Description
Eastward Ho! - August 1857 signed and dated 'Henry O'Neil 1858' (upper right) oil on canvas 36 x 281/2 in. (91.4 x 72.4 cm.) PROVENANCE James Hamilton Houldsworth, 1878. Anon. sale; Sotheby's, Belgravia, 22 February 1972, lot 88 (œ2,600 to A. Glass). Anon. sale; Christie's, London, 16 October 1981, lot 26 (œ12,100). EXHIBITION Glasgow, Loan Exhibition in Aid of the Royal Infirmary, 1878, no. 2. Glasgow, International Exhibition, 1901, no. 199 (lent by James Hamilton Houldsworth). London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Winter Exhibition, 13 December - 23 January 1901-2, no. 111. London, Corporation of London Art Gallery, Exhibition of Naval and Military Works, 1915, no. 139. NOTES Born in St Petersburg in 1817, O'Neil trained at the Royal Academy Schools in the early 1830s. The historical painter Alfred Elmore was among his fellow students, and in 1840 they travelled together in Italy. Meanwhile O'Neil had become a member of The Clique, a circle of young artists who also included Augustus Egg (born 1816), Richard Dadd and John Phillip (both, like O'Neil himself, born 1817), and William Powell Frith (born 1819). In some ways, this group anticipated the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, they were to express a new realism and emotional intensity. Also like the more famous group, they soon went their separate ways. Dadd, for example, specialised in fairy painting, achieving some of his most remarkable work as a certified lunatic in Bethlem and Broadmoor hospitals, while Frith became a highly successful exponent of anecdotal and sentimental genre. O'Neil remained as true as any to the group's original ideas, continuing to paint pictures which made a strong appeal to the emotions. The climax of O'Neil's career was the exhibition of his picture Eastward Ho! August 1857 (private collection) at the Royal Academy of 1858, depicting troops leaving for India to crush the mutiny. In 1856 the British annexed the kingdom of Oudh (now part of the state of Uttah Pradesh, India), and the many sepoys recruited in Oudh were deprived of their privileged position. The sepoys felt that British rule failed to respect their traditions of religion and caste. They resented the British introduction of social changes, and mounting discontent culminated in open revolt when the East India Company issued new Enfield rifles. To load the rifles, the sepoys had to bite off the ends of greased cartridges. Rumours that the cartridges were greased with the fat of cows and pigs outraged both Hindus, who regard cows as sacred, and Muslims, who regard pigs as unclean. The first mutinous act occurred on 10 May 1857, at Meerut, when 85 soldiers, who had been placed in chains for refusing to use the new cartridges, were freed by their comrades. The mutineers killed many of their officers and set out for nearby Delhi, which they captured with the help of the local garrison. Regiments then revolted at Cawnpore and Lucknow; Cawnpore was captured, and Lucknow was besieged. The mutinies and the British reprisals were equally savage, the mutineers murdering their officers, women, and children, and the British firing captured mutineers from cannon. The sepoys vastly outnumbered the British soldiers, and the rebellion quickly spread over north and central India, gaining widespread popular support. British troops recaptured Cawnpore in July 1857, and Delhi in September 1857. The long siege of Lucknow was lifted in March 1858. The last phase of the revolt, played out in central India, was quelled in April 1859. The most important result of the rebellion was the abolition in 1858 of the East India Company and the transfer of the administration of India to the British Crown. In the long term, it led to both greater consideration by British rulers of Indian sensibilities, and increased interest in Indian nationalism. Constant news of the massacres and reprisals had conditioned the public to respond ardently to O'Neil's poignant depiction of families saying goodbye to soldiers as they embarked for India. Crowds thronged to see the picture, as Anthony Trollope recalled in the obituary of O'Neil that he wrote for the Times in March 1880. By the time it was shown at the International Exhibition held in London two years later, it had acquired the status of a modern icon. Although other paintings also dealt with this incident - including N”el Paton's In Memoriam (private collection), Abraham Solomon's The Flight from Lucknow (Leicester Art Galleries), and Frederick Goodall's The Campbells are Coming, Lucknow, September 1857 (Sheffield Art Galleries), it was only O'Neil's interpretation which avoided the sensationalism of the atrocities and concentrated instead on the personal, individual dramas of leave-taking at the dock. Setting the scene in Gravesend, the point of embarkation for British troops destined for the war, O'Neil made the subject particularly relevant for a London audience. He captured a wide variety of responses and emotions inspired by this moment of departure, including, a young wife clasping her husband's hand, a widowed mother numbly parting from her son, and an indifferent boatman smoking his pipe. All would have appealed to a Victorian public avid for sentimental narrative. The Athenaeum concluded that the effect of the picture was 'a simple paths and truth that will bear an hour's perusal....The classes of life, the ages, and the stations of the different leave-takers are admirably expressed and contrasted. The centre of all is a poor soldier's widowed mother, whose foot is just on the last stop, and who is gazing with vacant, wet eyes, quite abstracted, on the tough boatman with the blue shirt and red braces, who is holding out to her his strong-knotted hand;... next up the steps comes a soldier's wife a poor woman but decent enough in her red-chequered trailing shawl, neat straw bonnet and blue ribbons. She carries in her arms heedlessly (for her eyes are strained upward to catch a last look at the dear fellow's face) a child...the grief is wonderfully varied, and is always concentrated, deep, and without self-consciousness.' (vol. for 1858, p. 586). Not surprisingly, O'Neil tried to repeat his success. The following year he showed Home Again, 1858 (fig. 2), in which troops returning from India were seen disembarking from their ship at Gravesend, many of them wounded. This was sold by Christie's, 14 June 2000, lot 18 (œ553,750). Companion pictures of this type were popular at the time. Abraham Solomon showed Waiting for the Verdict and its sequel Not Guilty (both Tate Gallery) at the Royal Academy in 1857 and 1859, and Millais's equally famous pair, My first sermon, and My second sermon, (Guildhall Gallery), appeared, again at the Royal Academy in 1863 and 1864. O'Neil's pair was a strikingly effective vision of Victorian attitudes towards war that combined patriotism, bravery and sentimentality. When both pictures were exhibited at the International Exhibition of 1862, the Art Journal reviewer saw them is highly relevant to the contemporary condition of England. This school of pictorial art is emphatically English...becausewee in England are daily making to ourselves a contemporary history. Britain is a land of action and of progress, trade, commerce, growing wealth, steadfast yet ever changeful liberty; a land and a people wherein a Contemporary Art may grow and live, because in this actual present hour to act heroically, suffer manfully and do those deeds which in pictures and by poems, deserve to be recorded. It seems that both the prime versions of Eastward Ho! and Home Again found ready buyers. Eastward Ho! was acquired by Edward Adam Leatham MP, if not directly from the Academy at least by the time the engraving after the picture was published. Home Again seems also to have been bought from the artist soon after its first exhibition. The enormous popularity of the works is reflected in the fact that O'Neil was encouraged by patrons to produce reduced versions of the pair. These versions retain all the sense of poignancy, melodrama, and contemporary history of their predecessors. Our painting was the first reduced version of Eastward Ho! that the artist undertook, and the composition remains the same as the original. A reduced replica of Home Again (1860), with the same dimensions as our picture and perhaps made as the basis for W.T. Davey's engraving, is in the National Army Museum. There is also a variant pair formerly in the McCormick Collection (1859 & 1861; measuring 32 5/8 x 25 3/8 in.) which was sold at Sotheby's, New York, 28 February 1990, lots 133-4 (55,000 dollars each). A smaller variant pair from the collection Sir Charles Booth, Bt. (1859 & 1861; 201/2 x 161/2 in.) was sold at Sotheby's Belgravia, 6 October 1980, lot 33 (œ12,000). A variation of Home Again (351/2 x 273/4 in.) focusing particularly on the central figure leaving the ship (private collection) was offered at Sotheby's on 6 November 1996, lot 262. O'Neil later tried to recapture the appeal of these pictures in works like his 1861 Parting Cheer (fig. 2), sold at Christie's 10 June 1999, lot 21, and The Soldier's Return (1858) and Before Waterloo (1868). None of these, however, was such a compelling image or received the same level of response as Eastward Ho!.
