London’s Guildhall reveals hidden gems among collection of 4,000 paintings

Collection forgotten for 50 years after building bombed in Blitz reopens to the public in January after refurbishment

The portraits of stern-faced City worthies in robes, wigs and chains of office in London’s Guildhall collection have now mostly been banished to the stores. Instead, the walls are full of women and children, paintings including Grecian nymphs, serene Victorian ladies arranging flowers on a sunny window seat, a little girl painted by John Everett Millais yawning through a long sermon, and two Victorian children, a match girl and a crossing sweeper, shivering in the snow as they look yearningly at a pantomime poster.

A ticket would have been an unimaginable luxury for these children. The sentimental middle-class Victorian audience, the target audience for artist Augustus Edwin Mulready, for whom a family outing to the pantomime was an essential part of Christmas, might have winced, or even wept.

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