The Call of the Prophet Amos, 1875. Oil on canvas, 10 x 24 in. (25.5 x 61.2 cm). Private collection. Click on image to enlarge it.
Amos was an Old Testament prophet and shepherd, who lived at Tekoa, a small village about ten miles south of Jerusalem in the Judian highlands on the edge of the desert of Judah. Amos also tended sycamore trees and harvested their berries, which the prophet can be seen placing in a basket in this painting. He was given a special call by God to be his prophet. Amos foretold to a hostile audience the doom that would fall on Israel unless its people changed their ways. Subjects such as this appealed to Smetham because he felt they had contemporary significance to nineteenth-century Britain, which was in the midst of social, industrial, and religious upheavals of its own. Amos had lived c. 760 B.C. during the reign of Jeroboam II, at a time that Israel was at the height of its political influence in the ancient world. Its military power had expanded Israel’s borders as far as they had ever been and the country enjoyed great prosperity. Like Victorian England, however, its society was also full of social injustices. Amos preached not only against false worship and immorality, but also against the oppression of the poor. He felt that the worship of God of necessity must include the protection of the weak in society. During the reign of Jeroboam I the worship of Baal and of the golden calf was instituted. Amos proclaimed against this false religion still practiced in the northern kingdom of Israel and advocated a return to the traditional worship of Yahweh practiced in the southern kingdom of Judea. Amos called upon the people of Israel to repent and forsake false religion or their punishment would be inevitable and irrevocable.
This visionary work is more reminiscent of the work of the earlier English painters known as The Ancients, which included William Blake, Samuel Palmer, and John Linnell. The figure of the prophet Amos, which looms out of the right foreground, has more of the monumentality of a figure by G. F. Watts, such as his figure of Mammon in the painting Mammon: Dedicated to his Worshippers of 1884-85 (Tate Gallery, London). Watts and Smetham were acquainted with each other and admired the other’s work.
According to Susan Casteras,
other scriptural subjects portrayed different moments of crisis or anguish for their protagonists, for example… The Call of the Prophet Amos of 1875. While the figure in the latter work occupies only one corner of the horizontal composition, he looms large – even excessively so - in scale, and his spatial relationships to the animals and landscape nearby is problematic. Yet his emotional/psychological state also sets him apart, and his size, the grove of trees, and the basket all seem to crowd him into a rather suffocating position. By 1875 this had become a recurrent devise that Smetham used to create psychological isolation and to suggest the claustrophobia of individual situations, and in this late work the effect still remains powerful. Smetham also asserted that the subject suggested the ‘glorious impartiality’ of God, writing in 1870: ‘How grand is this that the ploughman on his sod, Amos the gatherer of sycamore fruit and herdsman, and Daniel invested with sweeping cares and dignities of state are one before the Glorious Father!’” [106, 108].
Bibliography
Casteras, Susan P. James Smetham: Artist, Author, Pre-Raphaelite Associate. Aldershot, U.K.: Scholar Press, 1995.
Last modified 23 March 2022