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Lot Essay
In 1882 David Murray exchanged the lochs and glens of his native Scotland for the home counties. 'Highlandism' - the landscape of heather hills and long-horned cattle - currently dominated the Royal Scottish Academy to which he had been elected. However, with a London studio there were more immediate opportunities to broaden the range of his work. He visited northern France, painting 120 landscapes of Picardy for a themed exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1886 and although these works reveal an affinity with the emerging new school of rural Naturalism and its advocates of Royal Academy reform, Murray was by this date safely within the Academy fold. He was elected Associate in 1891.
Up to this point he had devoted large canvases to the flat fields of East Anglia, the Downs of Sussex and the hop gardens of Kent. Each of these landscapes was recorded with 'frankness' and with 'the one desire to render [the scene] as it appeared'. The term 'impressionist' was even used to describe his work.
'The real make, shape, and lie of things, their obvious colour, the air which penetrates them and circulates about them, all these he sets himself to render as fully as his means allow.1
These words were applied to canvases such as The Young Wheat and Mangolds, 1891 in which vast open fields with dramatic perspectives are depicted. Tiny field workers, placed in the middle distance, convey the sense of scale. These essentials reappear seven years later in The Flowers of the Field, one of three landscapes exhibited at the Academy and painted the previous summer at Shoreham.
The works were praised by the editor of The Magazine of Art for their spaciousness and style, 'with skies more quiet, more deeply studied and more highly finished than is usual for him'.2 The Athenaeum in a lengthy review of the Shoreham pictures saw Flowers of the Field as 'a picture of sunlight', which renders,
'...harmoniously and strongly, yet... broadly and softly, a meadow all ablaze with poppies and purple thistle blossoms. A somber-looking mill in the mid-distance lends solidity and the effect of contrast to the splendours and verdure of the foreground, while far off, the dark blue sea reflects the firmament, which, charged with the electricity of a coming storm, gathers purplish and ashy tints.'3
The Times essentially concurred in finding Flowers of the Field an 'able example' of the 'masterly painting of a man who knows what he wants to paint and paints it without hesitation, or awkwardness, or fumbling'.4 Surveying Murray's work later in the year for The Studio, another contemporary critic observed that the canvas reveals the 'quieter aspect' of nature, and while the foreground is filled with bright red poppies 'lighted by the summer sun', the sky is 'delicate and gentle'.5
Striking shrill colour notes did not mean that the painter had turned his back on the subtleties of tone. Murray always insisted that he painted large canvases in the open air. Although these particular flowers appeared unbidden in a fallow field, this was the time when, with swift railway access to the metropolis, blooms were actually under cultivation as a luxury crop. Flower-sellers were stationed at almost every London thoroughfare and even the humble poppy, with its narcotic aroma, had its admirers.
When Murray was finally elected as a full Academician in 1905, Marion Hepworth Dixon reconsidered his career and returned to the issue of Impressionism - a word frequently misunderstood in Britain.6 By this stage there was a concerted effort to restore native traditions as the basis of the new sensibility. Turner and Constable were revived as Impressionist forerunners and both found obvious echoes in Murray's art.7 However, it was in wide, open landscapes with huge skies such as the classic Flowers of the Field, that the painter achieved his most characteristic effects and significantly it was one such canvas, Swedes, 1905, that he chose to represent his work in the Royal Academy collection after his election.
1 Walter Armstrong, 'David Murray ARA', The Magazine of Art, 1891, p. 400. See also Marion Hepworth Dixon, 'David Murray', The Art Journal, 1892, pp. 144-8.
2 The Magazine of Art, 1898, p. 425; The Graphic, 30 April 1898, p. 531 also praised Murray's 'beautiful skies'.
3 'The Royal Academy, First Notice', The Athenaeum, 30 April 1898, p. 573.
4 'The Royal Academy', The Times, 1 June 1898, p.4.
5 A Record of Art in 1898, 1898, (Studio Special Number), p. 80.
6 Marion Hepworth Dixon, 'The Art of David Murray, RA', The Ladies Realm, May-October 1905, p. 279.
7 His In the Country of Constable was for instance, purchased for the Tate Gallery by the trustees of the Chantrey Bequest in 1903.
KMc.
Up to this point he had devoted large canvases to the flat fields of East Anglia, the Downs of Sussex and the hop gardens of Kent. Each of these landscapes was recorded with 'frankness' and with 'the one desire to render [the scene] as it appeared'. The term 'impressionist' was even used to describe his work.
'The real make, shape, and lie of things, their obvious colour, the air which penetrates them and circulates about them, all these he sets himself to render as fully as his means allow.
These words were applied to canvases such as The Young Wheat and Mangolds, 1891 in which vast open fields with dramatic perspectives are depicted. Tiny field workers, placed in the middle distance, convey the sense of scale. These essentials reappear seven years later in The Flowers of the Field, one of three landscapes exhibited at the Academy and painted the previous summer at Shoreham.
The works were praised by the editor of The Magazine of Art for their spaciousness and style, 'with skies more quiet, more deeply studied and more highly finished than is usual for him'.
'...harmoniously and strongly, yet... broadly and softly, a meadow all ablaze with poppies and purple thistle blossoms. A somber-looking mill in the mid-distance lends solidity and the effect of contrast to the splendours and verdure of the foreground, while far off, the dark blue sea reflects the firmament, which, charged with the electricity of a coming storm, gathers purplish and ashy tints.'
The Times essentially concurred in finding Flowers of the Field an 'able example' of the 'masterly painting of a man who knows what he wants to paint and paints it without hesitation, or awkwardness, or fumbling'.
Striking shrill colour notes did not mean that the painter had turned his back on the subtleties of tone. Murray always insisted that he painted large canvases in the open air. Although these particular flowers appeared unbidden in a fallow field, this was the time when, with swift railway access to the metropolis, blooms were actually under cultivation as a luxury crop. Flower-sellers were stationed at almost every London thoroughfare and even the humble poppy, with its narcotic aroma, had its admirers.
When Murray was finally elected as a full Academician in 1905, Marion Hepworth Dixon reconsidered his career and returned to the issue of Impressionism - a word frequently misunderstood in Britain.
KMc.