Home Again, by James Collinson (1825-1881). 1856. Oil on canvas. 827 x 1155 mm. Courtesy Tate Britain. Accession no. T04105. Purchased 1985. Reproduced here under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Click on the image to enlarge it.

The Tate Britain website commentary explains that "Home Again was painted in the final year of the Crimean War. The British Public had followed the two-year conflict between Britain and Russia in the popular press; with this painting Collinson satisfied the demand for staged homecomings. A weary soldier wearing the uniform of the Coldstream Guards is returning home to his rural cottage. When it was first exhibited a quotation beside the painting explained that the soldier had been discharged because of an accident leading to blindness. As a consequence, the family now faced a bleak future."

Wilkie's The Blind Fiddler.

Collinson was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who left the group and gave up painting, supposedly to become a Roman Catholic monk, but he gave that plan up pretty quickly and eventually returned to painting, though, as this work shows, he did not adopt early PRB principles of composition and lighting. In fact, Home Again in many ways precisely resembles the painting that Holman Hunt cited as incorporating those precepts of the Royal Academy schools the PRB wished to abandon — David Wilkie's Blind Fiddler. According to Hunt, students were taught to drop corners into darkness, thus creating an oval visual field, base the composition on one or two pyramidal arranges of figures, and use one major light coming from one side and a minor one from the other. These rules, of course, are exactly what Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents and Hunt's own Rienzi inverted with bright, even early Renaissance lighting, hard-edge objects in the pictures's corners, and different kinds of figural arrangements. — George P. Landow

Commentary by Dennis T. Lanigan

Home Again was exhibited at the Society of British Artists in 1857, no. 396. The Crimean War lasted from October 1853 until February 1856 and was fought between an alliance of Britain, France, Turkey, and Sardinia against the Russian Empire. The 1st Battalion of the Coldstream Guards fought in the battles of Alma and Inkerman in 1854 and Sevastopol in 1855. Upon their return four members of the regiment were awarded the Victoria Cross, which had only recently been instituted. A disabled soldier returning from the war would have faced a difficult time financially in terms of compensation from the British Government, particularly if he was only partially disabled. A voluntary society called the Soldiers' and Sailors' Family Association was also formed to help look after the family of disabled returning veterans.

Collinson's painting shows a blind soldier of the Coldstream Guards, whose eyesight was lost in an accident, returning to his family in England. Many of the members of his wider family circle, including his parents, have gathered in a modest domestic interior to welcome the soldier home. Presumably the woman coming to be received into the soldier's outstretched arms is his wife and some of the children are his. A sailor and his loved one clasp hands to the far right. The two boys fighting to the left of the composition were worked up into a separate composition entitled The Siege of Sebastopol, although this picture does not appear to have been exhibited. A ragged print of soldiers fighting hangs on the wall behind the boys.

W. M. Rossetti in The Spectator felt the subject could have been more strongly presented: "Mr. Collinson's Home Again – the return of a Crimean soldier, his beard grizzled with toil and trouble – is a domestic picture containing a good deal of matter, clearly if not very strongly presented" (343). As Helen Newman has pointed out, however, Rossetti failed to mention one key element in the picture: "Perhaps he has overlooked the fact that the soldier is blind; a note to this effect was appended to the picture when it was exhibited. One of James's very detailed interiors, the whole family have assembled to welcome the returning hero, but is a sad homecoming; they appear poor enough already and the future looks bleak, especially for the soldier whose only consolation is having done his duty" (114).

A critic for The Art Journal praised the amount of detail Collinson included in the picture: "No. 396. Home Again, J. Collinson. The story is of the return of an old soldier of the Coldstream Guards to his home, where is received by his family circle. The work contains numerous figures, and is full of appropriate material very minutely executed" (144). The Illustrated London News felt, although Collinson's painting was not of exceptional merit, it was at least still worthy of mention: "As we intimated in our former notice, there is an unusual number of works in this exhibition, which, although not of the highest merit, still almost equally deserve separate consideration. Want to space, however, compels us to the following simple enumeration of such works, viz.: - … Home Again (396), by Mr. Collinson" (320).

Related material

Bibliography

"The Exhibition of the Society of British Artists." The Art Journal New Series III (1 May 1857): 142-44.

"Exhibition of the Society of British Artists." The Illustrated London News XXX (4 April 1857): 320.

Home Again. Art UK. Web. 1 March 2024.

Newman, Helen D. James Collinson (aka "The Dormouse") . Foulsham: Reuben Books, 2016.

Rossetti, William Michael. "Fine Arts. The Society of British Artists." The Spectator XXX (28 March 1857): 343.


Created 26 June 2020

Last modified 1 March 2024