The Turn of the Plough

George Gascoyne was a painter and engraver. He studied at The Slade and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1884. The Studio Magazine, writing in 1915, considered '...the horse that serves the worker in the fields [is where] Mr Gascoyne is pictorially most intimate...and in this vein..is seen at his best' (Vol.63. p.144). The Turn of the Plough exemplifies this subject matter and is painted in the social realist tradition advocated by Hubert von Herkomer. It was exhibited a year before Herkomers pupil and Gascoynes near contemporary, Lucy Kemp-Welch showed her early landmark picture Gypsy Horse Drovers. Heavy horses working the land was a subject that Kemp-Welch was to make her own, as seen in such works as Ploughing on the South Coast (London, Royal Academy, 1902, no264.), but the present picture, in it's scale, compostion and grandeur shows Gascoyne as her equal.