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A group of two adults and three children. The children are playing, two of them throwing hay over the third, who is on the ground. To their right, a man is standing holding a pitchfork, looking on at them, smiling. To their left, a woman is standing, raking hay.

The museum is a subsidiary branch of the Victoria and Albert Museum and opened as the East End Museum of Science and Art on 24 June 1872, incorporating into its structure the iron framework used as part of the temporary buildings erected in 1856 for the then South Kensington Museum, and known popularly as the ‘Brompton Boilers’. ‘Since the destruction by fire of the Crystal Palace and the demolition of other great Victorian iron structures such as the Coal Exchange, Bethnal Green Museum is the most important surviving example of the type of pre-fabricated iron and glass construction employed by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition building of 1851. The building was designed by Major-General Scott, the designer of the Albert Hall. The mosaic decorations which form a frieze on the exterior walls of the building are from designs by F.W. Moody and show, on the north side, man engaged in the arts and science, and on the south side of the building, various agricultural pursuits. The frieze was executed by students of the National Art Training School, now the Royal College of Art.’(1) A contemporary account of the museum’s opening, remarks of the building’s exterior: ‘It is built in three spans or bays, the walls being of red brick, with thirteen somewhat mean-looking windows at each side, over which are flat mosaics, similar to the work along the frieze at the Albert Hall, and designed by the lady students of the South Kensington School of Art. They represent various branches of industry, both agricultural and manufacturing, as well as the fine arts and sciences, such as music, sculpture, astronomy, chemistry and such like’.(2) The mosaics are all muted in colour with only one panel, ‘Spectral Analysis’, incorporating any colours other than the subdued reddish-greys which blend in well with the surrounding brickwork. At the time of the museum’s opening, much of the contemporary press coverage was patronising and dismissive in its tone, both of the building itself, incorporating as it did elements of the old ‘Brompton Boilers’ and, more particularly, of the Bethnal Green area itself as a suitable site for a museum, a fact which caused great local offence and indignation. A typical type of account ran: ‘ . . . a great ugly building has been slowly reared. We regret to be obliged to call the gloomy pile ugly; but no other word will even so much as imply its extreme deformity, which is not even relieved by the extraordinary device of coarsely painting the outside with almost grotesquely primitive representations of various human pursuits, while beneath each picture it has been thought desirable, in order to guard against popular errors, to inscribe in words what the representation is intended to convey, in the manner of the legends under the coarse woodcuts of an old-fashioned primer or child’s spelling-book. This may be desirable for a place where education has been so long neglected, but let us hope that the operation of the new Government schools will ere long enable the promoters of the East End Museum to erase the explanations from their mural adornments’.(3) Of the mosaics themselves: ‘The designs for these mosaics were by Frank Moody, full-size drawings being prepared by W. Wise. The female students of the South Kensington Museum Mosaic Class made the mosaics under the superintendence of S. Cooper of Minton, Hollins & Co. Minton’s quotation of £420 for twenty panels was accepted in January 1870. Inside the building a mosaic floor was laid by E.F. DuCane’s female prisoners, to the fish-scale design used beneath the Sheepshanks Gallery at South Kensington, for £286-6s-0d’.(4)

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110cm high approx x 202cm wide approx