Children Playing at Doctors

Hardy's long and successful career was principally devoted to painting happily nostalgic episodes in childhood, most often of a domestic and humorous nature. As with so many scenes of everyday life, this work is intended to be 'read' like a written narrative. The children here are playing while their mother and grandmother are out of the house; the two children in the centre are pounding bread in a mortar and pestle to make tablets, but the child on the right has taken the game a step further by climbing on a chair to open the medicine cupboard, and is pouring a measure of perhaps poisonous liquid into a glass to administer to the 'patient'. Fortunately, the adults are seen returning through the door, otherwise the patient might become a fatality, an outcome suggested in the right corner of the picture by the doll which has fallen out of her carriage. Hardy also uses a device much enjoyed by painters and their audience in the middle years of the nineteenth century - the mirror on the wall which reflects the view to the outside world through the left-hand window.