Exhibition: Street Life: the “Cries” Genre and the Global Topography of Selling Food

The exhibition will explore the long-established genre of the “Cries,” or the representation of street vendors “crying” or broadcasting their wares. Celebrating both the visual and the acoustic aspects of urban life, and usually taking the form of prints, the “Cries” images showcased economic prosperity through representations of diverse occupations and products being sold in urban spaces.

The chronological scope of the exhibition is between 1711, when the first edition of Marcellus Laroon’s Cryes of the City of London was issued, and the publication of John Thomson’s Street Life in London in 1877. The focus is primarily on British print culture, with the majority of the works published in and featuring London, but the exhibition will include works in other media and will be transnational in scope. We plan to include works depicting vendors in Calcutta (present day Kolkata), the British Caribbean, Lima, New York, and Paris, and to consider how the “Cries” genre was developed into an ethnographic discourse as Britain expanded its imperial reach.

Although the “Cries” genre encapsulated vendors with a wide range of wares, we are focusing on works depicting vendors of foodstuffs, and researching the kinds of produce, dairy products, fish, meat and baked goods that were sold on the streets of cities at this period. The exhibition will investigate the proliferation of images of specific foods that had particular significance; one recurring trope is that of the milkmaid, an often-idealized figure that represented rural purity at a time when adulteration of milk was a major concern in Britain.