"Harvest Moon" by Helen Allingham

Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Victorian Artists —> Helen Allingham —> Watercolors —> Next]

Harvest Moon, “globed in yellow splendour”

Helen Allingham, RWS 1848-1926

Signed and dated 1879.

Pencil, watercolor, and bodycolour

6 ½ x 5 ¼ inches

This glowing water-colour dates from the early years of the artist's marriage to William Allingham, the poet whose verse is quoted in the title. The figure of the reaper stands monumentally against the landscape in which he has been working, and as he walks home he glances back at the rising moon. In Allingham's later work the figures tend to be less dominant in the composition, but here the large central figure shows the influence of Frederick Walker.

Allingham first treated this subject the year before. when she spent the summer at Shere, in the Tillingbourne valley between the Downs and Surrey Hills, where her husband noted in his diary that she "painted every day most assiduously". The first version was an unfinished illustration, exhibited at The Black and White Exhibition, Dudley Gallery, 1878, where an art critic considered it "The sweetest and tenderest figure subject...".

Bibliography

Maas, Rupert. Catalogue. London: The Maas Gallery. 2007. Catalogue number 7.

The Maas Gallery, London has most generously given its permission to use in the Victorian Web information, images, and text from its catalogues. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with the Maas Gallery. Readers should consult the gallery website to obtain information about recent exhibitions and to order their catalogues. [GPL]

Last modified 26 February 2012