DAVID GILMOUR BLYTHE 1815-1865
Street Urchins, c. 1856-58
Oil on canvas, 26 3/4 X 22" (67.95 x 55.88 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Museum purchase, 946-0-102

Almost totally forgotten by 1940, David Gilmour Blythe has since re-emerged as America's foremost social and political satirist of the mid nineteenth century. In the 1860s, his sly pictorial digs at the follies of urban life and his complex allegories of the Civil War had made this colorful character a popular favorite in his chosen home of Pittsburgh, but his inability or unwillingness to send his works east to the markets of Philadelphia and New York denied him the wider recognition he deserved. Born to immigrant Scotch-Irish parents in East Liverpool, Ohio, like many other frontier artists Blythe began his career as an itinerant portrait painter, a self-taught limner begging commissions among the more prosperous families of the towns along the Ohio River. His travels took him not only to Philadelphia and Baltimore, in the East, but as far west as Indiana and possibly even New Orleans. His ambition led him to loftier goals: a monumental carved-wood statue of General Lafayette for the courthouse at Uniontown,
Pennsylvania, and a "Great Moving Panorama of the Allegheny Mountains" were among his early projects.
By 1855, discouraged by the death of his young wife and the financial failure of his panorama, Blythe turned increasingly to satire. Through his poetry he had already been an active participant in the heated political debates of the era and, like the Missouri artist-politician George Caleb Bingham, had begun to make sketches of frontier types. His artistic models were the works of William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank; his politics were those of a typical Midwesterner of the time, shifting rapidly between the poles of the Free-Soilers and the Know-Nothings, depending on whether the issues were the expansion of slavery or of immigration, both of which Blythe opposed. But Blythe saved his sharpest cuts for the politicians, be they Abolitionists or fire-breathing Secessionists, who manipulated public opinion to their own self-serving ends.
Much of Blythe's satirical painting, however, was aimed at humbler subjects, the vanities of the aspiring middle class, the petty corruption's of the bureaucracy that arose to serve it, and the degradations of the immigrant poor. Among his favorite motifs were the children-homeless, underfed, and uneducated-who swarmed the streets of Pittsburgh by night and day. Just as in a Dickensian novel, these newsboys, pickpockets, and vagrants both shamed the society which had failed them and threatened its disruption with their random mischief.
Street Urchins serves almost as a summary of Blythe's opinions. Jammed into a space seemingly only large enough for one or two figures are eight small pudding-faced boys, their caps worn insouciantly like badges of honor. Most of them are smoking cigars in defiant imitation of grown-ups, though the foremost has found a more creative use for his smoke as he prepares to light a toy cannon mounted on a stack of bricks. A comparison with Blythe's The Firecracker (1856-58, Duquesne Club, Pittsburgh, Pa.) makes the artists message clearer; in that work a somewhat older boy prepares to light a firecracker with his cigar, while flames and smoke rise over the city behind him. Fire, set deliberately or accidentally, was a major threat to all American cities at the time, and the boys of the streets, with their disorderly habits, were often blamed when it erupted. Yet the cannon in Street Urchins, though a toy, is also a tool of war, through which Blythe may have meant to presage the imminent national conflict, an inevitable result in his mind of the lack of social and political order personified by these children.

BRUCE W. CHAMBERS