Lot 141: Alfred Edward Emslie, A.R.W.S. , 1848-1918 bending sail after a gale oil on canvas

signed and dated l.l: A Emslie 1881 oil on canvas

measurements note 67 by 101 cm., 26 by 40 in.

Sotheby's, Pictures from the Collection of Sir David and Lady Scott, 2008, pp. 114-117.

Hunter Harvey Webster;
His sale, Sotheby's Belgravia, London, 20 November 1973, lot 21;
J.S. Maas & Co, London, where purchased by Sir David Scott in January 1974 for £2,750.

Alfred Edward Emslie first exhibited in London at the Royal Academy in 1869, but later showed at the Grosvenor Gallery and at the annual exhibitions of the New English Art Club. His choice of subjects is typical of the generation of artists who sought membership at the New English Art Club: rustic figures, often showing grim scenes of toil; landscapes and coastal subjects, usually taken in winter months and at times of bad weather. There was a political dimension to this preference for subjects which revealed the hardship of the countryside; art was seen as a means of informing people of the realities of the lives of those who endured dangers and misfortune. This direction owed much to the influence of European painters, notably that of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who gathered a community of followers including many British students at Gréz-sur-Loing. In addition, many English-speaking painters trained in the ateliers of French painters, such as the Academie Julian, thus learning to appreciate and emulate continental styles of art. The pattern of Emslie's early career is not known, but it may well be that he had trained in part in Paris or elsewhere in France or the Low Countries. Later in life, he turned to portraiture, and - at about the turn of the twentieth century - to religious subjects (which were commented upon in issues of the Art Journal and Studio in 1900). Although the title of the present painting has usually been given as 'Binding the sail after a Gale', in 1990 Dr Pieter van der Merwe of the National Maritime Museum expressed the view in response to an enquiry from Lindsay Errington that the first word should be 'Bending', explaining that the term described the action of lashing the mainsail canvas to the spars. He further explained that the figures were engaged in the task of raising a gaff, which is a 'fore-and-aft sail on the mizzen of the aftermost mast of a ship [which is] supported by the gaff above and fixed to the spanker boom below'. It was further pointed out that the artist has shown 'the hoops which hold the sail to the mast and which slide up as the sail is hoisted', and the more general conclusion was drawn, on the basis of the 'rigging, smoke and what look like funnel stays further forward', that the ship was a 'three masted steamer'. Dr van de Merwe believed that, although the ship was relatively small, the event was one witnessed far out at sea rather than in the English Channel: 'the sea conditions are not those of the Channel (no ferry would have put to sea in that) and look more like ocean swell' (these quotations and opinions come from a letter dated 21 December 1990, and from Dr Errington's catalogue entry for the work in Sunshine and Shadow - The David Scott Collection of Victorian Paintings, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, 1991, p. 40, where nonetheless the more usual title was retained). The connection that Dr Errington made between the present marine subject and works set on board ship by the French artist, temporarily based in London, James Tissot, was perhaps suggested by the presence in the painting of a young woman who sits on deck to observe the scene. Subjects of an analogous type by Tissot, with similar close attention to naval construction and equipment, and almost always showing attractive young women, were exhibited in London in the late 1870s. These however usually depend for their main subject on some flirtatious innuendo or suggest the desire for illicit assignation between men and women, and are dependent on the traditional story-telling function of British art. By contrast, the virtue of Emslie's painting is its candid treatment of an actual event, not as a pretext for romantic anecdote or suggestiveness, but as something which involved strength and courage, and upon which men and women's lives depended. Emslie's skill in documenting a fearsome and even life-threatening episode at sea, as seen in his Bending Sail after a Gale, also informed his work as an illustrator of contemporary events and subjects of newsworthy interest. In the 1870s and '80s he made a large number of plates for Illustrated London News, including scenes on board ship analogous to the present subject, (Fig 1. Nearing Home for example, showing figures on deck after a long voyage, appeared in 1880, and is therefore likely to have derived from the same experience of travelling by sea that led to Bending Sail after a Gale). Later in the 1880s, Emslie seems to have turned to industrial subjects; his print At Work in a Woollen Factory was published in 1883. His prints were admired and collected by Vincent Van Gogh during the years that he lived in London. In 1882 Vincent wrote to his brother Theo about a subject of Emslie's showing a mining disaster, and sent him a copy of the print Nearing Home; while on another occasion he told of how he had acquired 'another beautiful sheet by Emslie, "The Rising of the Waters", a peasant woman with two children on a half-flooded meadow with pollard willows', a subject that had been published in 1881.