RA in 1876: ‘The smallest figure upon this canvas is by far the most important personage of the scene. He is a mite of a child, certainly not more than three years old, who, having lost his way, has been taken by the police to a station- house, where he now sits at the end of a long bench, the very picture of infantile sorrow and bewilderment. There is something exceedingly tragi-comic in the disconsolate woe-begone air and manner of this tiny wanderer, as, with head slightly drooping on one side, he looks furtively from under his little hat at the gigantic policeman who has “run him in,” and who, standing in awful majesty, with his back to the fire, surveys him with some such expression of haughty patronage as an elephant might be imagined to bestow upon a flea. That august “Bobby” has not as yet quite fathomed the “Gainsborough” mystery, and he is still some what at sea about the Clerkenwell explosion: but on the present occasion he has on hand a case fairly within the compass of his professional abilities. He is proud of his capture, and evidently intends to make the most of him. So the prisoner is to understand that violence on his part will be of no avail to him, and that the best thing he can do is to submit patiently to his fate. Never surely were greatness and smallness brought into more ludicrous contrast; but it might hurt the consequence of the “force” to be told what is nevertheless the fact, that the captive excites far more interest than does his captor. The group of sergeants seated at the table, and so zealously employed in making out their sheet of night charges as to be apparently unconscious of the presence of their burly brother in arms (or rather in truncheons) and of his prisoner, is highly characteristic, and the whole scene is depicted with a quaint, quiet humour not to be resisted. This is a clever and original work, full of drollery not unrelieved with a touch of homely pathos, so that one hardly knows whether to bestow tears or laughter on the lilliputian wayfarer who is “miles away from home”. Why so good a picture should have been placed above rather than upon the line is a mystery past finding out by any one not in the confidence of the Hanging Committee.’
Sources:
http://www.maasgallery.co.uk/british-pictures-2015/british-pictures-2015/british-pictures-20159-1239
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