School Boys Quarreling

This was one of William Sidney Mount’s first genre paintings which helped to establish his reputation as a young artist on the rise in the early 1830s. Mount used a shed on his property in Stony Brook as a model for the structure which frames the young boys in a scrum. In 1831, he displayed it at the National Academy of Design. A critic from the New York Mirror wrote that it was “a humorous delineation, and eminently successful.”