![The Hop Gardens of England [Kent]](4.jpg)
The Hop Gardens of England [Kent]. 1874. Oil on canvas. 60½ x 84 inches (153.7 x 213.4 cm). Collection of Tate Britain, reference no. T13443. Image kindly released under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) Licence. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
The Hop-Gardens of England was painted during the summer and autumn of 1874 on location at Wrotham near Sevenoaks in Kent. Lawson's friend Heseltine Owen has described the genesis of this picture:
In the early summer of 1873 I went to spend a few days with some friends of mine near Tunbridge in Kent. The hop-fields were then in their greatest beauty. Though just returned from Italy, I was confirmed in the opinion that, beautiful as are the vineyards of Italy, they are equalled, if not surpassed, by the hop-fields of England. I remember pressing this on Lawson, and I urged him to try his hand. So we arranged a little trip into Kent together. We went down by coach from London to Tunbridge. The day was brilliant, and Lawson - who, as far as I can remember, had never been in Kent before, or, at all events, among the hop-fields – was deeply impressed. We were put down by the coach at my friends' place, and, after lunching with them, spent the afternoon together, driving about an a dog-cart they lent us, stopping at any points which he thought might help in his picture, and generally planning and arranging the campaign. Later on he settled down with his sisters at Wrotham, and in a quaint old barn, which made an excellent studio, he began his great picture, The Hop-Gardens of England. [68]
The painting features a landscape of rolling hills with intermittent clumps of trees. Rows of burgeoning hops surround a solitary male figure in the mid foreground. A large plough stands on a hill in the right foreground. Oast houses and other farm buildings can be seen in the background. The composition was influenced by Rubens's A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning of c.1636 in the National Gallery in London. Lawson's brushwork is atypically bold, dynamic, and highly experimental and more suggestive of much later painting styles than landscape painting at the time.
![The Hop Gardens of England [Kent], detail](4b.jpg)
The solitary male figure.
The Hop-Gardens of England made its first public appearance at McLean's Gallery in Haymarket in London in 1875. Although the painting had been rejected by the Royal Academy that year to Lawson's great disappointment, it was accepted the following year and hung in a prominent position. As Owen explained: "Yielding – as Lawson himself told me they did – to the outspoken opinion of Sir Frederic Leighton, the Council of that year accepted the picture, and it was hung in the Great Room" (70). It was widely reviewed. The critic of The Art Journal drew special attention to it: "A picture to which we would draw special attention is C. G. Lawson's Hop Gardens of England (161), hanging in the place of honour over the Academy Council picture by C. W. Cope. We look over miles of lovely hop country, the red-tiled farmhouses on the hillside foreground being almost embowered in the yellow greenery of the abounding plant. The treatment is at once original and truthful, and the Council last year showed how wonderfully human they are by rejecting it" (231). Edmund Gosse, Lawson's biographer, felt this picture was a major turning point in his career: "So huge a picture, the work of a young man, could not be better placed at the Academy, and Cecil Lawson's name began once more to be mentioned among artists, although his picture came back upon his hands unsold" (25).
Lawson subsequently repainted parts of the picture and then exhibited it at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879 under the title Kent. The Magazine of Art reviewer commented: "Mr. Cecil Lawson re-exhibits 'Hop-gardens in Kent, recently hung (and badly hung) at the Academy – a tormented and spotty work, in which the effect of a chaotic perspective is helped by the absence of any trustworthy horizon" (164). It was also noticed, and extensively but not favourably reviewed, by F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum:
From these almost monumental portraits and poetic pictures we turn to two large landscapes, the mood of which is antithetical to anything approaching style, in the finer sense of that term; but it is a duty to examine them carefully, because former efforts of Mr. Cecil Lawson have received much attention and a large measure of praise. There is no doubt of their prominence here. The larger landscape is Kent (19), which represents Kentish hop-gardens, oasts, cottages, downs, and roads, and a late afternoon effect of sunlight. While admiring highly the Titianesque luminosity of the deep turquoise sky, its far-reaching atmosphere and slow-trailing clouds of golden white, we fail to see the motive of the artist, who, in depicting nature, has chosen an awkward standpoint for his linear perspective, and very much confused the aerial perspective of the landscape proper which it pleased him to paint. Mr. Lawson has sacrificed local truth in nearly every part of his picture: in the verdure of the hop-vines, and, above all, in what should be the splendid red of the roofs, the golden orange of the roadway, its inevitable purple shadows, and the pure shadows of the same origin on the foliage throughout. He has vulgarized those elements of the view which nature made lovely, and which agriculture had not wrecked, and thus departed from nature, without attaining, or even seeming to care to attain, that dignified, monumental style of landscape which is possible when nature is treated under certain rules of art, as in G. Poussin's pictures of old and G. A. Fripp's of our own time. Those shadows which are clear and lovely in nature, and are not to be fouled in monumental art, are here but dirty spaces of almost meaningless pigment; and the lights, which must have been glorious in the sun of such a view as this, sink to the state of an old master's faded picture. Mr. Lawson's model, in this case, at least, has being some ill-restored Rubens. [575-76]
Unlike Stephens the reviewer for The Spectator greatly praised this painting for its power despite its minor faults:
We must now pass to the landscapes of Mr. Cecil Lawson, and first to his large contribution called Kent. In many ways this is a beautiful picture, in all it is a work of very great power, – greater power, we should say, than exists in any other landscape painter of our time. To say that it is at all perfect, even in its way, would be both to mislead the public, and do the artist the greatest possible harm; indeed, we fancy if the latter told us his opinion, he would be the first to say that his method of work was at present scarcely more than experimental. And in many minor points, as, for instance, in the painting of the nearest flowers and foreground, the work is greatly deficient in delicacy; but for grasp of a subject, in power of depicting worthily a broad stretch of varied landscape, and in the freedom and vigorousness of the whole painting, this is a very remarkable work. Its similarity to Rubens' landscape is so great that we cannot help noticing it, though we do not like drawing attention to such resemblances, and attach little, if any importance to them. The likeness, however, is to the strength and freedom of Rubens, quite as much, if not more, than to his manner and choice of subject. [596]
In 1880 The Art Journal published an engraving of The Hop Gardens of England by J. Saddler opposite page 4. At that time the journal described the painting in this way:
Mr. Lawson's large and noble picture formed, among the landscapes, one of the great attractions of the Grosvenor Gallery last season, where it most deservedly occupied a very prominent position in the principal room. The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of Wrotham, a district particularly distinguished for its hop gardens, which lie chiefly on and under the chalk hills running between Bromley and Rochester. The picture is not an actual transcript from any one point in particular, but is a representative composition of most of the characteristics of many portions of the county of Kent. The time of year presented is September, when, if the season has been favourable, the hop flowers are fully ripe and ready for the 'pickers.' The gardens then offer a most beautiful and attractive sight, and Mr. Lawson has here done full justice to a scene of nature rich and luxuriant, where the hops are hanging in abundant and graceful festoons from the poles round which the vine clings. The numerous small circular buildings with roofs crowned with a kind of vane are oasts, or kilns for drying the hops when gathered; these kilns are mostly heated by flues. The machine in the foreground in the picture, that bears a strong resemblance to a plough, is simply an instrument for clearing the weeds from the alleys between the hop rows, which should always be kept clean. [4]
![The Hop Gardens of England [Kent]](4c.jpg)
Closer view of the implement for clearing the rows between the lines of hops (not a plough, as one critic saw it).
When the painting was shown for the second time in the posthumous exhibition of Lawson's works at the Grosvenor Gallery Winter Exhibition in 1882-83, no. 167, it was accompanied by these lines from a sixteenth-century air, "The Jovial Man of Kent", appended to it in the catalogue:
"Let Frenchmen boast their straggling vine,
Which gives them drafts of meagre wine;
It cannot match this plant of mine
When autumn skies are blue."
Thus said the jovial man of Kent
As through his golden hops he went.
Lawson himself had used this refrain as a motto for his picture. The painting became one of Lawson's best-known works and was exhibited seven times between 1875 and 1897, including at the International Exhibition in Melbourne in 1880-81 and the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
![The Hop Gardens of England [Kent]](../drawings/2.jpg)
Watercolour sketch for the painting. Click on the image for more details, and to see a larger image of it.
Although Lawson concentrated on oil painting, so that his watercolours are rarer, there is a watercolour sketch for this painting in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. It was exhibited at Lawson's posthumous exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, Winter Exhibition, in 1882-83, no. 193. Martin Hardie praised this study: "In one of his water-colors, Hop Gardens of Kent, he has condensed and compressed the whole of a county into a space of 10 by 20 inches. It is a drawing which combines a triumphant grasp of detail with magnificent sweep of design; that flight of birds, so thoughtfully and perfectly placed, is an integral part of his ordered pattern. Indeed, in all his work, the broad and poetic effect is enhanced by the aptness of his impressionistic method" (189). The watercolour study is similar to the larger oil version, but differs in significant details, including the figure of the man who is purposefully striding in the watercolour whereas he is leisurely strolling in the oil. The position of the flock of birds has changed in the oil and the birds are not nearly as prominent as in the watercolour. The flowers that are so notable in the foreground of the watercolour are absent in the oil painting. The palettes are quite different between the oil and watercolour, with the oil being darker and much more colourful. In general, however, the oil is a more successful composition than the watercolour suggesting that the changes Lawson made were for the better.
Bibliography
"Art. Three Painters at the Grosvenor Gallery." The Spectator LII (10 May 1879): 595-96.
Bury, Adrian. "Cecil Lawson, Landscape Painter 1849–1882." The Connoisseur CXIV, no.494 (December 1944): 78–84.
Esposito, Donato. Frederick Walker and the Idyllists. London: Lund Humphries, 2017. Chapter 5, 117-18.
Gosse, Edmund. Cecil Lawson: A Memoir. London: The Fine Art Society, 1883.
Hardie, Martin. Water-Colour Painting in Britain III. The Victorian Period. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1968.
"Kentish Hop Gardens." The Art Journal New Series XIX (1880): 4.
Owen, Heseltine. "In Memoriam: Cecil Gordon Lawson." The Magazine of Art XVII (1894: 1-6, 64-70.
"Pictures of the Year. –III." The Magazine of Art II (1879): 161-65.
Stephens, Frederic George. "The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition." The Athenaeum No. 2688 (3 May 1879): 575-76.
"The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Art Journal New Series XV (1876): 229-32.
Created 13 June 2023