This limpid watercolor, made by John Linnel in the late summer of 1813, shows the harvest. Linnel painted it during an important tour of North Wales that he undertook in the company of the painter George Robert Lewis.

 

Linnell had been trained at the Royal Academy Schools before beginning his career as a landscape painter in 1811. As a student at the Royal Academy, he had spent time sketching out-of-doors with other young artists, particularly William Mulready, William Henry Hunt, and the more established painter John Varley. His friendship with Varley’s brother, Cornelius, seems to have stimulated both a religious conversion and a new approach to landscape painting. He joined the Baptist church in January 1812, becoming a member of the chapel at Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, and bought drawing instruments that would enable him to transcribe what he saw with scientific accuracy. Linnell undertook a number of sketching trips with other painters, including the trip to North Wales with Lewis in 1813. A sketchbook that Lewis used survives in the Victoria and Albert Museum and shows that both artists were intensely interested in agricultural labor.

 

This trip had a profound effect on Linnell, who had never been farther from London than the Sussex Downs. He established his independence as an artist and also abandoned his interest in a picturesque mode of landscape. As he later noted, this summer tour provided him with endless inspiration: “I have never visited Wales since but that one month’s study supplied me with material for life.” Linnell found something eternal in the landscape of Wales, commenting later in life, “So thoroughly did some of the valleys near Snowdon carry me away from all former associations with modern Art that I could almost fancy myself living in the times of Jacob and Esau and might expect to meet their flocks.”¹

 

This watercolor was executed on the spot during this short stay in Wales in 1813. Linnell avoids any specificity in the costume of the figures, essentially rendering them timeless. The watercolor is on a heavy French paper, bearing the watermark of Thomas Dupuy from the Auvergne region and dated 1742 (or possibly 1749). This pre–French Revolution sheet was of a type used primarily by printmakers because of its highly absorbent quality. This allowed Linnell to produce a series of saturated watercolor washes, giving a subtle golden glow to the composition. —Jonny Yarker