Going Home (The Road Home). Oil on panel, 41/2 x 63/8 inches (11.5 x 16.3 cm). Private collection.
A late rather small symbolist landscape of a lone traveller heading for home as a huge red sun sets in the west. Twilight was one Smetham’s favourite subjects and here he has treated it in a rather impressionistic fashion far removed from the tenets of Pre-Raphaelitism. Smetham’s friend Frederic Shields believed it was Smetham and not the French who was rightly entitled to be termed an original “impressionist”. As Casteras has noted, “the importance of ‘impressionism’ was heightened by Smetham’s frequent emphasis of how important it was to him that the mood of a painting overshadow technique. He thus wrote that the ‘thought of a picture is more than technical qualities seen by shallow persons’…Smetham continually endorsed the primacy of the conception above all” (125).
Smetham had previously treated this same subject in a larger watercolour of 1873, now at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, but this is treated in a much more conventional manner similar to works by Palmer or Linnell (Casteras, Fig. 35, 117).
Bibliography
Casteras, Susan P. James Smetham: Artist, Author, Pre-Raphaelite Associate. Aldershot, U.K.: Scholar Press, 1995.
Last modified 23 March 2022