Miles from Home (oil on canvas)

The little boy is the artist's three or four year old son, Charles Edward Dixon, in an actual incident when he had been lost and picked up by the police, according to a notice in the Belfast Newsletter (June 1, 1876, p 3). 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: '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 mere 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.'