Scenes from Clerical Life: The labourer is worthy of his bread

This secular diptych is a rare survival in paint by the Scottish-born Peter Paul Marshall, who had moved to Liverpool in 1847 and married one of the daughters of the Pre-Raphaelite patron John Miller a decade later. Although his profession was that of surveyor and civil engineer, in 1859 and 1860 Marshall had four pictures accepted at the Royal Academy, and a total of seven at the Liverpool Academy of Fine Arts in 1860 and 1862. From the late 1840s the Liverpool Academy had promoted the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates, and Marshall would have had the opportunity of studying important paintings there. Introduced to Ford Madox Brown by John Miller in 1856, he was appointed surveyor to the Tottenham Local Board of Health the following year, and was elected to the Hogarth Club in November 1858 as a non-artistic member. He was a popular figure in Pre-Raphaelite circles, and was later described by William Michael Rossetti as ‘a capable painter who might, under differing circumstances, have passed out of the amateur into the professional stage of work’. Today Marshall is primarily known as a partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., founded in 1861. The idea of the firm originated with him, and the address given on the label on the back of one of the pictures is its premises, 8 Red Lion Square.
The label makes clear that Marshall’s subtitle for this pair of paintings, ‘The labourer is worthy of his bread’, differs from that given them when first shown at the Liverpool Academy. The 1862 exhibition catalogue prints a quotation from St Luke’s Gospel, 10:7, ‘The labourer is worthy of his hire’, but Marshall has deliberately substituted the word ‘bread’ for ‘hire’ to make a political point about the disparity in income between the bishop and his hard-working curate. The painting of the latter is based on the early chapters of The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, a short story published in George Eliot’s first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). Barton, a balding curate with a large family, is struggling to cope on very low wages, and it is this aspect which has inspired Marshall to paint his two pictures, entitled Scenes from, rather than ‘of’, Clerical Life.
On the wall behind the curate, Marshall has included a print clearly inscribed ‘BISHOP’, thus providing the link to the other picture, which is of Marshall’s own invention. It depicts a wealthy but stony-faced bishop; on the floor near his chair – not yet in the wastepaper basket – is a large sheet of paper headed ‘Petition’ that mentions the word ‘Curate’. Are we to read this as a petition for a living wage from the curate to the bishop?
In case the message was not clear, Marshall also included in the 1862 exhibition catalogue a doctored quotation from Alexander Pope’s Epistle III. To the Right Honourable Allen Lord Bathurst, ‘Of the use of Riches’ (1736):
‘ “God cannot love”, - says Blunt, with tearless eyes,
“The wretch he starves’, - and piously denies;
While the good bishop, with a meeker air,
Admits, and leaves him, Providence’s care”.
The original reads:
“God cannot love (says Blunt, with lifted eyes)
“The wretch he starves” – and piously denies:
But rev’rend S-n with a softer air,
Admits, and leaves them, Providence’s care.
The social realist aspect of the paintings aligns them with Ford Madox Brown’s Work, which was in progress while Marshall was working on lot 126, Augustus Egg’s triptych Past and Present, 1858, and Holman Hunt’s Awakening Conscience of 1853-4. Marshall’s two pictures are painted with vivid colours and hard-edged Pre-Raphaelite precision; what is more, in the first of them the artist has included aspects that display his allegiance to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The bishop has been reading a copy of the Saturday Review (a periodical sympathetic to the Pre-Raphaelites) and rests one hand on a table cover, which, as Linda Parry has observed, is ‘almost certainly, a copy of one of the [Morris] firm’s earliest commercial embroideries’. One of the most striking aspects of the picture is the screen in the left background featuring large monochrome prints of scenes from the life of Jesus Christ. Pride of place is given to Hunt’s celebrated Light of the World - Marshall could have seen the original in Bond Street in 1861 and would also have known the engraving published the previous year. Hunt portrays the Saviour knocking on the door of the human heart, but Marshall has tweaked the expression on Christ’s face: instead of gazing boldly out of the picture space, he is looking down disapprovingly at the hard-hearted bishop. The Light of the World has pushed to one side a reproduction of Raphael’s Charge to St Peter (the cartoon of which was on public display at Hampton Court in the 1860s). As John Christian has observed, this is probably influenced by the third volume of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1856) which contrasts Raphael’s cartoon – ‘that infinite monstrosity and hypocrisy’ – with the Holman Hunt, ‘a real vision of real things’ representing ‘Christ as a living presence among us now’. Traditional hierarchies, which place Raphael as supreme, are thus subverted in favour of Pre-Raphaelitism.
We are grateful to Judith Bronkhurst for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.