Notes
The picture is the joint work of two artists who often collaborated on sporting subjects and scenes of rustic genre. William H. Hopkins, who was responsible for the landscape and animals, was a west-country artist, living at different times in Keynsham, Bristol and Bath. He exhibited in London for nearly forty years (1853-90), supporting the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street. Horse portraits and hunting scenes were a speciality. Sally Mitchell describes him in her Dictionary of British Equestrian Artists (1985) as 'a very pleasing artist' whose horses were 'well observed (and) naturally and attractively painted.'
Edmund Havell, junior, was also known for his equestrian and hunting subjects, although he could turn his hand to portraiture and his contribution to the present picture seems to have been confined to the figures. Havell belonged to a large family of artists who came from Reading. His father, brothers, son and other relatives were all painters, although the best known of them is probably the landscape painter William Havell (1782-1857), who was his uncle.
Having studied under Benjamin Robert Haydon, Edmund Havell, junior, was based in Reading until 1845, when he moved to London. There he remained for the rest of his life, although a visit to the United States is recorded and in 1866 he lived briefly in Clifton, Bristol. This is interesting since William Hopkins had been living at Willsbridge, Bristol, since 1859, and 1866 is the date when our picture was painted (or just possibly re-worked, see below). However, as there are works both earlier and later than this on which they collaborated, the partnership cannot have depended entirely on their being neighbours at this period. They must often have met in London, where Havell, like Hopkins, was a regular exhibitor at the R.A., the British Institution, and Suffolk Street.
Our picture is inspired by a ballad by the popular Irish song-writer and novelist Samuel Lover (1797-1868). Born in Dublin, the eldest son of a stockbroker, Lover began his career as an artist, specialising in portraiture and miniature painting and was elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1828. He first revealed his talents as a song-writer at a banquet given for his fellow Irishman Tom Moore in 1818, and this led to friendship with the poet and an entrée into Dublin's literary circles. In 1826 he produced the best-known of his many ballads, 'Rory O'More', and in 1832 he published his first book, Legends and Stories of Ireland, which proved an instant success. Meanwhile he had not abandoned painting. A miniature of Paganini, executed when the violinist visited Dublin in 1831, was acclaimed when it was exhibited the following year at the Royal Academy in London, and in 1835 he moved to the capital to establish a portrait practice. He gave up miniature painting in 1844, when his sight began to fail, but continued to paint and exhibit landscapes.
Lover was as much at home in London society as he had been in that of Dublin, frequenting Lady Blessington's receptions and helping to found Bentley's Miscellany with Dickens and other friends. Versatile almost to a fault, he had been writing novels since 1837, and he now became a prolific dramatist as well as providing libretti for operas. 'Rory O'More', having gained wide currency as a ballad, was re-cast as both novel and long-running play. If Lover's connection with the stage is reminiscent of Dickens, so is his habit of giving recitations of his own works. Called 'Irish Evenings', these events were a great success, and in 1846, like Dickens twenty years later, he took the show to America, not returning until 1848. After a life of enormous and wide-ranging literary activity, his health declined in 1864 and he settled in the Isle of Wight, although when he died in 1868 he was buried at Kensal Green. Despite the popularity of his work in its day and its expression of what the Dictionary of National Biography calls a 'genuine Irish raciness', it is now all but forgotten.
Our picture is inspired by a ballad that has been dated to 1846, although research has yet to identify it with one of the numerous volumes in which Lover's literary effusions were collected and published. The ballad was sung to a tune called 'The Pretty Plow Boy', and the opening lines are as follows:
When first I saw sweet Peggy,
'Twas on a market day,
A low-backed car
She drove, and sat
Upon a truss of hay;
But when that hay was blooming grass,
And decked with flowers of Spring,
No flow'r was there
That could compare
With the blooming girl I sing.
In the painting Peggy is seen on her 'low-backed car' among a group of Irish country folk taking their livestock to market. Her charms have clearly caught the attention not only of the young farmer walking with his pigs in the foreground but of a better-class man, perhaps the local squire, who rides his brown nag on the far side of the waggon. She sits, just as Lover describes her, on 'a truss of hay', surrounded by poultry and plucking a chicken. This bird's fate, the poet writes with ill-disguised sexual innuendo, invites the 'envy' of 'lovers (who) come from near and far' to admire her.
A very similar work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1864. Submitted by W.H. Hopkins but described as having 'rustic figures by E. Havell', the picture was entitled The low-backed car and was accompanied in the catalogue by the opening couplet quoted above. This of course was when the R.A. exhibitions were still held in the National Gallery building in Trafalgar Square, the move to Burlington House not taking place until 1869; and the picture hung in the West Room with pictures by artists as diverse as Landseer, Tissot, Horsley, Grant (the president), Orchardson and Linnell. G.F. Watts's famous Choosing, modelled by his child-wife Ellen Terry (National Portrait Gallery), was displayed here that year, as was Spencer Stanhope's early masterpiece Penelope, sold in these Rooms on 28 November 2001, lot 3.
Without a reproduction of the R.A. picture (or even a good description in a review, so far untraced), it is hard to determine its exact relationship with our canvas. The latter is dated 1866, but it is not inconceivable that it is the work shown at the R.A. two years earlier which for some reason was re-worked and re-dated. Alternatively it would seem to be a second version of what was no doubt a popular composition.
The picture's early history is obscure, although such hints as we have are intriguing. The inscription on the back, written in French in an old hand and including a price (6,500 francs), strongly suggests that at some early date the canvas was on the market in France. Yet by 1892 it was evidently at Craigcrook Castle, outside Edinburgh, since it is seen on the walls of one of the rooms in a Bedford, Lemere photograph illustrated in James Taylor's history of the Castle that was published that year in Edinburgh (fig. 1). It would be pleasant to think that it was bought by Lord Jeffrey, the eminent Scottish judge, leading Whig and co-founder of the Edinburgh Review, who rented the castle as a country retreat from 1815, carried out major alterations, and remains its most illustrious occupant. After all, Jeffrey moved in similar circles to Samuel Lover; like Lover, he was intimate with Tom Moore and Dickens, in whose company they may even have met. However, the picture cannot have been at Craigcrook as a result of any such connection since Jeffrey died in 1850, some fifteen years before it was painted. It must therefore have been acquired by a later tenant.
