The Pride of the Village, by John Callcott Horsley, 1817-1903

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The Pride of the Village

John Callcott Horsley, 1817-1903

1839

Oil on mahogany

Support: 762 x 622 mm.

Collection: Tate, presented by Robert Vernon in 1847 (ref. N00446)

The gallery label of March 1993 expains that the painting was first shown at the Royal Academy with an accompanying quotation from Washington Irving's 1819 short story of the same title. [Commentary continues below. Mouse over the text for links.]

Image kindly released by the Tate Gallery under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) licence. Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Image acquisition and text by Jacqueline Banerjee

In Irving's story, an only daughter's role as May Queen brings her to the attention of a young army officer. To her great distress, he subsequently proves false: "A tear trembles in her soft blue eyes. Was she thinking of her faithless lover? Or were her thoughts wandering to that distant churchyard into whose bosom she might soon be gathered?" Like the girl in Tennyson's poem, "The May Queen" of 1832, which Horsley later illustrated for the Moxon edition of the poet's work, the girl dies. She pines away at home, in just the sort of cottage in which she is depicted here.

The painting is typical of Horsley's work in these years. He loved seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and liked to emulate it by producing compositions with "architectural elements and strong light effects used to divide and dramatize the composition, and with the use of open doors and windows revealing secondary characters or vistas to other rooms" (Valentine). Here, the father's face stands out against the light from a large window, as he broods over the tragic decline of his daughter.

The sentimental story of the May Queen, beloved by all, whose great day is soon followed by her death, was hugely popular in nineteenth century art (see Thomas 64-76). It is not surprising that Horsley should later have provided three of the illustrations for Tennyson's poem.

Related Material

Horsley's first illustration for The May Queen (followed by two more)

Bibliography

Tate Gallery display Label, March 1993. Web. 9 April 2018.

Thomas, Julia. Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004.

Valentine, Helen. "Horsley, John Callcott (1817–1903), painter." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Web. 9 April 2018.

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Created 9 April 2018