Evening - Matlock. George Heming Mason (1818-1872). 1857. Oil on canvas, 15 x 29 ⅝ inches (38.3 x 75.2 cm). Collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, accession no. WAG 269. Click on image to enlarge it.
This is best classified as an Idyllist work despite its similarities with the Etruscan School in its format. In the 1860s Mason was considered a leader of the Idyllic School along with Fred Walker. Christopher Newall has described what constitutes an Idyllist picture: “The Idyllists painted figurative subjects in domestic or landscape settings…None of the Idyllists painted pure landscapes. The Idyllists were concerned with the union of figures with their immediate surroundings, rather than the material analysis of the physical world attempted by the Pre-Raphaelites. The view that was offered of landscape remained restricted; human activities were observed within a confined foreground and at close range” (83). Evening – Matlock has much in common with Mason’s later Idyllist masterpieces Evening Hymn and Harvest Moon.
When this work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1867, no. 202, it was well received. F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum greatly admired its harmonies of colour and tone:
Mr. G Mason’s Evening, Matlock (202) might be called a landscape if the figures were not so rich in feeling, and delicately expressed. It represents the mixture of sunlight and moonlight on a newly reaped upland; broad stretch of shadow widens on the sloping side of a field, down which a gleaner, a very graceful figure, drives some sheep; beyond, shocks of corn stand in the sun-lighted space of the land; the full moon rises in all the glow of her summer perfectness. Notice the subtle harmonies of this picture in colour and tone; the admirable manner in which all its elements have been studied, and, be they of lines, tones, or tints, with perfect taste combined” (667).
The critic of The Art Journal found this work full of beauty and poetry: “No artist has better justified the favourable estimate of friends, then G. Mason. There is exquisite beauty and poetry in ‘The Evening at Matlock’ (202). The bend in the figure of the little girl as she steps down the hill is graceful in the extreme. For colour the whole picture is a symphony” (145).
The Times found the colour and sentiment of this work delightful:
“Mr. Mason’s Unwilling Playmate a stubborn donkey, which a girl is vainly trying to tug by the halter…is as a whole inferior to his other picture this year called Evening, Matlock, which is made up of upland cornfields, in which the late harvesters and reapers are still working under the harvest moon, while in the foreground a gleaner descends a rough hill path driving a few sheep before her. The colour and sentiment of this picture are extremely delightful, and we are not sure that Mr. Mason has painted anything sweeter than the three far-off, cornfields sleeping under the broad low moon which is still white in the warm sky, where the flush of evening sunset still lingers. The picture is full of the ineffable poetry which belongs to this painter’s work, in a way we are neither able nor anxious if we are able to explain, for those to whom it appeals feel it, and to those to whom it is caviare cannot be made to feel it, by any amount of writing.
Bibliography
“The Royal Academy.” The Art Journal XXIX (1867): 137-146.
Morris, Edmund. Victorian & Edwardian Paintings in the Walker Art Gallery & at Sudley House. London: HMSO Publications, 1996, 301-03
Newall, Christopher: Victorian Watercolours. London: Phaidon Press, 1987.
“The Royal Academy Exhibition.” The Times (May 14, 1867).
Stephens, Frederic George. “Fine Arts. Royal Academy.” The Athenaeum No. 2064 (May 18, 1867): 666-67.
Last modified 21 December 2022