A Golden Eve. Benjamin Williams Leader (1831-1923). Oil on canvas. 1896. H 121.9 x W 182.8 cm Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow. Accession number: 2130; a gift from Douglas White, 1939. Photo credit: Glasgow Museums. Available via Art UK on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Click on the image to enlarge it.
This painting appears in Lewis Lusk's list of Leader's works as A Golden Eve. In the same year (1896) Leader also painted A Silvery Morn, suggesting that at this time he was enjoying painting scenes that were fundamentally mood pieces, privileging colour. Here, the trees with their autumn leaves are gloriously reflected in the water. Leader loved the uplands wherever he found them, whether in the west of England, the Surrey Hills or Wales, and he loved the rivers that flowed through them. There are no people here, the trees are not "prettified" and the boulders in the foreground are shown in almost Pre-Raphaelite detail. This bears out what Tim Barringer says, that "the best of his works, from before 1890, achieve an attractive synthesis of Pre-Raphaelite rigour and Francophile freedom of gesture."
Looking at this rendering of a lovely piece of countryside, one feels that Lusk was right in saying, in 1901, "One may confidently believe that the better part of mankind will always love these things, and appreciate their serious value in making life livable — the hills, the streams, and the man who, by the steady devotion of a lifetime, preserves their beauty for his fellow-men" (31). — Jacqueline Banerjee
Bibliography
Barringer, Tim. "Leader, Benjamin Williams [formerly Benjamin Williams] (1831–1923), landscape painter." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Web. 1 September 2020.
Lusk, Lewis. "B. W. Leader, RA." The Art Journal (attached monograph). Internet Archive. Vol. 63 (1901). Contributed by the Getty Research Institute. Web. 1 September 2020.
Created 1 September 2020