Quarrymen of Purbeck, Dorset, by Henry Tanworth Wells (1828–1903). 1885. Oil on canvas. H 142 x W 216 cm. Collection: Guildhall Art Gallery. Accession no. 773. Given by the artist's daughters, Alice Joanna Street (née Wells) and Joanna Margaret Hadley (née Wells), in 1903. Image credit: City of London Corporation, Guildhall Art Gallery. Image kindly made available via Art UK under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC).
Most artists at this time went to the western parts of the country to paint rural scenes or scenes in the fishing villages along the coast, especially those in Cornwall, around Newlyn. If they painted men at work, they tended to chose sailors and fishermen on their boats. But this is one of several excursions by Wells "into large-scale thematic multi-figure genre painting" of labourers (Herrington et al. 283). It is true that, by now, photography was making real inroads on his pre-eminent source of commissions, portrait-painting, still, this did not dictate his choice of such a different subject on such a different scale. The scene is full of interest, with men of all ages, including one young lad, working with stones and machinery, notably a tall hoist, with rope and chain attached to a cogged wheel, right by the edge of the sea on a bright day. The path from the quarry can be seen on one side, the deep blue of the sea on the other, low clouds scudding across the sky. Light and shade are handled to good effect: the colour of the stone, whether hewed and aligned, or natural — the very ground itself as it leads upill — dominates the picture. There is certainly a need to consider this aspect of Wells's work more closely.
Image download and text by Jacqueline Banerjee. [Click on the image to enlarge it]
Bibliography
Herrington, Katie J.T., Louise Cooling and Alicia Hughes. "Henry Tanworth Wells: Miniaturist and Portriatist of Distinction." Victorian Artists and Their World, 1844-1861, as Reflected in the Papers of Joanna and George Boyce and Henry Wells. Edited by Herrington. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2024. 269-285. [Review of whole book]
Quarrymen of Purbeck, Dorset. Art UK. Web. 13 July 2024.
Created 13 July 2024