The Stream by James Clarke Hook RA, 1819-1907. 1885. Oil on canvas. H 92.1 x W 151.1 cm. Collection: Tate, accession no. N01598, presented by Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest in 1885. Kindly released by the gallery on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND), and downloaded from Art UK.
The painting is listed in Juliet McMaster's study with a quotation from Shakespeare's The Two Gentleman of Verona: "Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge..." (Act 2, scene 7), and depicts a peaceful bucolic scene. As McMaster says, this painting "features mainly cows" (185), and illustrates the way Hook reduced the human element in his later work. It also shows him painting the countryside scenes that he enjoyed so much (especially those including streams), despite the popularity of his "Hookscapes" on the coast. — Jacqueline Banerjee
Bibliography
McMaster, Juliet. James Clarke Hook: Painter of the Sea. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023 [Review]
The Stream. Web. 29 September 2023.
Created 29 September 2923