"The Miners" by George H. Boughton, A.R.A..

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The Miners

George H. Boughton, A.R.A. (1834-1905)

1878

Oil on canvas

H 66.4 x W 56.1 cm

Collection: Sudley House, Liverpool, accession no. WAG 190

Bequeathed by Emma Holt, 1944

A genre painting with a difference: young men in a stone quarry swing their long-handled mallets to break a huge block of rustic stone, as a prettily dressed young woman, with a small child watching behind her, looks on. [Commentary continues below.]

Image download, commentary and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Kindly made available, via Art UK, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY).

Two pickaxes lie on the rocky ground to the left. The scene is an interesting mix of hardy realism and sentimentality, emphasized by the figures' clothing, against a rough background — perhaps in Brittany, where there were silver and lead mines, and granite quarries amid the forests. Cosmo Monkhouse mentions "his changes of scene from New England to Brittany, from France to Scheveningen, from Holland to Cornwall" (562). As is evident in his later Sketching Rambles in Holland (1885), Boughton was as interested in the process of hard work as he was in costume, and these come together here.

Bibliography

Boughton, George Henry. Sketching Rambles in Holland. London: Macmillan, 1885. Internet Archive. Contributed by the Getty Research Institute. Web. 29 December 2021.

Monkhouse, Cosmo. "Some English Artists and Their Studios." The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Vol. XXIV. Century Company, 1882: 553-68. Internet Archive. Web. 29 December 2021.

Created 29 December 2021