Costers (originally street-sellers of fruit or vegetables from barrows or stalls) were conspicuous and celebrated figures in London’s East End. They were known for their distinctive speech, colourful, flamboyant dress – referred to by Walter Sickert as the ‘sumptuous poverty of their class’ – and a habitual stoic cheerfulness in spite of their hardworking lives. Costers became a popular motif in British art, c. 1890–1940, reflecting a realistic figurative trend in painting and an interest in depicting popular or ‘low’ culture, which merged with contemporary preoccupations of class and race, notable in the ‘gypsy’ pictures popularised by Augustus John. Rothenstein’s Coster Girls draws on artistic precedents ranging from Degas to Whistler through to Hogarth and even Goya, updated to a modern setting. In depicting the broad, rounded sweep of water seen behind the women, Rothenstein also conjures up a similar waterside setting to that found behind the dramatic lone female figure in his own Souvenir of Scarborough (1893, private collection) painted the previous year. Kenneth McConkey in Impressionism in Britain, has described Coster Girls as ‘one of the most significant renderings of low life’, in which ‘the whole rich vernacular of London trades and types is recalled, foreshadowing the poetry of Henley and Symons and the Paradise Walk heroines of William Nicholson and William Orpen.’ Yet the composition, as Anna Gruetzner Robins has noted, is ‘also very aestheticised with its deep tones, thin medium, and judiciously economical highlights’.
When Rothenstein sent his Coster Girls to the New English Art Club in winter 1894, it attracted the following review: Mr. Rothenstein’s Coster Girls tells its story pretty plainly. A pretty little doll, comparatively inexperienced, sensitive and shy, stands – with the Thames for Background – side by side with a creature at all events less winning, portrayed so realistically that she suggest to me that her claims to have had ‘a Past’ might fairly rival those of some disordered heroine of fashionable melodrama. Many are the painters more agreeable than Mr. Rothenstein, but it is scarcely possible to be more clever than he.