The Cast Shoe, by George Heming Mason (1817-1872). Oil on canvas, 121/4 x 20 inches (31.1 x 50.8 cm). Collection of the Tate Britain, reference no. NO1388. Image kindly released under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) licence.
The Cast Shoe, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865, appears transitional between his earlier Etruscan period and the later Idyllic School works he executed following his return to England in 1858. The Etruscan School style of landscape painting was characterized by breadth of handling, subdued tonalities, and broad panoramas with a focus on a general impression of the landscape rather than focusing on minute details. Like an Etruscan School painting the format of The Cast Shoe is distinctly horizontal and painted at their favourite time period of twilight. The horizon is high with the sky taking up little of the composition. A lone man holding the cast shoe in his right hand leads a mottled white horse at twilight as the sun slowly sets in the background. They walk by a small pool inhabited by ducks. The reflection of the man and horse in the water helps to intensify the contrasting light levels and enhance the colour effects.
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum praised all three of Mason's submissions to the Royal Academy in 1865: "The Cast Shoe (240), another picture with qualities similar to those of its companions, show a merciful man who has dismounted from his unshod pony and follows him across a rough and darkling heath; the whole painting glows with warmth of suppressed colouring and is a complete work of art, in a very high sense of the word" (628). The Illustrated London News felt the real theme of this painting was to display the beautiful colour effects seen at twilight: "From the few works indicating imaginative sympathies we would select for prominent mention three small landscapes by Mr. E. [sic] Mason. Their subjects, materially considered, are of the humblest - to wit, bits of rough moorland, with a little water, geese, a girl or two, or a man leading a pony that has cast a shoe; the effect in all being at or immediately after sundown (31, 229 and 240). But the spectator feels that the painter's real theme was the low-toned, palpitating, after-glow, with its mystery of indefinite form and broken yet beautiful color; and he feels, moreover, that the theme has been treated with pure feeling and true poetic perception.
The critic of The Spectator praised the truthfulness of this landscape: "Mr. G Mason, one of our most original and poetical landscape painters, sends three pictures very similar in subject and feeling to what he has previously exhibited. The ruddy glow of evening and extreme grace of line, got without the least sacrifice of rusticity, are the most marked beauties of his Gander (31). Even more beautiful is The Cast Shoe (240), where a rider has dismounted and leads his horse up the slopes of a common, carrying the shoe in his hand. Here, too, the sun is down, and the all-pervading glow of early twilight is painted with startling truth" (526). J. F. White in The Contemporary Review, when discussing the late George Mason's pictures, singled out this painting out for praise: "One of the pictures that first brought Mason into more general notice was No. 23, The Cast Shoe. This is perhaps one of the most harmonious and sympathetic landscapes in the collection. A man in a blue smock leads a grey horse, which has cast its shoe along a hill road. The horse has just crossed a small stream in which it is reflected, while some ducks swim about in a pool. How perfect is the balance of colour in this picture, and how completely are all its parts welded together. Every point tells, even in the steely colour of the cast shoe which the man carries in his hand, and which repeats the cold colour of the grey clouds" (731).
Links to Related Material
Bibliography
Esposito, Donato. "George Heming Mason." Frederick Walker and the Idyllists. London: Lund Humphries, 2017, Chapter VII, 159-80.
"Fine Arts. Exhibition of the Royal Academy." The Illustrated London News XLVI (20 May 1865): 490-91.
"The Royal Academy." The Spectator XXXVIII (13 May 1865): 526-27.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts. Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 1958 (6 May 1865): 626-28.
White, John Forbes. "The Pictures of the Late George Mason, A.R.A." The Contemporary Review XXI (1873): 724-36.
Created 28 April 2023