A Hymn to Spring, by Cecil Gordon Lawson (1849-1882). 1871-72. Oil on canvas. 60 x 40 inches (152.4 x 101.6 cm). Collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, object no. 1995.25.1. Image from Peter Nahum at the Leicester Galleries, by permission (see note). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
This painting was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1872 but was eventually exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, Winter Exhibition, in 1882-83, no. 187, after Lawson's death. The remainder of the exhibition was devoted to a retrospective of the work of Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Certainly this posthumous exhibition of one hundred and six of Lawson's paintings and sketches helped to solidify his artistic reputation. The Art Journal commented upon this: "Visitors to the recent exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery must have been impressed with the genuine greatness of the Art of the late Cecil Lawson. His work cannot fail to be appreciated by those who are able to distinguish between the labourers of an artist born, and one who by pains achieves distinction. Lawson's pictures may not be popular yet, but this is because they are comparatively little known. As time goes on his power will assuredly be more widely acknowledged" (132).
The critic for The Spectator echoed many of the same sentiments: "What may be called the second portion of the exhibition, though it is scarcely inferior to the first in general interest, is a collection of the works of the late Mr. Cecil Lawson, a young landscape-painter, who lived long enough to do great things in his art, but hardly sufficiently long to adopt a steeled manner of work, either in craftsmanship, or in his way of treating his subjects. His art had many faults, rather many shortcomings; but when all these have been allowed for, there's a solid residuum of truth, beauty and poetical feeling to be found such as is very rare in contemporary Art" (1614). In his second notice of the Grosvenor exhibition by The Spectator critic he pointed out that when Alma-Tadema tried to be simple, he was rarely successful:
"Mr. Lawson, however, shows exactly the reverse quality, – he is most impressive when he is least involved. His great pictures which abound in detail, are, artistically speaking, the least satisfactory portion of his work. His imagination in these latter works seems to struggle unsuccessfully to free itself from the mass of matter with which it is encumbered, and being hardly of sufficient power to subdue the details into unity with the main artistic idea, the composition results in being tame, and to a certain extent unmeaning. But give to Mr. Lawson a comparatively simple scene, in which the aspect earth and sky is susceptible of some poetic interpretation, and his imagination straightaway interprets it with an apparent ease and strength, which is unmistakeable evidence of its working best when it is most unencumbered. [1651]
Closer view of the midground of the painting.
A Hymn to Spring was painted when Lawson was in his early twenties at the beginning of his career but is now considered by many to be one of his most important paintings. It was based on his illustration for a poem, "Spring," by Alfred Perceval Graves and published in the short-lived magazine Dark Blue in May 1871. The location was the countryside near Hungerford in Berkshire. Donato Esposito has described the painting in this way: "A Hymn to Spring depicts, in a restricted vertical format, an expansive view across ploughed fields. Overhanging branches above frame the crowded view, and a small tree to the right, with white blossom, accentuates the starkness of the barren field. The restricted framing of the view suggests a glimpsed informality" (118).
Hilary Morgan has noted that Lawson seems to have been fascinated by the problem of "representing a distant landscape seen through a frame or screen of tree trunks and foliage" set in the immediate foreground. This, she finds, "is a compositional feature of many of his famous views of Cheyne Walk where the far bank of the Thames is seen through the riverside trees. It also appears in A Pastoral, in the Vale of Mieford, North Wales ..., the Minister's Garden ... and the August Moon." In the period of A Hymn to Spring, Lawson began his canvases from nature but completed them in the studio. A Pastoral was exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1873, and in this the screen of birch trunks was added at a late stage in the composition (Owen 67-68). A Hymn to Spring may have undergone a similar process as the artist intensified the richness of the composition.
Closer view of the foreground of the painting.
As a teenager, Morgan explains, "Lawson had devoted himself to "careful studies of fruit and flowers, bits of landscapes and special clouds or blossoms or grasses" (Bryan's Dictionary of Artists (1919), III: 189). This period of detailed study, perhaps undertaken in a Ruskinian spirit, comes to fruition in the present painting with its minute observation of the foreground detail." Spring flowers like daffodils and the flowering medlar tree are meticulously painted in the foreground, perhaps also influenced by his early fondness for the works of William Henry Hunt. The meadow and stream in the midground, however, are more broadly handled while the sky is a brilliant blue.
Morgan surmises that the painting was owned by Heseltine Owen, the author of Lawson's "In Memoriam" piece for the Magazine of Art, sine it was featured in the article, later owned by someone with the same surname.
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Bibliography
"Art. The Grosvenor Gallery." The Spectator LV (16 December 1882): 1614-15.
"Art. The Grosvenor Gallery. Second Notice." The Spectator LV (23 December 1882): 1650-51.
Esposito, Donato. Frederick Walker and the Idyllists. London: Lund Humphries, 2017. Chapter 5, 112-135.
Morgan, Hilary, and Peter Nahum. Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Their Century. London: Peter Nahum, 1989. Catalogue number 138.
Owen, Heseltine. "In Memoriam: Cecil Gordon Lawson." E The Magazine of Art XVII (1894): 1-6, 64-70.
"Reviews. Cecil Lawson; a Memoir." The Art Journal New Series XXII (1883): 132.
Created 13 June 2023