The Woodman's Child. Arthur Hughes (1832-1915). 1860. Oil on canvas. 24 x 25 ¼ inches (H 61 x W 64.1 cm.), arched top. Collection: Tate Britain. Accession no. T00176; acquisition method: presented by Mrs Phyllis L. Holland 1958. Kindly made available by the Tate Gallery on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence. Image acquisition (via the Art UK website), first commentary and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee.
This is a partner to Hughes's much larger Home from Work, which depicts a woodman coming home and hugging his baby daughter. According to the Tate collection's text, these were both commissioned by the Gateshead art patron, James Leathart. Here, the little girl is sound asleep in a sheltered nook, her head resting on a satchel and shaded by a brimmed hat, with a little blanket or shawl, now untucked, only partially covering her frock. A robin and a squirrel are, it seems, watching over her. In the distance her mother and father can be seen, her mother stooping to forage, her father working just behind the tree-trunk in the centre. Very minute Pre-Raphaelite detail fills the foreground. The child is depicted in such close detail and with such tenderness that it seems likely that the model was one of Hughes's daughters. Stephen Wildman tells us that Emily, whom both Terry Riggs and Christopher Newall suggest (Newall 33), was born in late August 1861, and the painting was exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in 1860. The child who is wearing shoes and socks here would therefore (if this really was the artist's own child) have been modelled by Amy, born in December 1857.
Both paintings are widely seen as genre paintings, because of the popularity of woodland backdrops both in early photography and Pre-Raphaelite art. Millais's The Woodman's Daughter comes to mind, although that was inspired by Coventry Patmore's sad poem of the same title, about a girl who was eventually seduced by the squire's son — with dire consequences. But Hughes's two paintings are focussed on a smaller child in this woodman's family, and she is not charged with any ominous or negative associations. Quite the contrary.
Additional Comments by Dennis T. Lanigan
Hughes exhibited The Woodman's Child at the Liverpool Academy in 1860, no. 20, before it went to Leathart, the important Gateshead art patron. He subsequently lent it to the International Exhibition held at South Kensington in 1862, no. 743. As noted above, it forms a pair with Hughes's larger Home from Work that entered Leathart's collection and was shown at the Royal Academy in 1861 — a painting in which a woodman, coming home with his bundle of sticks, bends over to be kissed by his little daughter while her slightly older sister looks on. In The Woodman's Child, however, the little girl is lying down asleep, as described above. Earlier she appears to have been picking wildflowers which she likely intended to place in the small wooden basket resting near her left arm. The squirrel observing her so closely is a large red one, and a massive tree trunk occupies much of the right midground and background.
The critics are generally appreciative. Timothy Hilton has commented that both The Woodman's Child and Home from Work have a "great feeling for what was certainly a characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite painting in the years around 1860 – the texture of rough, country things, the thick wickerwork of a basket or trug, clothes made of corduroy or linsey-wolsey, the unpolished earthenware of a cruse" (116). Christopher Newall, for his part, finds this painting to be characteristic of Hughes's early work: "The landscape setting is executed with extreme fidelity to nature, and the overall composition illustrates Hughes' extraordinary sense of colour evident in his works of the 1850s and 1860s" (33). Like others, Terry Riggs has noted how the forest setting has been painted with painstaking attention to detail: "The Pre-Raphaelite virtue of truth to nature is thoroughly honoured in this picture, where the various elements are painstakingly observed as if they were a still life. The soft autumn colours perhaps suggest ideas of mortality. However, the child is in no immediate danger, watched over by a squirrel and a robin." As for influences, Allen Staley felt that, although Hughes greatly admired Millais's work and often borrowed from his compositions, The Woodman's Child bears no obvious relationship either to Millais's Woodman's Daughter (now in the Guildhall Art Gallery) despite both works having meticulously painted forest settings, or to Coventry Patmore's poem on which Millais based his painting (86-87). Perhaps Millais’s L’Enfant du Regiment of 1854-55, showing a child alone and sleeping on a marble tomb effigy in a church, is the closest of his works that might possibly have influenced Hughes, although this is an indoor scene and not located in a forest.
Bibliography
Hilton, Timothy. The Pre-Raphaelites, London: Thames and Hudson, 1970.
Ironside, Robin, and John Gere. Pre-Raphaelite Painters, London: Phaidon, 1948. 43.
Newall, Christopher. The Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Riggs, Terry. "Arthur Hughes: The Woodman's Child" (Gallery summary). Tate. Web. 28 March 2019.
Roberts, Len. Arthur Hughes His Life and Works. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1997, cat. 45. 148.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Wildman, Stephen. "Hughes, Arthur (1832–1915), painter." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Web. 28 March 2019.
The Woodman's Daughter. Art UK. Web. 28 March 2019.
Created 28 March 2019