Notes
Travelling through the countryside during the winter months, the Victorian observer would note the intense activity that went into the preparation of the soil for the next season's crops. The land, barely unfrozen, was ploughed and harrowed before seed-drilling could commence. 1 Heavy draught-horses were mobilized for this purpose and on larger farms there may be six or more teams working in friendly competition, such that by the 1870's, more organized 'ploughing matches' became popular. 2 'Rigs' or sections between 20 and 40 yards wide were staked and numbered before the ploughmen began. This spectacle attracted artists, as William Small's double page illustration for The Graphic indicates (fig. 1).
Artists' interest in the representation of English rural life in the final quarter of the century runs parallel to the growth of illustrated periodicals and the demand for naturalism and documentary accuracy. Young British painters could not find these attributes in the work of Burne-Jones and second generation Pre-Raphaelites, so they looked instead to French artists such as Jean-François Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage. With these mentors, there was a strong attachment to 'the poetry of the peasant', to home fields and to the gradual unfolding of the farmer's year. Following Bastien-Lepage, the painter must suppress his own personality in order to convey the intrinsic character of his surroundings. The presentation of material facts acquired a moral value, for its own sake. Such principles guided the formation of the Newlyn School to which the young William Banks Fortescue attached himself in October 1885.
Fortescue was born in Southport, Lancashire but trained as an engineer in Birmingham, before becoming an artist. 3 Having studied in Paris and worked in Venice, he arrived in Newlyn and shared lodgings with Stanhope Forbes. Early works like The Fish Fag, c.1886 (fig. 2) reveal that he was fully attuned to the 'square brush' manner practiced by Forbes. 4 The use of these brushes, and his ambitions as an amateur cellist, is confirmed in Fred Hall's humorous drawing of the artist (Tate Britain Archives). Fortescue's Royal Academy exhibits in the late 1880's confirm his place in the Newlyn School. Homewards, 1888 (untraced) shows a group of barefoot crabbers walking along the beach at low tide, while A Chip off the Old Block, 1889 (untraced) depicts two boys playing with toy boats in a tin bath, watched over lovingly by their fisherman-father. 5
By 1890 Fortescue was beginning to extend his range to include scenes of rural life. This may have been motivated by the fact that 'Newlyn' was being branded as one of the leading schools of painting. Its members had extricated themselves from the New English Art Club and were finding their feet in the Royal Academy. They also were staging their own exhibition at Dowdeswell's Gallery in Bond Street, supported by articles in Art Journal and Magazine of Art. 6 Fortescue at this stage may well have recognised both the benefits and the dangers of being associated with this controversial faction. Accordingly in 1890 he moved to the village of Paul a few miles inland from Newlyn and by 1895 he was living in St Ives, where an equally vibrant artist's colony, had a much less prominant 'house style'.
In moving away from the 'fisherman's cottage' genre, Fortescue looked to two current masters of English ruralism. These were John Roberston Reid and George Clausen. The latter's Ploughing, 1889 (fig.3) for instance, demonstrated the practice with great clarity in a horizontal, frieze-like composition, showing the ploughman and his team in side view. This was, in some cases, a definitive statement.
Although impressed by Clausen's work, the painter may have regarded it as too doctrinaire in terms of 'square brush' naturalism. As a result he is likely to have looked at the work of one of Clausen's mentors - now resident in Cornwall - John Robertson Reid. 7 The expatriate Scot's most celebrated works, A Country Cricket Match, Sussex, 1878 (Tate Britain) and Toil and Pleasure 1879 (fig. 4) both show rural panoramas of the type depicted here. In the first the main cluster of figures is ranged to the left, while in the second - a picture of field workers interrupted by the arrival of the local hunt - they are, as in A Ploughing Match grouped on the right. 8 Unlike Clausen, who stressed everyday occurrences, Reid and Fortescue possessed a sense of occasion. Both choose moments when they are able to portray all classes in the rural community and both emphasise the theatrical by presenting an event and its spectators. Boys look on admiringly and a man with baskets of apples offers them to the crowd of spectators who line the field. In the middle distance to the left, the adjudicator on horseback discusses the race with a well-dressed man and woman, who are probably from the manor house. The landscape, the full sweep of the fields around Paul, gives a view to the sea in the distance.
In Fortescue's canvas the ploughman in the foreground takes the lead, directing his horses to a new section of grass to be furrowed. Ploughing competitions tested the ability of men and horses as much as the quality and design of their implements. Being a 'horse man', the ploughman doubled as a carter at harvest and as someone who operated horse-drawn harrows and seed-drills at other times. Peter H Ditchfield, a Rector from Berkshire who published country life columns for The Times and The Morning Post prior to the Great War, considered ploughing a task that required great skill. He wrote,
'A Ploughman has before him a tremendous task. He has to draw straight lines through a field with a troublesome instrument called a plough with the aid of still more troublesome agents called horses... The ploughman has a vast amount of skill in the management of his implement. He has to attend to the skim and coulter, to fix them well, or a stone may wrench the former out of place; he has to consider the nature and condition of the ground, and set his plough accordingly. I should like to conduct you to our ploughing matches where all the intricacies of the art are displayed and the skill of the carters, their steadiness, absence from flurry or excitement, can be admired. 9
Ditchfield echoed earlier accounts. Rider Haggard, who observed ploughmen at work in the 1890's and may even have taken the handles of a plough, noted that they made their job seem 'an easy matter'. He particularly admired the intelligence and docility of the farm horse, which, in comparison to the 'carriage or riding horse... through heat or cold, sun or snow, plods on hour after hour at his appointed task'. 1 0 Haggard noted the secret call-signs between the ploughman and his team, and if you have 'mastered the mystic word... the horses will turn', as in Fortescue's painting. At this point, great care was necessary lest 'you bring them about too sharply, throwing the plough on its side and yourself in a ditch'. 1 1 The alternative might be to take the corner too widely and arrive several yards away from where you wish to be.
This has clearly not occurred in Fortescue's painting, where with strength and skill the leading ploughman tilts the handles of his plough in preparation for the turn. Seeing this so clearly demonstrated in Fortescue's Academy piece, Henry La Thangue may well have been prompted to paint The Last Furrow, 1895 (Oldham Art Gallery), and Clausen, Turning the Plough, 1896 (untraced). However the real legacy of A Ploughman's Match, Cornwall lay in the earliest works of Harold Harvey, in pictures like The Dinner Hour 1897 (Private Collection) and Crowst 1906 (Private Collection), both of which show plough teams. In later years Fortescue returned to single figure subjects such as For the Fold, 1893 (Private Collection) and after his move to St Ives, his work was scaled down further. Sadly he never reclaimed the ambition, the command of light, atmosphere and mis-en-scéne, found in A Ploughing Match, Cornwall.
1 Alun Howkins, 'In the Sweat of thy Face: The Labourer and Work', in G.E. Mingay, The Victorian Countryside, vol 2, 1981, (Routledge and Kegan Paul), pp. 512-4.
2 Howkins (p.153) indicates a hierarchy of labourers in which 'horse men' were above 'cow men' and casual labourers. Because of their skills they were never laid off, and a team master was treated with great respect. It was he who would mark out a field in 'rigs', by ploughing a single straight furrow for the less skilled ploughman to follow. Ploughing was one of the last farming activities to succumb to mechanisation. While steam-powered threshing was not uncommon at the turn of the century, because it demanded manoeuvrability, ploughing awaited the full development of the internal combustion engine.
3 Biographical information on the artist is sparse - see Caroline Fox and Francis Greenacre, Artists of the Newlyn School, 1979, (exhibition catalogue, Newlyn, Plymouth and Bristol Art Galleries), pp. 204-7.
4 This work, clearly inspired by Forbes' A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach, 1885 (Plymouth City Art Gallery) also features women with fish baskets and a view of the sea with the fleet in sight. Giving prominence to the aged fishwife and bare-foot boy, Fortescue was anticipating Forbes' A Son of the Sea, 1894 (Private Collection) and Walter Langley's Breadwinners, 1896 (Private Collection).
5 See Pall Mall Gazette 'Extra', 1888, p. 58 and Pall Mall Gazette 'Extra', 1889, p. 76.
6 Alice Meynell, 'Newlyn', The Art Journal, 1889, pp. 97-102, 137-142; W Christian Symonds, 'Newlyn and the Newlyn School', The Magazine of Art, 1890, pp. 199-205.
7 For a fuller discussion of Reid and Clausen see Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen RA, 1852-1944, (exhibition catalogue, Tyne and Wear and Bradford Museums), p. 29.
8 It is worth noting that the format of many of these paintings including the present lot, is essentially based on a horizontal double square. Such formats were more commonly used upright for full-length portraits.
9 Peter H Ditchfield, Country Folk, A Pleasant Company, 1923 (E P Publishing Ed., 1974), p. 138. Ditchfield contrasts the ploughman's knowledge and skill with that of the machine worker or driver on a tube railway who 'presses a button and the thing works itself' and yet who earns £7 a week while the ploughman's wage was a mere 35 shillings.
10 H. Rider Haggard, A Farmer's Year, Being his Commonplace Book for 1898, 1899 (Cresset Library ed., 1987), pp. 106-7. Haggard notes the ploughman's skill in assessing the lie of the land, in ploughing a straight line, and avoiding 'undesirable variations of depth in the furrow'.
11 Ibid, p. 108.
KMc
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