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Lot Essay
John Glover's bucolic pastoral scene showing farm workers at work and resting after lunch on an English summer afternoon was set in what is now known as Regent's Park in London's inner north. Originally founded by Henry VIII following the dissolution of monasteries throughout the country, the land had subsequently been sold or gifted by The Crown to landholders for farming and pasture use. By 1817, however, the year in which Hayfield near Primrose Hill was painted, Regent's Park had again reverted to The Crown and for five years the construction of terraces, villas and parklands designed by Sir John Nash had been underway.
The intrusion of the urban onto Glover's "celebration of rural life" (D. Hansen, John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Hobart, 2003, p.171) is, however, only hinted at in this idyllic scene of the privations and rewards of the honest labourer. The well-fed farm workers show no indication of the distress they must have been experiencing with the introduction of the protectionist Corn Law of 1815, which resulted in the substantial increase in the price of bread, leading to broad political unrest. Nor is there any hint of Nash's comprehensive redevelopment of Regent's Park, and the rapidly industrialising centre of London is only suggested by the grey clouds, chimney-stacks, and the spire of St. Mary's church in New Street, Marylebone, which had been constructed only four years earlier.
In his only extant oil painting of an English harvest scene, Glover, known as the 'English Claude', follows the format popularised by French seventeenth century landscape artist Claude Lorrain, in which a high viewpoint reveals a populated foreground. Scenes set in middle distance and beyond guide the eye through the painting, so Glover becomes a painter of movement as much as landscape. "His views are commonly rendered not from a single viewpoint but from a range of distances, creating a series of telescoping frames that document an approach to or departure from the central subject." (Ibid, p.45)
The world of Glover's imagination was peopled by characters reminiscent of Dutch Golden Age artist Salomon van Ruysdael and his contemporaries, who had influenced Glover's work since the 1790s. In much the same way as these artists sought to extol the virtues and compensations of the temperate, industrious life, so too in Hayfield near Primrose Hill does Glover trace the balance between work and relaxation in the labourers' day.
This theme would be one which the artist would return to after his emigration to Tasmania in 1831. Aged 68, Glover would paint My Harvest Home, in which a similarly productive harvest scene is illustrated, this time set in Glover's own Tasmanian property, Patterdale. Hayfield near Primrose Hill documents a world of Glover's imagination. 18 years later, Glover's artistic talents had resulted in a level of success sufficient to allow him to produce a document of his own land, his own crops and workers a world away from the country of his birth.
The intrusion of the urban onto Glover's "celebration of rural life" (D. Hansen, John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Hobart, 2003, p.171) is, however, only hinted at in this idyllic scene of the privations and rewards of the honest labourer. The well-fed farm workers show no indication of the distress they must have been experiencing with the introduction of the protectionist Corn Law of 1815, which resulted in the substantial increase in the price of bread, leading to broad political unrest. Nor is there any hint of Nash's comprehensive redevelopment of Regent's Park, and the rapidly industrialising centre of London is only suggested by the grey clouds, chimney-stacks, and the spire of St. Mary's church in New Street, Marylebone, which had been constructed only four years earlier.
In his only extant oil painting of an English harvest scene, Glover, known as the 'English Claude', follows the format popularised by French seventeenth century landscape artist Claude Lorrain, in which a high viewpoint reveals a populated foreground. Scenes set in middle distance and beyond guide the eye through the painting, so Glover becomes a painter of movement as much as landscape. "His views are commonly rendered not from a single viewpoint but from a range of distances, creating a series of telescoping frames that document an approach to or departure from the central subject." (Ibid, p.45)
The world of Glover's imagination was peopled by characters reminiscent of Dutch Golden Age artist Salomon van Ruysdael and his contemporaries, who had influenced Glover's work since the 1790s. In much the same way as these artists sought to extol the virtues and compensations of the temperate, industrious life, so too in Hayfield near Primrose Hill does Glover trace the balance between work and relaxation in the labourers' day.
This theme would be one which the artist would return to after his emigration to Tasmania in 1831. Aged 68, Glover would paint My Harvest Home, in which a similarly productive harvest scene is illustrated, this time set in Glover's own Tasmanian property, Patterdale. Hayfield near Primrose Hill documents a world of Glover's imagination. 18 years later, Glover's artistic talents had resulted in a level of success sufficient to allow him to produce a document of his own land, his own crops and workers a world away from the country of his birth.