Oil sketch for The Evening Hymn [Evening Hymn], c.1868. Oil on canvas; 9 3/8 x 20 1/2 inches (23.6 x 52.8 cm). Private collection.
This is the oil sketch for Mason's Idyllist masterpiece Evening Hymn that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868 but is now unfortunately lost. Mason had returned to England from Rome in 1858, but financial difficulties and depression had initially interrupted his ability to paint. This late work he painted during his English period was a great advance, both over the early works he had painted during his time in Italy, and those he executed when he first returned to England. Lord Leighton had introduced Mason to his patrons Percy and Madeline Wyndham who commissioned two paintings from Mason, but left the choice of subjects to him. One of these commissions became The Evening Hymn, which initially hung on the main staircase of the Wyndham home at 44 Belgrave Square but which was later transferred to Clouds, the home that Philip Webb built for them in Wiltshire. It was a large work measuring 94 x 229 cm. It featured a group of girls returning from evening church sevices singing a hymn and overlooked by two shepherds and their dog. The current whereabouts of the finished painting is unknown, or even whether it still survives. The success of Evening Hymn greatly furthered Mason's artistic career and his acceptance by the art establishment and on January 30, 1869 he was elected as an associate member of the Royal Academy, the first of the Idyllists to be so honoured
George Price Boyce mentions in his diary for March 31, 1867 seeing the painting as a work in progress: "Called on George Mason at Hammersmith, whom I found painting on his big picture of girls singing in the twilight, very beautiful." The Evening Hymn received enthusiastic reviews from the critics when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy and it also received the Manchester Art-Prize of £50. The critic for The Art Journal commented:
"If asked which picture in the Academy haunts most the memory, we should name The Evening Hymn (329), by G. Mason. This is a creation of genius which abides in the mind as a perpetual joy. It is, indeed, a vesper song at close of day, when rest comes for the weary, and labourers in the vineyard or field, wending their tired steps homeward, raise thankful voices to heaven for the blessings of the day, and await the repose and comfort of the coming night. These peasant girls dwell, perchance, in some English Arcadia, far away from the cares and corruptions of a city. Their hearts are innocent as their faces are lovely. Even the colour is a symphony and a lyric. There is a melodious cadence in this sunset burst of splendour, intense as brightest yellows and reds can render it. The rapture reaches a climax, and then is toned down into the repose of twilight. Blues, cool greens, emeralds, and greys are thrown into the landscape shadows, as balance to the burning sky. This is heat mitigated, and the picture brought into exquisite keeping and balance. The veil of twilight grey cast over the figures still further enhances tranquillity; the picture is perfect in tone, in depth and intensity of expression. The result is not attained save by the use of well-nigh every expedient; the colours are loaded and re-loaded, painted and then re-painted; transparent and semi-transparent pigments, complementary, contrasted, and accordant colours are by turns used to enhance the effect desired. The picture in itself, as well as in the technical methods brought to bear, is somewhat novel in our English school. Mason's work is not without points of resemblance to Breton's pictures; yet we see in this Evening Hymn more of sensitiveness, tenderness, and emotion" (106-07).
F. G. Stephens, the critic of The Athenaeum was impressed enough by the picture to review it twice. In his first review in Fine Art Gossip on March 21, 1868 he wrote:
"Mr. Mason has just completed a picture called The Evening Hymn, which will probably appear at the Royal Academy Exhibition. The work is the largest yet shown by the painter. The time represented is that of early twilight, just after the sun has set; and while his fervid rays yet glow on the landscape and rich sky, they reflect from the surface of a river that glides from the mid-distance to the front, and, half way, is spanned by a bridge. The light suffices to show that the year is young, so that the foliage is sparse and the boughs but half covered; yet they are not skeleton-like, as in winter. On a hill to the right, a low square church-tower appears among the trees. Nearer and more to the front are a few houses of a village; their lately-lit lamps shine from the windows, with the red fire of a forge that stands as one of the group. In the foreground advances, as if sauntering slowly home from payers, a group of girls, whose common occupation is that of singing, though they sing in diverse ways and under the influence of different feelings. One, on the left, has parted a little from her companions, and moves alone; her figure standing solid and clear against the soft, gold-tinted sky and its warm grey clouds. In coming toward us, the other songstresses mark time with their movements, and step as to the cadence of the chant. Their graceful attitudes and slow paces assort with the sounding of their veiled voices and the sinking of the golden light" (428).
A sketch of the painting in its frame (private collection).
When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy, Stephens wrote: "Mr. G. Mason's Evening Hymn (329) is a sort of poem on canvas, and wrought in such a manner as affords delight to the educated eye. The hasty observer also will in his way enjoy the solemn tranquillity of that twilight which, as it grows, will absorb the greater portion of the landscape, which is equal in pathos and beauty to the figures of young village girls, who, returning home at day-fall, pace together and, as they step, chaunt the melodious prayer of the hour" (667).
The reviewer for The Illustrated London News stated: "Mr. Mason's Evening Hymn simply represents groups of village-girls returning homeward in their Sunday cotton prints, and relieved against a deep, rich glow of sunset deepening into twilight, which gives to their figures a spirit-like vagueness and beauty exquisitely accordant with the suggestion of the solemn stillness of the hour of nightfall being broken only by innocent harmonious voices singing their even-song of prayer and praise" (543). The reviewer of The Saturday Review was equally impressed by this picture: "One of the most perfectly successful pictures in the present Exhibition is Mr. Mason's Evening Hymn. Five or six girls are coming home from school in the evening, and singing. There is a yellow sky, after sunset, with red near the horizon; the landscape is rather extensive, and includes the church and a distant river, seen between near trees. Two young shepherds and a dog are stopping to see the girls pass. These girls are dressed in the simplest prints, and one cannot say that the shepherds are anything but ordinary English shepherds, yet so great is the art with which the attitudes are chosen and the group arranged, that the picture awes us by a very strong impression of grandeur and nobleness. As mere painting, too, the work is thoroughly admirable. There is no better work of that class in the whole Academy; it is wonderful how grand the commonest dresses, such as these of the poor girls here, may become under the hand of a true artist, when treated with this fine taste and subtle delicate indication" (56).
The Evening Hymn, etching by Charles-Albert Waltner after G. H. Mason, P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., May 25, 1882. Etching on chine collé, plate size 12¼ x 23 in (31.1 x 58.4 cm). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession no. 45.78.74. Donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, under the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy.
The sketch, perhaps even more so than the finished painting, also shows the influence of the Aesthetic Movement, likely influenced by his close friend Frederic Leighton. One can't help but wonder if Mason's painting may have later influenced Thomas Armstrong's masterpiece Haytime, exhibited the following year at the Royal Academy in 1869. Armstrong's picture, however, is closer in mood and atmosphere and in its classically inspired Arcadian figures to the sketch than it is to Mason's final chosen composition. Certainly the influence of classicism is obvious in both works and both are works without ostensible subjects. John Forbes White, when discussing Mason's art following his death, noted: "Mason has frequently been blamed for the classic forms he has given his peasants, but it seems to us that it is one of his strong points that he has been able to give grace and beauty to forms which, it must be admitted, are generally clumsy and ungainly. The dresses of his peasants recall classical ideas because they are severe in form and free from any local or temporary fashion. They seem designed rather to reveal than to conceal the beauty of the human form, by allowing the graceful action of the well-draped limbs to appear under the free and flowing costume of the rustic maidens. Yet though he worked under the influence of the principles which guided the men who cut the Elgin and Aeginetan marbles, there is no copying of classic forms…But it is only with reference to the form and costume of his peasants that any charge of classical tendency could possibly be made. The spirit of his work is essentially modern, in the close and tender linking of man with nature and in the human sympathy he infuses into his landscape" (727-28). Much the same comments could easily be made about Armstrong's masterpiece.
White in The Contemporary Review considered The Evening Hymn the first of the three really important Idyllist works Mason painted in his lifetime:
Out of the simplest materials, Mason has here given us a grand and solemn poem, by the dignity of his conception. So far as feeling goes, apart from subject, it may be said to be profoundly religious. The last rays of the sun throw their light on a troop of maidens who have come towards us slowly, singing their evening hymn. They have no beauty save that of rapt, earnest expression; and that Mason purposely denied them good looks in order that the attention of the spectator might be attracted to the high motive of the picture, is rendered probable by placing them in strong shadow against the light of the setting sun. They walk and sing, regardless of the two shepherds who stand aside and gaze at them as if they were beings from another world. Somehow it does not seem to jar on the sense of fitness that a young shepherd behind the group looks wistfully into the face of the young girl putting a rose in her breast. Mason's loves are almost ethereal in their purity. Religious through the painting is in feeling, there is no effort to teach or convey lessons. Mason's art was too natural and healthy for this. The impressiveness of the picture comes simply from the noble treatment of a subject which, in the hands of a less strong man, might easily have degenerated into namby-pamby feebleness. The picture is painted in a low, almost sombre key, and this tone seems heightened by the way in which he has opposed the shadowed heads of the girls against the glow of the setting sun. Observe how skilfully he has carried the light of the sky into the shadowy dresses by means of the grey-white pages of the hymn-books carried by some of the girls. And quiet though the dresses are, notice their depth and wealth of colour. In looking at this picture, one instinctively thinks of The Gleaners, by Jules Breton, which has many points in common with the Mason. But how much finer is the Evening Hymn in the subtle, broken, mysterious colour. Breton's tones and harmonies are fine and true, but they seem to be reached by simple direct touches, laid on at once with certainty and knowledge. Mason, on the other hand, seems to grope his way to the most refined passages by pure love of colour for its own sake, so that we may isolate pieces of his work and rest on them in the enjoyment of their mysterious loveliness, as we do on square inches of Tintoretto, or Veronese, or Reynolds" (732-33)
The finished oil differs significantly from this preliminary oil sketch. Although the whereabouts of the finished oil is unknown, an etching of it was published by P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. in 1882 that can be used for comparison. The overall feeling of the composition is much the same, but the actual groupings of the major figures in the foreground is different, as is the landscape background. The only figures that are virtually unchanged are the two girls to the right of the main body of the young females. It is unknown how many additional studies were made between the preliminary oil sketch and the final composition. The major figures are much closer to the picture plane in the final composition, making them look more monumental in scale (Esposito, 162). Apparently Mason altered the composition of Evening Hymn after it was initially completed, thus delaying its exhibition for a year, but it is uncertain exactly what these alterations intailed. There is no doubt that in his later career Mason was fastidious to a fault and he laboured over his pictures in an attempt to achieve his desired goals and finish. In looking at the beauty of the sketch, however, one wonders why Mason felt the need to change the composition so much in the finished work. Such alterations were not unusual in Mason's work, however.
Two oil sketches of female figures for Evening Hymn were exhibited at the Mason exhibition held at Stoke-on-Trent in 1982 (cat. nos. 46 & 47). Two preliminary drawings for the composition are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (accession nos. E.352-192 and E.353-192). Both relate much more closely to the preliminary oil sketch than to the finished oil painting, however, and must have preceded the oil sketch. A drawing showing studies of the shepherds and the dog is in the British Museum (museum no. 1906,0612.4).
Bibliography
Esposito, Donato. "George Heming Mason." Frederick Walker and the Idyllists. London: Lund Humphries, 2017, Chapter VII, 159-80.
"Exhibition of the Royal Academy." The Illustrated London News LII (30 May 1868): 543.
"Pictures of the Year." The Saturday Review XXVI (11 July 1868: 56.
"Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series VII (1 June 1868): 101-10.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Art Gossip." The Athenaeum No. 2108, (21 March 1868): 428.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts. Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 2115 (9 May 1868): 666-67.
Surtees, Virginia. Diary of George Price Boyce. Norfolk: Real World, 1980.
White, John Forbes. "The Pictures of the Late George Mason, A.R.A." The Contemporary Review XXI (1873): 724-36
Created 28 April 2023