The Dancing Platform at Cremorne Gardens

A crowd has gathered on a summer's evening in the south-west corner of Cremorne Gardens, close to the dancing platform and its central pagoda where the dance orchestra played. The twelve-acre pleasure gardens opened in 1846. Fireworks, balloon ascents, vocal and instrumental concerts, marionettes and dancing were the principal amusements and the charge for entrance was one shilling.

While the most striking feature of the gardens was the orchestra, depicted here, the main subject of Levin's painting is the crowd itself and the social types within it. Pleasure gardens had a reputation as places of debauchery where promiscuous behaviour could go unchecked. Levin shows respectable visitors mingling with prostitutes and other revellers drinking and generally carrying on.