The Harvest Moon, by George Heming Mason. Oil on canvas. 34 x 91 3/8 inches (86.4 x 231.1 cm). Collection of the Tate Britain, reference no. NO4742. Image kindly released under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) licence.
This picture is another of Mason's Idyllic masterpieces romanticising rural workers while ignoring the back-breaking labour that was the actual reality of harvest time in Victorian times. It was the last work Mason exhibited at the Royal Academy prior to his death and it was the last major painting he completed. G. F. Watts noted that it was altered dramatically a large number of times before it was finished. (Billingham, Mason, 6). It was exhibited in 1872 where it received extensive and generally favourable reviews. The scene takes place during Mason's favourite time of the day, twilight, and during his favourite season, Autumn.
The reviewer for The Art Journal was complimentary and admired the elegance of the painting:
'The Harvest Moon' (125), G. Mason, according to the judgment pronounced by its surroundings, seems out of time and out of place; it has the ring of an ancient epistle which has been laid aside, and forgotten since the days of Etruscan Art. It represents a company of reapers returning from their labour, lighted on their way by the moon; and less weary, more jovial, than harvest-labourers usually are when exhausted by the toils of the day. It is so adjusted as to depart but little from monochrome, and has the appearance of the initiative of a decorative design. It is a passage of surprising elegance, and the artist would have us believe that it is a simple conception recorded without premeditation; but this kind of loose social manner of painting, when shown to be based on sound knowledge and power, is generally nothing less than the acquisition of a life-time of toil, and Mr. Mason is fortunate in having so early mastered it. The piece claims notice on the score of its graduations, but in parts the background supersedes the figures, and that is an agrarian outrage that cannot be condoned" (151).
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum was even more fervid in his praise of this work, praising in particular its lines and tones:
Mr. Mason's ill health has caused a delay in finishing The Harvest Moon (125), a large picture which we described so long ago that is perhaps necessary to repeat the description. A party of reapers is returning by a field-path to a rough road and following a loaded wain, which is ahead of them, and slowly toiling up a rising ground where the sun's light falls more brightly then elsewhere, although the whole landscape retains a glow, and the greater luminary itself has not yet given place to the lesser, which is of a warm silver hue and quite at full; her lower edge, reddened where the earth mists veil it, has quitted the horizon, and is revealed, large, round in the eastern sky, and faces us. The sun still reigns, the land is filled with his rosy light, the source of which is behind us; this falls on each sloping field and hill-side, in radiance of the warmest kind. In the foreground is a field nearly reaped, the corn standing in shocks; some labourers are still at work; at the side, near to us, is a foot-path, on which some reapers are going home in a line; a girl who bears a shock of corn she has gleaned, walks first; then come two men with scythes on their shoulders, next a group of others, who leave the nigh-reaped field, and, at last, two charming figures of a girl and her lover, – she, hardly yet a woman, places her hands behind her head and, sidling, walks; he, an ardent lout, thrums the strings of a fiddle. These are not rare elements of design, but the exquisite feeling which Mr. Mason has thrown into the subject has made the picture most valuable. Notice the look of continuous motion given by the main lines of the composition, assisted in expressiveness by the manner in which the scythe blades are born aloft by the reapers, and by the graceful action of the second girl. The colour is lively, enriched, or rather made more tender than ever by the treatment of the light; and the effect of the chiaroscuro is also most artistic. Mr. Mason's success in dealing with the last-named element is remarkable. This is not a glowing sunset, like scores of those we know, but as delicate as it is powerful; the harmonies and sub-harmonies of the tones and colour are ineffable, and could not be improved; the exhibition of such a work affords a lesson of the highest value to our school, too apt as it is to neglect those pure and high elements of art, which is in this example we find nearly in perfection, i.e. the harmonies of lines and tones. [564]
Henry Morley in The Fortnightly Review found the work poetic: "The light of the harvest moon shines golden on the tips of the white sheaves, and falls full on the sheaf of the thin gleaner who with grace of womanhood in poor and scanty dress is leaving the harvest field with the mowers and the binders of the sheaves. One with a fiddle ready tells of love and music in the cots where simple shepherds dwell. There is a poem to be felt in Mr. G. A. [sic] Mason's pale picture of The Harvest Moon. although his enforcement of the main idea by making the moonlight shine as gold upon the corn puzzles a few. 'That moonlight!' we hear them say as they look. 'I never saw such moonlight as that.' The picture has its own pale beauty. Some figures in it recall Mulready, and its beauty comes of a right feeling of simple truth. Poverty is there in its leanness and its patches, but the glory from heavens is upon it, and the common brotherhood of life shines out of it" (701-02).
The Illustrated London News particularly praised Mason's use of light in this composition as seen at summer eventide:
"Mr. Mason's large picture of 'The Harvest Moon' (125) is clearly open to the prosaic objection that the figures possess a beauty of contour and a grace of carriage not to be found in English rustics; whilst portions of the work have, as representation, an unmeaning, fortuitous, and scarcely suggestive disposition of broken colour, to be accepted only on the supposition that those portions are unfinished. Nevertheless, regarding the picture as intended to be an idyllic paraphrase of an incident of rural life, as a poetic rendering of or chromatic symphony on an exceptionally strange and lovely aspect worn by nature during a few fleeting minutes, it has strong claims to respectful consideration. The difference between the best landscape work of this kind and that of Mr. Millais is, that in the one case the painter records exactly what he sees; in the other the artist recalls an impression retained but necessarily generalized by memory, and transmitted through the imagination. The effect in this instance is not that of twilight such as Mr. Mason usually paints, but of summer eventide, when both sun and moon are on or near the verge of the horizon. The moon at the full we see here has just risen, and the sun may not have entirely set in the western sky behind the spectator; but if it has, its ruddy after-glow is scarcely less potent, and dominates the mellowed silver radiance of the moon. The two luminaries, however, so neutralize each other, and the light of each is so softened and diffused by the dense lower atmosphere, that all objects appear spectrally without "cast shadows"; and thus we have the beautiful phenomena reproduced, however imperfectly, in this picture, wherein everything is defined – or, rather, half-defined – far more by colour than chiaroscuro, the reflected aerial tinctures effacing more or less the 'local colors.' The principal figures in the composition are a string of reapers returning homewards, prominent among them being a girl of refined beauty and her lover, who tunes his violin preparatory to the celebration of "harvest home." [467]
The critic of The Spectator felt this was one of the few works in the Royal Academy exhibition where the artist had actually painted for his own satisfaction and not merely to please the public:
Mr. George Mason's Harvest Moon (125) is certainly a bit of real poetry. Doubtless there are some obvious imperfections in the execution; but the artist had an idea to express (no mean praise), and he has treated his band of home-wending harvesters with more truth, a keener appreciation for the beauty of flowing lines, and a greater freedom from sentimental prettiness than can easily be found in any other English artist accustomed to deal with cognate subjects; or if there be any such, he must be sought at the Water-Colour society. The pictures are few and far between at this Exhibition which inspire the beholder with any respect for the artist. Seldom can one say, "Here is an artist indeed, who has painted for the satisfaction of his own thought, who has a cultivated mind, and has trained his hand to paint." It was a cynical critic who wrote that as the artist must live by public favour, he must paint to please the public taste. At that rate, improvement it's hopeless. Luckily there are a few who will not stoop to this. [788]
The reviewer for The Architect struck one of the few discordant notes, disliking the picture and its colouration in particular, whereas most other critics had praised its rich colouration: "Whatever diversity of opinion may exist with regard to Mr. Mason's production called The Harvest Moon (125) – and we are told there is much - we most unhesitatingly pronounce an adverse verdict as to its merits in nearly every respect. While admitting the excellence of the drawing of the figures per se, we regard as inexcusable the extreme unnaturalness of colour and effect, and must say that in these particulars the artist has grievously offended against truth and nature" (236). The critic of The Saturday Review was also not, in general, taken with this work:
How intense colour may be brought into subjection and tone is officially obvious in The Harvest Moon (125) by Mr. Mason, A.R.A. It may be objected that the artist's manner has been exalted into mannerism; it may be urged that in this moonlight pastoral the figures are shadowy, unsubstantial, and ghostly, the forms unpronounced, the limbs drawn with a knowledge which breaks down. It may be pleaded, however, in reply, that the painter at the outset makes an unconditional surrender to shadowy sentiment and poetic impossibility. Just as Claude may be supposed to have looked at nature through a Claude Lorrain glass, so may we imagine that Mr. Mason uses a Mason glass. At any rate the uninitiated public stand in need of some such optical medium or patent contrivance. But, the conditions, once granted, the conclusion follows by what may be termed pictorial logic. A keynote is struck ecstatic as that of the nightingale, and then the artist plays his variations around the central theme. The composition, thoroughly Italian, in its poetry and pathos, recalls strains which we have heard by peasants of the Abruzzi at Christmas-tide before images of the Madonna. This troupe of harvest labourers, returning home at nightfall, are impelled passionately onwards. Only perhaps by a long sojourn in Italy, by contact with a past which happily still lives in the present, can this poetic impossibility, this grand unreality, find place in modern art. [696]
The Builder welcomed back Mason's contributions to the Royal Academy exhibitions:
Heartily do we welcome back Mr. Mason, another painter who puts mind on his canvas, and whom illness, we believe, has deprived us of for the last two years at the Academy. Some of his mannerism of execution, too, is worn off; but it was a mannerism so pleasant, and so suited to the peculiar feeling of his pictures, that we half regret its abatement. In other respects, The Harvest Moon (125) bears its authorship on its face completely, and exhibits in its train figures (particularly in the young man and girl who come last) that peculiar feeling for the sentiment of rustic life with which the painter has been identified. We are not quite satisfied with the attitude or gait of the figure with the scythe and pitcher, who looks a little unsteady on his feet; and the attempt to indicate the sunset sky (behind the spectator) by the red light on the distant cottage-window is not successful, and is not borne out sufficiently by the light in the foreground figures. [377]
J. F. White recognized this painting as the last of Mason's great works:
The sense of enjoyment in the ideal rustic repose give place to sympathy with the labour of man, its toil and its reward. Mason goes beyond the pure intellect of the Evening Hymn, and deals with the more complex problem – the lower and the higher phases of daily toil. As if conscious that this was to be his last work, his manner becomes larger than ever, his canvas more loaded with wealth of colour, and his carelessness of subordinate details more conspicuous. He seems to have abandoned himself to the sentiment of his task, and to have let himself out without restraint, as if now for the first time he had come into the full possession of his power. It is the old story of rest after day's toil. The full harvest moon has risen over the Derbyshire hills, which are all aglow with the blaze of the setting sun. The rustics come through an open gate from the hollow where the cut corn and gnarled trees lie bathed in sunshine. On the left, a stalwart peasant, the favourite swain, tuning his fiddle, walks slowly by the side of the rustic beauty, while in front of them the rest of the labourers wend their way towards the farm-house, lighted as usual by the fireside glow. One of the men turns his head slightly to glance at the village beauty and his more favoured rival, while the rest turn homewards, following the loaded wagon. Observe the wonderful effect of the saffron robe of the maiden caring the strong red light of the sky into the lower shadows, and this light is again repeated in the red earthenware jar at the back of the rustic in the foreground, and brought to a climax in the golden blaze of the sheaf of corn on another girl's shoulder. To connect the cold shadow of the ground with the glowing sky, Mason has introduced with wonderful boldness and felicity the long jagged blades of the scythes, which, carried on the shoulders of the men, cut the air with a straight sweep. Notice the difference in the steely colour of the scythes, varying, according to their position and the amount of light falling on them. There is scarcely a part of this picture, which is not worthy of study, as to the dignity of form and beauty of colour. Mason would very likely have carried the picture further had he lived, but its incompleteness is not so great as one would imagine at first sight. It is rather the incompleteness of a man who, weak in health, knew when to hold his hand, to retain the bloom of his first idea. In drinking in the glorious colour of this picture, Mason's last and greatest work, one cannot think but with sadness of the sunset of his own life, ere the golden bowl was broken. [734-35]
Bibliography
"Art. The Royal Academy." The Spectator XLV (June 22, 1872): 787-88.
Billingham, Rosalind. George Heming Mason. Exhibition catalogue, Stoke-on-Trent Art Gallery and Museum, 1982.
Esposito, Donato. "George Heming Mason." Frederick Walker and the Idyllists. London: Lund Humphries, 2017, Chapter VII, 164-65.
"Exhibition of the Royal Academy." The Illustrated London News LX (May 11, 1872): 466-67.
Morley, Henry. "Pictures at the Royal Academy." The Fortnightly Review XVII (1872): 692-704.
The Royal Academy." The Architect VII (11 May 1872): 235-37.
"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal XXXIV (1 June 1872): 149-156.
"Royal Academy Pictures: Reflected Lights." The Builder XXX (18 May 1872): 377-78
"The Royal Academy." The Saturday Review XXXIII (1 June 1872): 695-97.
Stephens, Frederic George. The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 2323 (4 May 1872): 563-66.
White, John Forbes. "The Pictures of the Late George Mason, A.R.A." The Contemporary Review XXI (1873): 724-36.
Created 4 May 2023