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 playing cricket in a fenced off yard. School master and artist 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.
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 on which 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.