Ireland - 1846. Watercolour and bodycolour on paper. 9 ⅛ x 13 ⅛ inches (23 x 33.3 cm). Collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Image © Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, reproduced for purposes of non-commercial academic research.
The title of this watercolour refers to the Great Famine that Barbara had witnessed when she visited Ireland in 1845 with her father. Benjamin Leigh Smith may have travelled to Ireland at this time on behalf of the Anti-Corn Law League to assess the situation there. Barbara was obviously appalled by the conditions she observed and has written the word "hungry" on the verso of this watercolour, leaving no doubt what the painting was intended to represent. Both Barbara and her father were interested in the social issues of their day and were social reformers, concerned for the poor and underprivileged. The dismal cereal and particularly the potato harvests of 1845-49 in Ireland led to widespread famine and the British government's efforts at famine relief were clearly inadequate. Hundreds of thousands of Irish tenant farmers and labourers were evicted during the years of this famine. It has been estimated that at least one million men, women and children died as a result of starvation, typhus, or famine-related diseases and over a million people, perhaps as high as two million, emigrated to places like North America or Australia.
Barbara was passionate about her art throughout her life and this accomplished early watercolour, done while she was still a teenager, shows a bleak desolate landscape of the west of Ireland at sunset with a golden colour perfusing a clouded sky. The focus of the picture is obviously on the mourning woman in the central foreground, hunched over with her hands clasped around her knees, sitting on the ground by a stream. She perfectly portrays the desperation felt at this time by the Irish rural population who were not only starving but being evicted from their farms. The ruined abandoned cottage missing its roof to the right, as well as additional such cottages in the background, are emblematic of these evictions. Further on a ruined monastery is seen in the left midground. Pamela Hirsch feels this work may have been inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "The Cry of the Human" published in 1844 (26). The poem includes this verse:
The curse of gold upon the land
The lack of bread enforces;
The rail-cars snort from strand to strand,
Like more of Death's white horses!
The rich preach "rights" and "future days"
and hear no angel scoffing, —
The poor die mute — with starving gaze
On corn-ships in the offing.
Be pitiful, O God!
Barbara Leigh Smith was not the only artist to paint a sympathetic picture of the Irish people's predicament. Perhaps the best known is G. F. Watts's early social realist masterpiece The Irish Famine of 1850. Other examples include Erskine Nicol's An Ejected Family of 1853 and Walter Deverell's The Irish Vagrants of 1853-54.
Bibliography
"Great Famine." Encyclopedia Britannica. Web. 1 February 2025.
Hirsch, Pam: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist and Radical. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. 25-26.
Stalker, Helen. Work #4 (Works on Paper Collection). Whitworth Gallery. Web. 1 February 2025.
Created 1 February 2025