Football, a Painting by Thomas Webster, 1839

The schoolyard game, painted by the man who made a career of schoolyards.

Work: oil painting
Maker: Thomas Webster
Date: 1839
Era: The Victorian game · 1870–1900
Source: National Football Museum, FIFA Collection · via Art UK and Wikimedia Commons

Before the rules, there was the scramble.

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

Thomas Webster, who lived from 1800 to 1886, painted genre scenes of school and village life, and many of them became popular through prints. Football is one of them, dated 1839, twenty-four years before the Football Association existed and before anyone in London had agreed what the game’s rules were. It hangs in the FIFA Collection at the National Football Museum, catalogued A20, and the photograph reaches us through Art UK. That photograph is small, so the house offers this piece only at the sizes it can honestly hold. Webster lived for many years in the artists’ colony at Cranbrook in Kent, among the villages he painted.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

Football, a Painting by Thomas Webster, 1839, printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

Football, a Painting by Thomas Webster, 1839 framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A reproduction of oil painting — Thomas Webster, 1839 — from the copy held by National Football Museum, FIFA Collection · via Art UK and Wikimedia Commons. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

From the same press