The Good Harvest [The Good Harvest of '54], shown on the right in its frame. 1854. Oil on canvas. 17 1/4 x 13 3/4 inches (43.8 x 34.9 cm). Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, accession no. 1394-1869. Images © Victoria and Albert Museum, downloaded with thanks, for the purpose of non-commercial research.
Collins exhibited this painting at the Royal Academy in 1855, no. 1334. It was the last work he was to show there before eventually abandoning painting altogether in 1858 due to his lack of financial success as an artist. The painting shows a young girl in a purple dress holding a wheat sheaf in her arms. Unlike many of Collins's paintings of young girls or women this painting appears to be a modern life genre subject and does not appear to have an overt underlying religious meaning. The girl stands in front of an oak door to a rural cottage, seen to the right, with a red brick ivy-covered wall to the left.
Allen Staley feels this picture is yet another example of Collins leaning heavily upon the work of his close friend John Everett Millais: "It shows a continuing dependence upon Millais; the background of ivy on a brick wall comes straight from the Huguenot" (83). Suzanne Fagence Cooper has also pointed out, but in a more nuanced fashion, the close association of this work with that of Millais:
The Good Harvest of 1854, is characteristic of the PRB approach. The carefully studied brick wall, smothered with ivy, reminds us of the background to Millais' hit painting The Huguenot, painted three years earlier, and the girl's pinafore dress seems to be the very one worn by Millais' Woodman's Daughter (1850-1). Milliais had asked his Oxford patron, Mrs. Combe, to look out for just such a dress writing: 'if you should see a child with a bright lilac pinafore on, lay strong hands on the same…. I do not wish it new, but clean, with some little pattern – pink spots, or anything of that kind." Apparently this useful item had been passed on to Collins, On one level, this picture is a celebration of plenty after the years of the 1840s. However, the little girl's solemn expression makes us hesitate. Her gaze reflects an awareness of the passing seasons and the symbolic resonance of harvest time. Collins's work predates Millais' own exploration of the subjects in Autumn Leaves (1855-6) and Spring (Apple Blossoms) (1856-9). Collins is rather more subtle in his symbolism, unlike Millais' bonfire or scythe imagery. The girl's thoughtfulness suggests that she recognizes that her own childhood is short-lived; the fact that she is clearly expected to work in the fields reinforces this. There is also an implied Christian interpretation of the sheaf of corn: it is both a symbol of the harvest of souls at the end of time, described in Revelations, and a reference to Christ's body, represented by the bread of the Eucharist. As a High Anglican, Collins would have been well versed in such multiple readings. [56 & 58]
The discussion of this picture on the Victoria and Albert Museum site suggests that there might indeed be religious undertones to this picture as it relates to the bread and wine used in the sacrament of Holy Communion:
The 1850s saw a number of bountiful harvests in Britain, following a series of disastrous harvests in the "hungry forties." This painting celebrates the magnificent harvest of 1854. Collins adds an extra dimension by painting the child holding a bound sheaf of wheat, both the traditional symbol of concord and the attribute of Ceres, classical goddess of agriculture and abundance. The ivy on the wall is a symbol of Bacchus, god of wine, so the artist may be referring to the Eucharist, the Christian sacrament of consuming bread and wine.
When this painting was exhibited at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm in 2009, Christopher Newall considered its intent to be primarily that of celebrating agricultural abundance, rather than demonstrating an underlying religious symbolic meaning:
"The Good Harvest of 1854, which was one of Collins's last paintings before he turned to a career as a writer, is less austerely polemical – showing as it does a young girl momentarily pausing to look towards the viewer as she carries a sheaf of wheat to a cottage door. This was presumably intended as a commemoration of the succession of bountiful harvests that occurred in the early and mid-1850s and which allowed some alleviation in rural poverty after the privations of the "hungry forties," and therefore takes its place with F. M. Brown's Carrying Corn (Tate) as a celebration of agricultural abundance. There may also be an intended symbolism in the tied sheaf of corn as representing unity of shared belief and social concord, while the Eucharist is perhaps alluded to by the association with bread. [181]
W. M. Rossetti in The Spectator praised the technical execution the picture displayed while deploring its lack of beauty, especially in the face of the young girl. He found the work "too well executed to allow of our being content with the indifference it indicates to beauty; a semi-representative subject of this kind being peculiarly in need of that element, if only to mark its aim at something beyond the mere casual fact. Moreover, the quality of the face is rather that of a mature woman than a child" (575). This seems a somewhat unfair criticism but it appears Rossetti did not particularly care for Collins as a person or admire him as an artist. Rossetti, for instance, was one of the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who voted not to elect Collins as a member of the P.R.B. to replace Collinson following the latter's resignation. In his Reminiscences Rossetti recalled: "Collins considered that he ought to have been elected, and, not having been so, he was nettled, and disposed to hold aloof. Not many years afterwards he dropped the painting profession…. Collins was one of those artists who, along with very sufficient executive powers, seem to have little of the artistic nature: so at least it struck me, and so perhaps, as he relinquished the career, it struck himself…. To myself he was agreeable enough, but I never felt strongly drawn towards him" (151-52).
John Ruskin in his Academy Notes for 1855 lamented the poor hanging of this small painting at the Royal Academy which made it impossible to assess its merits, which is likely why it was not widely reviewed: "There is much careful painting in this little study," he remarked, "and it was a wicked thing to put it into a room in which, while its modest subject could draw no attention, its good painting was of necessity, utterly invisible" (29).
Rupert Maas concurred. Describing it as "not an ambitious painting, small, of a conventionally pretty girl at another closed oak door, holding a sheaf of corn, against the backdrop of an ivy-clad brick wall, very similar to the wall in Millais's The Huguenot of 1852," he nevertheless deemed it "a lovely painting," and noted that "Both Millais and Collins's pictures were badly hung in the Academy, but unlike Millais, who made a fuss and got his picture rehung advantageously, Collins allowed his picture to languish 'skied' in the little Octagon Room, lost amongst many other small paintings" (46).
Bibliography
Cooper, Suzanne Fagence. Pre-Raphaelite Art in the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: V & A Publications, 2003.
The Good Harvest of 1854. Victoria and Albert Museum. Web. 16 September 2024.
Maas, Rupert. "The life of Charles Allston Collins (1828-73): and his painting The Devout Childhood of St Elizabeth of Hungary." The British Art Journal XV, No. 3 (Spring 2015): 46.
Newall, Christopher. "The Good Harvest of 1854." The Pre-Raphaelites. Ed. Mikael Ahlund. Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2009, cat. 62. 181.
Rossetti, William Michael. "Fine Arts. The Royal Academy Exhibition: Domestic Pictures." The Spectator XXVIII (2 June 1855): 575.
_____. Rossetti, William Michael. Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, Vol. I, 1906, 151-52.
Ruskin, John. The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Academy Notes. Notes on Prout and Hunt and Other Art Criticisms 1855-1888. Eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderbum. London: George Allen, 1904, Vol. XIV, 29.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Created 16 September 2024