The picture shows a Liverpool solicitor’s office with a stubborn client waiting, whilst two clerks gossip behind a screen. The little boy is pointing at a spinning top but its meaning is not clear. Campbell was a Liverpool painter, much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, but the humorous tone of this picture is in an older tradition of Dutch-inspired scenes of everyday life. Similar modern subjects by Frith and others were at the height of their popularity in the late 1850s.
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