And When Did You Last See Your Father? 1878. Oil on canvas. 51 1/2 x 99 inches (131 x 251.5 cm). Collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Accession no. WAG2679. Kindly made available via Art UK on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
And When Did You Last See Your Father? was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1878, no. 329. In this work Yeames has again left the Tudors behind to select a subject from the Stuart period at the time of the English Civil War between the Royalist suppporters of King Charles I and the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax. Yeames has painted an imaginary scene where a Roundhead officer and his Parliamentary associates are questioning the young son of a Royalist supporter about his father's current whereabouts. The boy's mother and another woman, perhaps his aunt, are shown to the far left anxiously awaiting his answers. The boy is obviously faced with the dilemma of telling the truth, thereby endangering the life of his father, or going against his conscience by telling a lie. This is Yeames's best-known painting and his undoubted masterpiece. As Yeames's niece Mary Stephen Smith wrote:
So well-known is this picture that the mere mention of a little fair-haired Cavalier boy, standing on a footstool and being interrogated by the stern Roundheads, with his little weeping sister in the charge of a huge trooper, and the anxious mother in the background, will bring the picture to the mind of most. It is a good example of what I call my uncle's "arresting" pictures. He had a wonderful knack of choosing dramatic incidents, which left one wondering what was coming. [172]
Yeames himself explained the impetus for the painting: "I had, at the time I painted the picture, living in my house a nephew of an innocent and truthful disposition, and it occurred to me to represent him in a situation where the child's outspokenness and unconsciousness would lead to disastrous consequences, and a scene in a country house occupied by Puritans during the Rebellion in England suited my purpose" (qtd. in Stephen Smith 173-74). The model for the boy therefore was obviously Yeames's nephew James Lambe Yeames. His costume was based on Thomas Gainsborough's famous painting of 1770, A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, better known as The Blue Boy. The model for the weeping girl waiting her turn to be questioned was his niece Mary Yeames. After their mother had died Mary, James, and two other siblings went to live with their uncle. According to Edward Morris the model for the Roundhead interrogator at the extreme right was Sir Henry J. S. Cotton. The breastplate and helmet worn by the standing soldier comforting the weeping young girl apparently came from Yeames's own collection. The jewel casket held by the standing Roundhead in front of the doorway was based on the work-box of Yeames's wife (see Morris 524).
When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1878 it received mixed, although generally favourable, reviews. A critic for The Art Journal liked the picture very much even though he was concerned about the perspective:
W. F. Yeames fills the place of distinction in this part of the room with a capitally conceived subject representing five Roundheads – commissioners and soldiers of the Long Parliament – in a manor house, seated in solemn conclave round a table, questioning the inmates as to the whereabouts of the Royalist owner. The little boy, in pale blue dress, who is now being examined, with his little sister crying behind him, and his mother and aunt tremblingly anxious in the distance, is the scion of the house, and we know before he speaks that a clear, frank answer will ring out to the insinuating question, "And when did you last see your father?" Mr. Yeames did quite right in not making the presiding commissioner a truculent-looking man. We like the picture very much, even if the perspective is proved to be mathematically wrong. [167]
The Builder found this an effective picture to tell this story:
The central place in Gallery IV is occupied by Mr. Yeames's large work, the examination of the family of a Royalist household by a Parliamentary group of soldiers; the question, And when did you last see your father? (329) being put to a small boy who stands on a footstool, to bring his face better above the line of the table that is between him and his questioners. The painting tells its story forcibly; the simplicity of the child, the anxious faces of his elder relatives, and the varied but all alike rough and sombre expressions of the Parliamentary party, form an effective and pathetic contrast. A tall, steeple-hatted figure, seated among the Parliament men, recalls Scott's "Corporal Humgudgeon," and was perhaps suggested by the description of that worthy in Woodstock. [474]
A reviewer for The Illustrated London News felt this was an important picture but disliked its colouration:
Mr. W. F. Yeames, R.A., has only one picture, a very important one, being an episode from the chronicles of the Great Rebellion, and entitled When did you see your Father last? [sic] (329). The junior branches of a Cavalier family are under vigorous examination at the hands of a Committee of Roundhead Sequestrators who have taken possession of the Royalist's manor house. A little boy in blue has been perched upon a stool in front of a table, at which sit the members of the awful tribunal; his little sister, weeping bitterly, and in the custody of a grim soldier, is to be the next witness examined; and two grown-up ladies, pale and trembling, await their turn in the background. The composition is well grouped, carefully drawn, and, in the way of expression, most earnestly thought out; but the work lacks balance in light and shade, and, as a colourist, the artist seems to have been uncertain as to the key in which he should pitch his scale of tints. The tone is consequently an unskilful alternation of dullness and brightness. [434]
The critic of The Saturday Review was one of the few who thought Yeames had failed to reach the standard required in either his conception or execution of this work:
Another picture of some importance from its size and position, is Mr. Yeames's And when did you last see your father? which represents a little boy being questioned by the commandant of soldiers under the Long Parliament. This is not a very new subject, but it is one which is capable of being made highly interesting. Neither in his conception nor in his execution does the painter seem to have reached the degree of success with might fairly be demanded. The opportunities for expression in the faces of the various personages have been strangely missed or misused; the colour seems false throughout the picture, and all the textures have a strange resemblance to each other. [691]
A reviewer for The Spectator admired the toil Yeames put into the work: "In the fourth gallery there is, first, a large picture by Yeames, A., of the historical kind – a good, industrious work, chiefly concerned with clothes and accessories – And when did you last see your father? A little Royalist boy being questioned by a Roundhead, much to his discomfiture, while his sister stands by waiting her turn, and soldiers and domestics fill up the rest of the picture" (730).
The Times was much more complimentary in its remarks, praising both the painting's conception and execution:
A good work in the school of historical painting associated with the name of Delaroche is Mr. Yeames's incident from our great Revolutionary War. Commissioners of the Parliament, in a Royalist manor-house, are questioning the inmates as to the whereabouts of the head of the family, seriously compromised. A brave little boy of six or seven is at the table. Asked, "When did you last see your father?" he meditates his answer, collected and cautious, with the intelligence that bespeaks the experience of a troublesome time. His little sister, less mistress of herself, in the grasp of a not unkindly soldier, cries and hides her face. A little in the background the mother of the boy, and a girl who may be her sister, listen with anxious faces for the boy's answer. The faces of the Commissioners are well conceived; there is a sour divine, a keen, weazel-faced interrogator, an ascetic but intellectual and scholarlike man in black who acts as secretary, and a stalwart captain, through whose sternness pierces some of the sympathy of a brave man with the brave boy and unhappy women. The picture, like all that Mr. Yeames does, is unaffected in conception, unpretentious in execution, tells its story distinctly and with well-mannered technical skill, and is an eminently honest and credible example of illustration by painting of an epoch of English history – the sort of work we may yet, let us hope, live to see employed in our municipal halls and chambers, to help people to something like a realization of the life of the past, akin in painting to a well-written historical novel. For artists of Mr. Yeames's quality of imagination and technical accomplishment there is no work so suitable as this, and none so likely to give the painter a sense that his art had still a function besides portrait painting and landscape.
W. W. Fenn in The Magazine of Art felt this work led to Yeames's reputation rising even higher in the estimation of the cognoscenti:
This latter truly admirable picture represented an episode in the wars of the Parliament, when a party of Cromwellian soldiers who have burst into the apartments of a fugitive Royalist, and have captured, we may suppose, the son and heir of the house, are putting to the little boy the fatal question which might lead to the accomplishment of their purpose, and the destruction of the parent through the innocent truthfulness of the son. The child, placed on a footstool in front of the group of stern, cold, ruthless Puritan soldiers, gazes at his interlocutors with a blanched, half-timid face, in which nevertheless is visible the pride of his race, which we hope will carry the little fellow safe through his ordeal. Close by stand his lady mother and loving young sister, who look at him with mingled pride, tenderness, and fear. Nothing could have been more pathetic or better than the situation, whilst it afforded an opportunity for the display of the artist's characteristics and powers to their utmost, an opportunity in nowise neglected at any single point. [199]
Sketch for And When Did You Last See Your Father? c.1878. Oil on panel; 16 5/8 x 21 3/4 inches (42.2 x 54 cm). Private collection.
An oil sketch for the picture from the Forbes Collection was offered for sale at Christie’s on February 20, 2003, lot 243. It is interesting to compare the sketch to the finished painting. In the sketch, the composition, although containing many of the same figures, is much more compressed. Yeames has omitted the figure of the weeping young girl, which gives much more pathos to the finished painting. Spacing the figures in the final work has led to a much more dramatic and successful composition. The finished picture was engraved and illustrated on page 224 of Volume I of The Magazine of Art published in 1878.
Bibliography
And When Did You Last See Your Father?. Art UK. Web. 2 September 2023.
"Art. The Royal Academy. The Spectator LI (8 June 1878): 730-31.
Fenn, W. W. "Our Living Artists. William Frederick Yeames R.A." The Magazine of Art IV (1881): 196-99.
Morris, Edward. Victorian & Edwardian Paintings in the Walker Art Gallery & at Sudley House. London: HMSO Publications, 1996. 524-27.
Morris, Edward and Frank Milner. "And When Did You Last See Your Father?": The Painting, Its Background and Fame. Liverpool: National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside, 1999.
"Royal Academy Exhibition." The Illustrated London News LXXII (May 11, 1878: 434-35.
"The Royal Academy." The Magazine of Art I (1878): 71 & 224.
"The Royal Academy." The Saturday Review XLV (1 June 1878): 691-92.
"The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Art Journal New Series XVII (1878): 165-68.
"The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Builder XXXVI (11 May 1878): 473-75.
"The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Times (11 May 1878).
Stephen Smith, Mary Helen. Art and Anecdote. Recollections of William Frederick Yeames, R.A. His Life and his Friends. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1927.
Strong, Roy. Recreating the Past. British History and the Victorian Painter. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978. 136-37.
Created 2 September 2023