Category: Social Realism

Hard Times by Sir Hubert von Herkomer

Hard Times by Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1885)

My featured artist today is the German painter Hubert von Herkomer.  He was born in 1849 in Waal, a small town in southern Bavaria.  He was an only child.  His father Lorenz was a talented wood carver and his mother was a talented pianist and music teacher.  At the age of two he and his family emigrated to America and settled in Cleveland Ohio.  Their stay in America was comparatively short for in 1857 they returned to Europe, settling down in Southampton, England.  Herkomer first art tuition came from his father and later in life he often said that his father had been one of the most important and positive influences on his career.   He went to school in Southampton and began his art education when he attended the Southampton School of Art.  One of his fellow students was Luke Fildes who was to become one of the greatest English Social Realism painters (see My Daily Art Display, May 17th).  When he was sixteen years old his father took him back to Bavaria where he attended the Munich Academy for a short time.  In 1866 he returned to England and enrolled at the South Kensington Schools which we now know as the Royal College of Art and at the age of twenty he exhibited, for the first time, at the Royal Academy.

Herkomer left Kensington Art School and 1867 and started a career as a book and magazine illustrator. However he found most of the work tedious and so being a young man with radical political opinions he was excited by the news that the social reformer, William Thomas, intended to launch an illustrated weekly magazine called the Graphic.  Herkomer immediately fired with enthusiasm sent Thomas a drawing of a group of gypsies. The magazine owner, Thomas, was delighted with the drawings and the following week it appeared in his magazine.   Over the next few years Herkomer supplied Thomas with more drawings which were published.  He applied to join the staff of the magazine but was both annoyed and disappointed when his application was turned down by Thomas.  Herkomer had no choice but to remain as a freelance contributor.  Although devastated by the refusal he was later to recall that this rebuff was to be the making of him as an artist.  He wrote about his belief that he had an obligation to pictorially depict the hard times of the poor and the importance of such magazines like the Graphic, saying:

 “…It is not too much to say that there was a visible change in the selection of subjects by painters in England after the advent of the Graphic.  Mr. Thomas opened its pages to every phase of the story of our life; he led the rising artist into drawing subjects that might never have otherwise arrested his attention; he only asked that they should be subjects of universal interest and of artistic value.  I owe to Mr. Thomas everything in my early art career.  Whether it was to do a two-penny lodging-house for St. Giles’, a scene in Petticoat Lane, Sunday morning, the flogging of a criminal in Newgate Prison, an entertainment given to Italian organ grinders, it mattered little.  It was a lesson in life, and a lesson in art.  I am only one of many who received these lessons at the hands of Mr. W. L. Thomas….”

(Spartacus Educational Hubert Von Herkomer)

A number of his engravings which were used in the Graphic were later reworked by Herkomer into large scale oil paintings.  In 1879 he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy and became an Academician in 1890.

In 1880 Herkomer started to concentrate on portraiture which, at the time, was the most lucrative art genre.  His fame grew and he spent time in America where he completed thirteen portraits during his ten week stay and for them he received the princely sum of £6000.  His wealth grew rapidly and he could now afford a luxurious lifestyle.  Despite the lucrative portraiture market he never lost his love of Social Realism art which drew attention to the atrocious conditions of the poor.  It was in the late nineteenth century that he produced some of his great Social Realism paintings such as Pressing to the West in 1884; today’s featured painting Hard Times in 1885 and On Strike in 1891.  In 1883 Herkomer started his own art school at Bushey in Hertfordshire, at which he oversaw some five hundred would-be artists.  He served as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University between 1885 and 1895 and was knighted by the King in 1907.  Herkomer died in 1914 aged 65 and is buried in St James’s Church, Bushey.

The featured painting in My Daily Art Display is entitled Hard Times and was painted by Herkomer in 1885.  It now hangs in the City Art Gallery of Manchester.  The artist was dedicated to bringing the social problems of the poor to the eyes of the public through his oil on canvas paintings.  He never forgot his early impoverished childhood and his health problems.  The author Lee Edwards, who wrote extensively about Herkomer, commented:

“…Herkomer painted a number of pictures that revealed his sympathy with the poor and disadvantaged, a characteristic fostered in part by his own humble origins…”

This painting was one of his most famous works and was one of many of his paintings which featured rural scenes.  His inspiration for this painting was probably the impoverished migrant workers he had seen near his home in Bushey.  Herkomer actually used a real family for his painting, getting an a working labourer, James Quarry and his wife Annie to pose with their two sons Frederick George and his brother James Joseph as unemployed workers and their children.  The setting for this painting was called Coldharbour Lane, a long and winding road in the Hertfordshire countryside.  The outdoor setting was painted en plein air but the characters in the painting were painted later, indoors at his Art School.

The wife who sits with her children by the roadside looks sad and dejected.   On the other hand, the man looks down the road and his face is one of hope and possibly optimism that something will “turn up soon” and the tools of the man’s trade lie before them signifying that strength would eventually overcome hardship.  It is interesting to note the difference in Herkomer’s portrayal of the effect hardship had on men and women.  So should we view this painting as one of hope or one of destitution?

I suppose the answer lies with ourselves and whether when we face problems we believe our glass is half full or half empty !

Never Morning Wore to Evening but Some Heart Did Break by Walter Langley

Never Morning Wore to Evening but Some Heart Did Break by Walter Langley (1894)

My Daily Art Display today features an extremely moving picture which has the very long title Never Morning Wore to Evening but Some Heart Did Break.  The painting was completed by the English artist Walter Langley in 1894.  The painting today, as was the painting yesterday, is about loss.  The title of the painting emanates from Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, one verse of which reads:

That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break

Walter Langley was born in 1852 in Birmingham.   His father, William, was a tailor and Walter was one of eleven children brought up in an area close to the inner-city, poverty-stricken slums of one of England’s largest Victorian cities.  At the age of fifteen he was taken on as an apprentice lithographer and six years later he managed to gain a scholarship to South Kensington where he studied design for two years.  In 1876 Langley married Clara Perkins. The couple went off to Whitby on their honeymoon which was a favourite hangout of Victorian artists and this was Langley`s first encounter with a working fishing village.  In 1881 he returned to Birmingham and at the age of twenty-nine he was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, which had been established in the early nineteenth century

His lithography work was starting to dry up and this coupled with the news that his wife was expecting twins forced him to make a choice between continuing to be a full-time lithographer or concentrate all his efforts into his painting.  Langley`s growing commercial success as an artist made the decision easier for him to make as he knew he needed the money to support his rapidly increasing family..

He had visited the Cornish fishing port of Newlyn before and was very impressed with the surrounding area and in July 1881 he returned.  This time he went there with a commission for 20 paintings from an important Birmingham patron, Edwin Chamberlain. As the year came to close he received a further remarkable commission from the Birmingham art dealer JW Thrupp, acting on behalf of the Alldays family, of 500 pounds for a year`s paintings in Newlyn.  The year of 1881 was a great year for the artist and his family with the commercial success of his paintings which far outshone anything he could have hoped to earn as a lithographer in Birmingham.   In 1882 he and his family moved permanently to the Cornish fishing port of Newlyn which was to become a haven for artists.  The Newlyn School was the term used to describe this new art colony that was based around the fishing port and in some ways mirrored the artist colony based on the outskirts of Paris, known as the Barbizon School.  Artists from both schools were associated with en plein air painting.   Although Langley was not the first artist to move and settle in Newlyn, he is largely credited with being the Pioneer of the Newlyn Art Colony and this “title” was engraved on his tombstone in Penzance.

Having been brought up close to the poverty of slum life he was a great supporter of left-wing politics and was a follower of the left wing radical Charles Bradlaugh, the great advocate of trade unionism.  Many of his paintings were of the social realist genre depicting working class folk and their struggle for survival.  Some of his paintings highlight the empathy he had for the hard-working fishermen and their families amongst whom he lived, no more so than today’s featured painting,  Never Morning Wore to Evening but Some Heart Did Break.   Before us we see an old woman comforting a younger one.  Her arm is wrapped around the young woman’s shoulder who holds her head in her hands and cries over a fisherman who never made it back home.   Look how the artist shows the moonlight dancing over the ripples of the sea.

This turmoil of human emotions is in direct contrast to the flat calm sea we can observe in the background of the painting.  It is the calm after the storm which has taken the life of the young woman’s beloved.  This is a very emotional painting and “speaks” more than any words could possibly do.  It succinctly illustrates the tragedies which can befall the family of working-class fishermen as they battle against all weathers simply to put food on the family table.

An Al-Fresco Toilette by Samuel Luke Fildes

An Al-Fresco Toilette by Samuel Luke Fildes (1889)

For the third day running I am featuring a British artist.  The reason being is that the small art gallery I visited last week, although it had some wonderful pictures, ninety per cent were by British artists and whilst the paintings were fresh in my mind and I could still decipher my notes I thought I would dwell on what I saw.

My featured artist today is Samuel Luke Fildes who was born in Liverpool in 1844.  At the age of 17 and after he had completed his basic schooling he moved to the nearby Warrington School of Art before moving south to London and becoming a student at the South Kensington Art School and later the Royal Academy.   It was here that he was influenced by Frederick Walker, the English Social Realist painter who John Everett Millais described as “the greatest artist of the century”.   The Social Realism, sometimes termed Socio-Realism, was an  art movement whose members depicted social and racial injustice and economic hardship and in their works of art.  The subjects of their paintings were often members of the “working class” pictured struggling to survive the hardships of life.    Social Realism genre of painting was also very popular in America during the Great Depression and one famous example of  an American Social Realism painting was one by Grant Wood, entitled American Gothic which I featured on January 7th.

In 1869 when he was 24, Fildes joined the staff of the The Graphic, a new illustrated weekly newspaper, which was founded by the artist and social reformer William Luson Thomas.  Thomas believed strongly in the power of visual images and that they could change public opinion and it was his hope that this may lead to the eradication of social injustice and poverty.  Luke Fildes submitted an illustration, which was to run side by side with an article on the 1864 Houseless Poor Act and his poignant offering showing a line of homeless people queueing  up to get a ticket which would give them access to overnight accommodation.  This engraving entitled Houseless and Hungry caught the attention of a fellow artist who also worked for The Graphic, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, John Everett Millais, who showed it to the author Charles Dickens.  The author having recently just lost his book illustrator through ill-health, immediately commissioned Fildes to illustrate his new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  Fame soon followed and in 1870, Fildes left the newspaper to concentrate on his artistic work. 

I am leaving the story of Fildes life at this point as I want to conclude it tomorrow with another of his paintings, which is extremely poignant and sad and is connected to an incident later in his life.  However for today, I want to look at a painting which he completed in 1889 entitled An Al-Fresco Toilette and which can now be found in the Lady Lever Art Gallery on Merseyside.  This painting was a move away from his social realist work which was the main focus of his early artistic life.  Fildes, who began this painting in Venice, had originally decided to call this painting The Morning of the Fiesta.  It is set in a Venetian courtyard of a very old building with its vine-covered trellis work over the main entrance.   The building belonged to the artist Henry Wood.  Fildes and Wood were, at that time, looked upon as leaders of the Neo-Venetian art movement and many of their works depicted scenes of happy groups of girls passing the time away along the sides of the canals or posing on their balconies.  This type of painting was extremely popular in exhibitions and as illustrations in magazines and most importantly with art collectors.

In this painting, we see some women and children preparing themselves for that day’s Fiesta.  It is a vibrant painting full of charm and the sun has lit up the courtyard and the three women as they discuss the forthcoming event.  It is not known with any amount of certainty but it is believed that this is not an en plein air painting of a real life scene but was probably based on various individual preliminary sketches Fildes made and which were then used to build up the finished composition when he returned to his studio.  This type of happy, sunny painting was popular with art buyers.  Lord Leverhulme, the Northern Industrialist, philanthropist, and soap-manufacturer bought the painting in 1913 and considered it appropriate for his soap advertisements. 

However not everybody was happy with Fildes new art genre.  Art critics and the Art Establishment never forgave Fildes for abandoning the Social Realism genre of his early career, which had highlighted the terrible circumstances some of the poorest people in Britain had to suffer.   The Art Establishment still fervently believed that art still had an important moralistic role to play but unfortunately the taste of the buying public was starting to change.   They were moving away from these downbeat works, with all their distressing scenes, and look towards happier and sunnier scenes and Fildes realised that this was the route to financial stability.