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Lot Essay
In 1884, the young George Henry heard about the group of young painters who were working at Cockburnspath, a village in Berwickshire. Led by James Guthrie and Edward Arthur Walton, they were influenced by the latest thinking from Paris and their discussions centred around Bastien-Lepage and plein air Naturalism.
The catalyst for these debates was Arthur Melville, a painter with an enviable reputation, who had trained in Paris and whose watercolours depicting scenes from his adventures in Cairo, Baghdad and Mosul were already creating a stir in London exhibitions. Melville’s experiences beyond the ateliers meant that he was less constrained than the others. At Cockburnspath he was struggling over a large canvas depicting Audrey and her Goats (Tate) that, when Henry saw it, must have sparked his interest.
For one thing, it was more vividly coloured than Guthrie’s or Walton’s work, and being based on a narrative derived from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, its premises were radically different. While they painted fieldworkers, Melville took the innovations of Bastien-Lepage to another level and while his picture was unfinished, and would later be reworked, recent x-rays by Tate conservators indicate that his original 1884 goatherd bears striking similarities to Henry’s Audrey of two years later. Indeed during the intervening years the two artists remained in contact and with Guthrie, visited Kirkcudbright in 1886, where the present picture is likely to have been painted.
It was one of the first of a series of ‘goatherd’ pictures by Henry that stretched into the following year and inspired his friend, collaborator and later travelling companion, Edward Atkinson Hornel, who would also adopt the motif. Add to this Lavery’s Rentrée des chêvres, shown at the Salon of 1884 (National Gallery of Ireland) and one begins to appreciate how central to the development of the Glasgow Boys, Henry’s early ‘goatherd’ sequence really is. Its steep hillside and figure tending her flock, not only echoes Bastien-Lepage’s Pauvre Fauvette, 1881 (Glasgow Museums), it also looks forward to the radical semi-abstract treatment of Henry’s own Galloway Landscape, 1889 (Glasgow Museums) which again, following the later working of Melville’s Audrey, finds rhythm in the very structure of the terrain.
KMc.
The catalyst for these debates was Arthur Melville, a painter with an enviable reputation, who had trained in Paris and whose watercolours depicting scenes from his adventures in Cairo, Baghdad and Mosul were already creating a stir in London exhibitions. Melville’s experiences beyond the ateliers meant that he was less constrained than the others. At Cockburnspath he was struggling over a large canvas depicting Audrey and her Goats (Tate) that, when Henry saw it, must have sparked his interest.
For one thing, it was more vividly coloured than Guthrie’s or Walton’s work, and being based on a narrative derived from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, its premises were radically different. While they painted fieldworkers, Melville took the innovations of Bastien-Lepage to another level and while his picture was unfinished, and would later be reworked, recent x-rays by Tate conservators indicate that his original 1884 goatherd bears striking similarities to Henry’s Audrey of two years later. Indeed during the intervening years the two artists remained in contact and with Guthrie, visited Kirkcudbright in 1886, where the present picture is likely to have been painted.
It was one of the first of a series of ‘goatherd’ pictures by Henry that stretched into the following year and inspired his friend, collaborator and later travelling companion, Edward Atkinson Hornel, who would also adopt the motif. Add to this Lavery’s Rentrée des chêvres, shown at the Salon of 1884 (National Gallery of Ireland) and one begins to appreciate how central to the development of the Glasgow Boys, Henry’s early ‘goatherd’ sequence really is. Its steep hillside and figure tending her flock, not only echoes Bastien-Lepage’s Pauvre Fauvette, 1881 (Glasgow Museums), it also looks forward to the radical semi-abstract treatment of Henry’s own Galloway Landscape, 1889 (Glasgow Museums) which again, following the later working of Melville’s Audrey, finds rhythm in the very structure of the terrain.
KMc.