Young Dreams by James Clarke Hook RA, 1819-1907. 1887. Oil on canvas. H 106 x W 142.2 cm. Collection: Tate, accession no. N01513, presented by Sir Henry Tate in 1894. Kindly released by the gallery on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND), and downloaded from Art UK.
Juliet McMaster tells us that the location of the painting was Porthdinllaen in Gwynedd, in North Wales, a seaside village with beautiful views. The freshness of the scenery is matched by that of the two youngsters in the foreground. But, like another work painted in this spot, this one came in for some criticism precisely because of these figures:
Even a staunch supporter like F.G. Stephens pronounced his reservations in his ongoing reviews in The Athenaeum. Hook’s usual practice of painting the seascape on the spot and then adding the figures later did sometimes result in some lack of due proportion between figures and ground. Stephens with his trained eye — he too had gone through the Royal Academy Schools — sometimes noticed the discrepancy. And no doubt so did Millais, his brother Pre-Raphaelite. But once word got out about Millais’s preference for a Hook painting without figures, other critics took up the cry. [181]
This just shows how popular land- and seascape painting, per se, had become. But whether or not these figures quite fit the scale of the view, they complement it in spirit, and serve to draw us into it. It is unlikely that many art-lovers either then or now would prefer the composition without the yearning lad and the bashful girl, on whom his thoughts are likely fixed. — Jacqueline Banerjee
Bibliography
McMaster, Juliet. James Clarke Hook: Painter of the Sea. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023 [Review]
Young Dreams. Web. 29 September 2023.
Created 29 September 2923