About this artwork

Carse had received some teaching from David Allan, whom he followed in the illustration of Scottish rural life and folk custom.  Some of his earlier pictures influenced the young David Wilkie. The story told by The New Web is a little obscure, and is full of disconnected incidents, typical of Carse's taste. The village tailor and a young lad admire the quality of the new bale of cloth (a ‘new web’) he is cutting. Nearby another a young man (possibly the tailor’s apprentice) embraces a girl, and a scalded child yells beside the large soup pot and her grandmother reaches to comfort her. There seems an implicit contrast between youth and age, so the tailor's ‘new web’ perhaps alludes to the up and coming generation.

Updated before 2020

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Alexander Carse

Alexander Carse