"The reddleman re-reads an old love letter" -- "Arthur Hopkins's of Hardy's The Return of the Native

[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Arthur Hopkins —> Next]

The reddleman re-reads an old love letter

Arthur Hopkins

6.375 by 4.3125 inches

Hardy's The Return of the Native

Belgravia 35 (March), frontispiece

Text illustrated: "He sat down on a three-legged milking-stool that formed the only seat in the van, and, examining his packet by the light of a candle, took thence an old letter and spread it open."

Image scan, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. ]

Hopkins's rendering of Diggory Venn, which resembles Renaissance depictions of St. Jerome, such as Dürer's famous woodcut, suggests the youth's wistfulfulness and innocence amidst humble, domestic details of the wagon that doubles as his business and his home.

There are a number of questions that one might use as criteria for assessing the worth of illustrations in a text, such as "To what extent do the pictures create an appropriate sense of setting, mood, and motion?" and "Does the artist's style and sense of composition complement the author's?" In applying these to Hopkins' drawings one sees that his conception of the story sharpened considerably after Hardy's February 8th criticisms. Whereas the first drawing offers little interpretation of either setting or character, and the setting provides the interest in the second, the third and succeeding drawings highlight key situations, scenes, and relationships in the novel. Particularly moving is the gentle melancholy with which Hopkins depicts the youthful-cheeked Diggory Venn re-reading an old love-letter from Thomasin. A sense of a numinous spirit pervades the humble environment, the reddleman's wagon, which Hopkins has depicted in loving detail: the pots and tankards, the bags of dye (the one in the foreground conspicuously bearing the youth's initials), the kettle, and in particular the sources of light, the stove and the lantern, are somehow reminiscent of Dutch genre paintings such as Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolas Tulp (1632).

Created 5 December 2000

Last modified 30 December 2019