Day Dreams 

Curator: Here we have John Atkinson Grimshaw’s “Day Dreams”, an oil painting which perfectly exemplifies genre painting with a romanticism style. What do you make of it at first glance? Editor: Instantly, it’s languid, opulent…slightly melancholic, perhaps? She looks like she’s lost in a thought, lounging in a sea of lace and velvet. Like the artist wants you to just breathe and dream. Curator: And indeed the artist draws us into a depiction of leisure in late 19th-century society. It calls for an inspection into what the lifestyle of upper classes really meant back then and invites one to evaluate the labor and production which was necessary for it. Consider the textile industry required to make those delicate laces. Editor: I was also drawn to the collection of objects displayed on the shelves. Those vases feel carefully curated; symbols of a certain kind of cultivated sensibility. Perhaps it represents this interior, this private moment of "day dreaming," as a curated exhibition of self. Does it make a comment about gender roles as well? The space looks very ornamented and traditionally feminine. Curator: Perhaps. Or, by situating his subject amongst consumer items that clearly took the labor of many to produce, the painting could highlight a social stratum. We see an interior aesthetic dictated by global commodity chains. Editor: True, true. But look at how the light catches the edge of the lace. You can almost feel the textures of the different fabrics – velvet, fur, delicate woven cotton, that glossy hardwood floor, and the shadows dancing on the wall, that light isn’t about labor—it's pure sensation! He romanticizes every element of a domestic fantasy. Curator: Precisely the appeal for the consumer class that emerged during the second industrial revolution when, in order to increase profit, bosses had to give more jobs. To afford this image they themselves were consuming. It creates an idyllic window into a specific context that art, craft and the material conditions are completely woven in together. Editor: And while we unravel its complexities and the means that put her in that very position. Grimshaw still offers the viewer the chance to lose themselves in the dreams within the frame itself. Curator: It truly opens up to complex reflection—about pleasure, beauty, gender and the structure of the classes in this society. Editor: Absolutely! So let’s keep daydreaming and keep our eyes and mind wide open.