In anticipation of May 1 and its traditional festivities, this week’s picture is Thomas Sevestre’s watercolour of a curious but now-defunct ritual: Jack-in-the-Green: May Day Celebrations of the Chimney Sweeps of London. The painter, who dated his work 1 May 1850, was an amateur, but although his image has no great pretensions as a work of art – perhaps even because of that – it is a strikingly direct eyewitness record of a fascinating fragment of history.

The liveliest account of the chimney sweepers’ May Day antics is to be found in Nathaniel Hone’s Every-Day Book, or Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements:

“Here they are! The ‘sweeps’ are come! Here is the garland and the lord and lady! Poor fellows! This is their great festival. Their garland is a large cone of holly and ivy framed upon hoops, which gradually diminishes in size to an apex, … within it is a man who walks wholly unseen, and hence the garland has the semblance of a moving hillock of evergreens. The chimney-sweepers’ jackets and hats are bedizened with gilt-embossed paper… Their lord and lady are magnificent indeed: he wears a huge cocked hat, fringed with yellow or red feathers, or laced with gold paper: his coat is between that of the full court dress, and the laced coat of the footman of quality … His lady is sometimes a strapping girl, though usually a boy in female attire, indescribably flaunty and gaudy; in her right hand a brass ladle…

“When the garland stops, my lord and lady exhibit their graces in a minuet de la cour; in a minute or two they quicken into a dance… to the continued clatter of the shovel and brush held by each capering member of the sooty tribe. The dance concluded, my...

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