Sir Joshua Reynolds the Strawberry Girl Allen Art Museum

April 25, 2022 Post a Comment

It is hard not to be captivated by Joshua Reynolds's painting The Strawberry Girl, which hangs in the Wallace Collection at Hertford House in Manchester Square. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773, Horace Walpole jotted downwardly in his re-create of the catalogue the single word "charming", and we tin can see what that eminent homo of taste meant. The girl stares out at united states of america with childish directness, and, isolated confronting a rocky background, she looks vulnerable. Reynolds produced many paintings of children, but he was particularly fond of this 1. He is reported to have said that a lifetime could produce but half a dozen original works. In this shortest of shortlists he would certainly desire to include The Strawberry Daughter.

And yet The Strawberry Daughter is more than merely an enchanting picture. For behind it there lies a fascinating London story.

STRAWBERRY GIRLS BOTH Existent …
The clue to this story is the handbasket, or "pottle", that can be seen beneath the girl'due south correct arm. This apprehensive object would maybe take meant rather more to an eighteenth-century viewer than information technology does to u.s.a., for it was an essential piece of equipment for the transporting of fruit, an industry that employed a great many people in Reynolds's twenty-four hours. Nether the influence of their Dutch counterparts, the English marketplace gardeners were rapidly improving methods of tillage. Consequently fruit was being consumed in always greater quantities, and strawberries—so much a part of the English scene always since Cardinal Wolsey discovered how to eat them with cream—were no exception. No uncertainty the arrival of superior foreign varieties, which growers crossed with the wild native production, enhanced the fruit'due south appeal.

The centre of the trade in fruit was London, its voracious demands met by the market gardens in rural districts that are now encompassed by the modern capital. In his 1792 local history, The Environs of London, Daniel Lysons estimated that 800 acres within 12 miles of the metropolis were given over to the cultivation of fruit for Covent Garden and the other London markets, the areas most favoured by growers being those along the river that benefited from a loamy soil and the piece of cake supply of manure by water-wagon.

Ii strawberry plants (Fragaria cultivars): fruit and flowers.Aquatint by Charles McIntosh dated c. 1839. Credit: Wellcome Drove. CC BY

The best fruit to reach Covent Garden was sold to those few outlets that were prepared to pay the highest prices, typically shops in the West End. The majority of the produce was simply hawked through the streets, and, if Smollett is to be believed, it was pretty unappealing. Matthew Bramble in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker is horrified to see "a muddy barrow-bunter"—a woman with a wheelbarrow—"cleaning her dusty fruit with her own spittle". He goes on to describe London strawberries every bit "pallid, contaminated mash", a condition they are reduced to by being "tossed by greasy paws through 20 baskets crusted with dirt". Non especially enticing!

The hard work of carrying fruit from the market gardens to the city was done past women, whose labour was cheaper than men's. As the areas with the greatest yield of strawberries were Brentford, Twickenham and lsleworth, the distances the loads had to be carried were considerable. With a basket of up to fifty pottles balanced on her head, a strawberry woman would ready off on a journey of as much every bit thirteen miles—from Isleworth, for instance. Lesser distances were repeated two, three or even four times a day. Even with a load weighing from xl to fifty pounds she yet might walk at a speed contemporary witnesses judged to exist five miles an hour. At the end of a day's work she would receive no more than than nine shillings, depending on the full distance covered.

Fine strawberries! Image in Andrew White Tuer Onetime London Street Cries (1885) page 83.

These strawberry women must have been a striking sight, and during the summer months large numbers flocked to the surroundings of the capital to undertake seasonal piece of work. Various sources suggest that many came on human foot from parts of Shropshire and Due north Wales, where the sifting and conveying of hard ore at the surface of iron mines, which was their usual work, fitted them for a summer in the fruit gardens of the south.

Understandably, these tough characters were a recognisable type in the late eighteenth century. They were a byword for honest industry, and because of the nature of their piece of work they were admired for their robust, healthy looks. Richard Phillips, the radical author and publisher, thought that "for beauty, symmetry and complexion they are not inferior to the nymphs of Arcadia". He admired a piece of work ethic that endured considerable hardship in order to support anile parents or continue offspring out of the workhouse.

Such, then, is the life of hardship and grinding labour that Reynolds'southward strawberry girl has apparently—and come across below!—been built-in into. Non that this is his merely painting to hint at the rather sad twilight world of the children of the poor. 2 further experiments in the genre can be seen in the Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire. In Beggar Boy and His Sister a boy in dreary dress gazes out from the dark. He is trapped, helpless, and a little scared. Clinging to his back, and all but lost in shadow, is a footling sister. Though not shown in the painting there were other siblings too, all of whom the boy supported by making and mending nets, such equally the one he is seen property. The companion slice at Buscot, Mercury equally a Cutting Pocketbook, in one case again presents a solitary and discrete effigy. Despite the whimsical symbolism, the male child's downcast expression and the drab mural give the painting the same sentimental immediacy Walpole found so beguiling in The Strawberry Daughter.

Reynolds'due south studio at no. 47 Leicester Square. Paradigm in Walter Armstrong Sir Joshua Reynolds (1900) page 189.

Reynolds's interest in such subjects is well documented. His close acquaintance and one-fourth dimension pupil, the painter James Northcote, recalled that if the great human being met a picturesque ragamuffin in the streets, he would direct him or her to his house at no. 47 Leicester Foursquare. There he would paint them betwixt appointments with his grander subjects, and a plaintive "Sir!—I'1000 tired" would be heard issuing from the studio at regular intervals. The chestnut accords well with the curiously vague entries—"boy", "beggar", "child"—made by Reynolds in his notebook for the early '70s.

… AND PRETEND
Is the strawberry daughter 1 of Reynolds'south ragamuffin children? Almost certainly not. Her clothes of pale muslin, tied with a bow and gathered at the waist with a red sash, and her fashionable turban à la Turque, are more suggestive of wealth than poverty. Other portraits give articulate evidence of Reynolds's fondness for incongruous settings: the young Lady Catherine Pelham-Clinton, for case, is seen feeding farmyard poultry in immaculate muslin and lace. Similarly The Strawberry Girl is unlikely to exist anything other than a flight of fancy, the paint-and-canvas counterpart to the rustic costume complete with "a fiddling garland or wreath of flowers" that Fanny Burney wore to a masquerade in 1770.

Who so is this little daughter, whose costume so ill suits her role? It used to be thought that she is Theophila ("Offy") Palmer, a niece of Reynolds. This identification has now been challenged, though, on the grounds that Offy Palmer would have been as well onetime to exist the strawberry girl: in 1773 she would have been sixteen. Another proposition is that the sitter is a child who lived virtually Hopton Hall in Derbyshire, where Reynolds had once travelled to paint the incumbent, Phillip Gell. Probably her identity is lost forever.

LEAVING THE LAND
Which may non thing. For the real betoken almost the painting is not who but what it portrays, and that is the inevitable passage of fourth dimension. In other words information technology is a vanitas. Earlier long the daughter will grow into a adult female, and the years will run across to it that her babyhood is lost for good.

Some such moral—loss of childhood innocence every bit the disappearance of an Arcadia—would certainly exist appropriate to the later decades of the eighteenth century, an age that saw Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Goldsmith'southward The Deserted Village. In betoken of fact Goldsmith dedicated his poem to Reynolds, and its lament for a way of life retreating earlier the onset of commercial progress was born of the same nostalgia equally paintings like The Strawberry Daughter:

And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's manus,
Far, far away thy children get out the land.

Whatever is the case, The Strawberry Girfifty is i of Reynolds's best loved works. It was sold in 1796 to a John Willett-Willett for £81 18s, just, when it passed to the quaternary Marquis of Hertford (Richard Seymour-Conway) some sixty years later on, it went for the princely sum of £2,215. Corresponding with his amanuensis Samuel Mawson, the Marquis wryly commented that he "should be sorry to have a big basket at that price"—an allusion to the pottle—but he made information technology perfectly clear that this acquisition gave him very great pleasure.

GONE Besides Before long
But the story has a sad catastrophe. As is well known, Reynolds attempted to emulate the effects of the Old Masters, but his use of fugitive colours and faulty media caused a number of images to deteriorate. A particularly pitiful example of the results of these experiments is A Girl with a Baby, resting in a very poor state in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in South East London. Fifty-fifty in his lifetime Reynolds' s transient canvasses were much commented on, and he was not spared a certain satirical attention.

The point is well made by an anecdote nearly Charles Moore, the 1st Marquess of Drogheda, which we owe to the Rev Henry Crowe. The Marquis, who sat for Reynolds in 1761, led a riotous life abroad for some 30 years until he "became bilious, and returned to Republic of ireland with a shattered constitution. He then institute that the portrait and original had faded together, and corresponded, perhaps, as well as when outset painted".

The Strawberry Girl is i of these melancholy, half-lost paintings. What an irony that its deterioration has only enhanced the sense of childish fragility and fleeting innocence that make it so arresting! Looking at us from a wall in Hertford Business firm the daughter reminds united states of Blake'due south children in Holy Th with "their innocent faces clean" and "raising their innocent hands". Unwittingly, and unforgettably, Reynolds has given us a definitive image of the poignant fading of childhood.

SOURCES
There are many accounts of Reynolds's life and work. Those consulted for this mail service include: Walter Armstrong Sir Joshua Reynolds (1900); William Cotton wool Sir Joshua Reynolds and his Works (1856); Algernon Graves and William Vine Cronin A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1899-1901); Charles Robert Leslie Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1865). The image of The Strawberry Daughter is © Wallace Drove. Bachelor nether a CC-By-NC-ND four.0 (Unported) licence. https://wallacelive.wallacecollection.org/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=64959&viewType=detailView

GALLERIES
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