Lot 47: Tucking the Rick

Henry Herbert La Thangue, R.A. (1859-1929) Tucking the Rick signed 'H.H. LA THANGUE' (lower right) and inscribed as title (on the stretcher) oil on canvas 44 x 36 in. (111.8 x 91.5 cm.) In the original oakleaf frame

111.8 x 91.5 cm.

London, Royal Academy, 1902, no. 167. St Louis International Exhibition, 1904, no. 75. Newcastle Upon Tyne Polytechnic Art Gallery, Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, Paisley Art Gallery and Aberdeen Art Gallery, Peasantries, 1981-2, no. 53.

Royal Academy Pictures, 1902, p. 118. Academy, 10 May 1902, p. 488. Athenaeum, 24 May 1902, p. 665. Magazine of Art, 1902, p. 398. Times, 1 May 1902, p. 16. Spectator, 17 May 1902, p. 767. J. Stanley Little, ‘Henry Herbert La Thangue ARA’, The Magazine of Art, 1904, p. 6. Sir Isidore Spielmann FSA, St Louis International Exhibition, 1904, The British Section, 1906, p. 25. Peasantries, 1981, ex. cat., Newcastle Polytechnic Art Gallery, p. 56, pl. 4.

with Thomas Agnew, London. Thomas Francis Blackwell, by 1906, and by descent to Mrs L.A. Blackwell (†); Christie's, London, 21 June 1940, lot 186 (6 gns to Abbott). R.E. Abbott. Anonymous sale; Sotheby’s, London, 25 June 1980, lot 45. with Pyms Gallery, London.

In 1904, when Henry Herbert La Thangue’s Tucking the Rick steamed across the Atlantic to form part of the ‘British Section’ of the St Louis International Exhibition, James Stanley Little listed it as one of his ‘principal works’ (Stanley Little, loc. cit., Fig. 1). A robust naturalistic study of an English fieldworker engaged in a humdrum task, it hung close to the classical cataclysms depicted by Sir Edward Poynter in Cave of the Storm Nymphs (1903, private collection) and Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Perseus and Andromeda (1891, National Museums on Merseyside), and it must have seemed like a painting from another world. Lacking all allusion to the art of the past, beside the works of the Royal Academy Presidents it was chaste, if not puritanical. Their fictions contrasted with its facts. La Thangue’s heroine is weaving, or ‘tucking’ the outer wall of a hayrick in order to strengthen the structure against the buffeting of winter winds. It was an important task since loosely packed hayricks could collapse in a storm. This may indeed be the catastrophe from which the labourers in George Clausen’s contemporary canvas, The Rickyards, A Winter Idyll (1902, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) are attempting to salvage what remained the staple winter food source for livestock. Ricks would normally be reduced during the winter months, but first they must withstand the storms of the autumn equinox. In his essay on the artist, Little took the opportunity to inveigh against the modern methods of agriculture that ‘have long since changed in new countries – America, Canada, and Australia, for instance’, and were now invading Britain. While in the bread-baskets of the prairies, industrial processes had been quickly embraced, it was difficult to envisage mechanized harvesters in England’s smaller fields where the tradition for mixed farming and crop rotation in small units persisted. One can imagine the grain merchants of St Louis finding La Thangue’s picture curious. However surveying the oeuvre, Little realized that many of the activities the artist recorded, were ‘likely soon to become extinct’, and works that treated ‘mushroom gathering, gleaning …cider-pressing’ leapt to mind. In some areas, the rick-builders of yore were partly replaced by conveyers and the old ‘rick-master’s’ skills were in danger of being ‘obliterated under the Juggernaut wheels of progress’ (Stanley Little, op. cit., p. 1). For this reason, the painter had recently taken to wintering in the south of France, and three of his Academy pictures in 1902 were Provençal scenes based in hillside farms where old customs and practices persisted. What was nevertheless extraordinary about Tucking the Rick was its impression of a hot English summer day. La Thangue’s young woman was red with the sun and his study of the surface of the haystack was as profound as those of Monet. Its texture reflected the subtlest gradations of colour that expressed the warmth of the day. In 1902, contemporary critics felt the heat from the ‘luminous flash of the girl’s face’ and found it ‘quite wonderful’. Journals such as The Academy and The Speaker considered that his pictures were ‘golden and glowing’, and ‘a pleasure to the eye’, and while he was ‘a landscapist of some cleverness, he is a figure painter of more feeling …’ (The Academy, 10 May 1902, p. 488; The Speaker, 24 May 1902, p. 218). Few could overstate the picture’s visual drama. The woman is placed within the circumference of the shadow cast by the rick, and her male companion strides away in the middle distance – a counter-check that had been one of his early compositional ploys – seen most clearly in The Man with the Scythe, 1896 (Tate). Tucking the Rick played to the painter’s strengths. He sought through the human figure to express harmony between light and air, between mankind and the natural world, expressing what he termed ‘the sentiment of nature’ (G. Thomson, ‘HH La Thangue and his Work’, The Studio, vol IX, 1896, p. 177). And here, in the St Louis cavalcade, his picture sang of a rural way of life that was forever England. KMc.