Rushes (The Gypsy Encampment). 1873. Watercolour and gouache on paper; 25¼ x 36½ inches (64.1 x 92.7 cm). Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, accession no. 68-1895. See the museum's Terms and Conditions. [Click on all the images to enlarge them.]
This watercolour was exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1873 under the title Rushes, although it is more commonly known today under the title The Gypsy Encampment. The picture shows a young woman harvesting osiers that will likely be used for making basketwork near a gypsy encampment beside a stream. Two other women are visible in the background. The season is late autumn and the time is twilight. The foreground is a mass of tangled brambles and wild flowers growing beside the riverbank, while the midground features the figures of the three women and stark leafless trees. A hill covered by trees dominates the background to the right.
A closer view of the figures of the women.
When Rushes was exhibited in 1873 it received mixed reviews. The critic of The Architect did not find the painting successful as a whole while admiring certain passages of it: "On the borderland between figure and landscape stand Mr. North and Mr. Macbeth; with the first the landscape strikes the keynote of the subject, with the latter the human interest predominates. Neither artist is so interesting as usual. Rushes (140) by Mr. North, is a very careful drawing of a bank, tangled with brushwood and backed by bare trees, above a stream that slips through rushes and all manner of grasses and flowering plants, and reflects the cold sky in silver pools. A few picturesque figures cut the osiers, and a bit of orange drapery relieves the prevailing red brown and purple of the colouring, otherwise little varied. There is beautiful drawing and most praiseworthy outdoor study here, but as a picture the work is not successful" (231).
Foreground details.
The reviewer for The Spectator greatly admired North's handling of the tangled foreground: "There is a rather large drawing by Mr. North, one of the younger Associates, which possesses the quality of suggestiveness of detail in a marked degree. It is called Rushes (140), and conveys a singularly true impression of leafless underwood. But to see it properly one must hide the chief figure, a girl gathering rushes, which attracts the eye too much, and is besides ill drawn. No one that we know of can paint a tangled foreground like this better than Mr. North" (572). In 1879, when a group of five works by North was shown at an exhibition of watercolour drawings at the Grosvenor Gallery, a critic for The Magazine of Art noted North's ability to accentuate certain features of his landscapes while generalizing others: "Mr. North has a manner of generalizing landscape and foliage which gives the greater prominence to passages of peculiar attractiveness in the scene before him; these he accentuates with a touch full of charm. His way of insisting upon the beauty of certain chance wild flowers, while the grass and brambles are vaguely intimated, is entirely his own" (31).
Bibliography
"Art. The Water-Colour Society." The Spectator. XLVI (3 May 1873): 571-73.
Esposito, Donato. Frederick Walker and the Idyllists. London: Lund Humphries, 2017. Chapter 4, 99-101.
"The Water-Colour Societies. – Summer Exhibitions." The Architect IX (3 May 1873): 231-32.
"Water-Colour Drawings at the Grosvenor Gallery." The Magazine of Art II (1879): 30-31.
Created 21 May 2023