Contents
1739 – Youth playing at Cricket – J Cole after Hubert Gravelot (? 1730)
Probably the earliest illustration of cricket we have. One of a group of designs used as a decorative border. Also used on dinner services, jugs, etc.
Here the image is reversed and used in the Arms of Shrewsbury
1744 – A Little Pretty Pocket-Book
From A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly with Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer – a 1744 children’s book by British publisher John Newbery.
1744 – His House and School – John Stedman
School boys are playing cricket in a fenced-off yard. School master and the artist are seated in the foreground. Low, wide wicket.
1770 ? – Cricket at the Free School, Maidstone – William Jefferys
Maidstone was one of the early centres of cricket and provoked Puritanical outrage in the middle of the Seventeenth Century.
1771 – A Cricket Scene at Harrow School – Henry Walton
This painting is as much about the game as about the three sitters in the foreground: a professionally made bat of correct proportion, a worn ‘pitch’, a hat to stop the ball, ‘suitable’ dress and distant figures describing the act of bowling. The grip of the batter, however, seems to lack commitment, and the keeper is not concentrating on the task at hand.
The three principal sitters are the Mason brothers of Necton Hall, Norfolk, with Ambrose Humphrys, a family friend and patron of the painter. John Mason (aged 14) is batting, and William Mason (aged 10) is behind the stumps; on the right in the background is Harrow-on-the-Hill.
1777 – Children Cricketers Printing Block – J Marshall & Co
Black, carved wood printing block. Depicts four children, one holding a hoop, one tossing a ball, one with a shoulderless cricket bat over his shoulder and one holding a ball and a cricket bat.
1780 – Carmalt School, Putney – James Miller
Camalt School, Putney
1780 – Charterhouse School
A general view of the school where boys playing cricket can be seen. Charterhouse of one of the important cricket-playing schools of the Eighteenth Century.
1789 – The Darkening Green – William Blake
An illustration by Blake for his poem The Echoing Green. It is time for the boys and girls to end their play.