“The Cauld Blast" by Joshua Hargrave Sams Mann (c.1826-1886)

The Cauld Blast

Joshua Hargrave Sams Mann (c.1826-1886)

1876

Oil on canvas

H 91.4 x W 60.9 cm

Royal Holloway Picture Gallery, University of London

Purchased for Thomas Holloway, 1882; accession number: THC0043

Mann’s reputation as a purveyor of cozy domestic scenes has damned him in the eyes of posterity. There is nothing in the least cozy or domestic, however, about The Cauld Blast. [Commentary continues below. Click on the image to enlarge it, and mouse over the text for links.]

The painting in its frame (photograph by Jacqueline Banerjee)

Photograph on this page reproduced from Art UK by kind permission of the Picture Gallery; formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee.

Commentary by Robert Fraser

On a bleak mountain side an old man and a young girl huddle together against a driving storm. The old man is wearing a greenish plaid with which he is attempting to protect the girl. He looks to the left, haggard and haunted; she looks at us with a winsome appeal. Nothing in the picture tells us with any degree of definiteness that he is her grandfather, and yet we know it must be so. The setting is Scottish: lowlands or highlands we cannot be sure. One thing is obvious: a generation is missing. Where are her father and mother? If the setting is a highlands one, their absence may be a comment on the drastic effect of the clearances (I owe this insight to the gallery’s present curator, Laura MacCulloch). In that case the cold blast is as much the wind of adverse circumstances and political insensitivity as an inclement day.

This is Mann’s most commonly reproduced image, and with good reason. What distinguishes it, I think, and pulls at the heart-strings, is a vulnerability which these tender beings share, a mutual protectiveness, fragile and for that reason the more to be cherished. There is one more clue, and it lies in the painting’s title. The cauld blast is a phrase that memorably occurs in a poem by Burns:

O wert thou in the cauld blast,
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt,
I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee;
Or did Misfortune's bitter storms
Around thee blaw, around thee blaw,
Thy bield should be my bosom,
To share it a', to share it a'.

Or were I in the wildest waste,
Sae black and bare, sae black and bare,
The desert were a Paradise,
If thou wert there, if thou wert there;
Or were I Monarch o' the globe,
Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign,
The brightest jewel in my Crown
Wad be my Queen, wad be my Queen.

That Mann had this poem in mind cannot be asserted with certainty, but the mood fits. Burns’s poem is in lowland Scots: “beilt”, for example, is a shelter such as a bothie in a remote glen. This is also a love poem: affectionate and nurturing: “Misfortune’s bitter storms” include death, among other threats. I count it a mercy that, apart from the Burns quote, we know so little about this painting. The picture itself tells us most of what we need to know.

Related Material

Victorian
Web

Artists

J.H.S.
Mann

Created 11 June 2020