The Fish Stall

A young woman running a fish stall pauses to look at the viewer, a potential customer. With a knife in one hand and a fish tail in the other, she is about to clean or cut a codfish. The stall consists of a wooden table with a lead cover which is placed outside street-level premises. Inside can be seen, from left to right, a barrel, a water pump and a staircase lit by natural light.

Among the array of seafood on the table are crabs, eels, salmon, a boiled lobster, a barrel of oysters and a basket of mussels. Bill stickers on the wall to the left associate the painting with Billingsgate, the site of the City's reknowned fish market.

The Scottish genre painter William Kidd was influenced by the work of David Wilkie and Alexander Carse. He came to London and exhibited at the Royal Aademy and the British Institution. However, after Kidd was elected an honoury member of the Royal Scottish Academy, he increasingly exhibited his work in Edinburgh.