The Village Post Office

1849 · Oil painting · 20.3 × 29.2 cm

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Museu Vitória e Alberto

Londres, Reino Unido

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The Village Post Office is an 1849 oil painting by the British artist Frederick Goodall. A genre painting, it depicts a scene outside a post office in an English village, including a man reading aloud from a newspaper. It was one of his earliest prominent works in a long career stretching through the Victorian era. It makes reference to the penny post that had been established at the beginning of the decade.

Equally it has been suggested that the scene at in fact be a nostalgic depiction of the eighteenth century.

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The following year Goodall produced a larger, different version of the painting that he exhibited at the British Institution in 1850. It makes it more explicit that the man is reading news of the Sikh War from The Times. This was later engraved as a print by Charles William Sharpe. The smaller 1849 work is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, having been given as part of the Jones Bequest by the art collector John Jones.

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The first regular pre-paid postal service in the world began in England in 1840, and paintings such as this exploited popular interest in sending and receiving letters. In early years, a village post office often had its home in the local inn, which was, (and still is in some places), with the church, the focal centre of the community. The people on the left are reading a copy of the Times which carries the news of victory for Britain in the first Sikh War of 1845/6, another topical reference of the kind the mid-century exhibition audience so much enjoyed, while the other group, a woman with her children, have received a letter - sealed with black wax to indicate a death - presumably with the news that the family have lost their husband and father in the battle.

Museu Vitória e Alberto