The Stonebreaker, 1857. Oil on canvas, 253/4 x 31 inches (65.4 x 78.7 cm). Collection of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, accession number 1936P506., 1874.
This work is acknowledged as Wallis’ second masterpiece of the first phase of Pre-Raphaelitism. The principal version is in the collection of the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery while an oil sketch for the picture is in the Makins Collection. Allen Staley points out that
The Death of Chatterton is an interior scene, with only a view over the London skyline through a garret window, but [this] picture is an outdoor painting and a remarkable one. The stonebreaker lies dead upon his litter of rocks at sunset. Behind him are a fern-covered bank, a river in a valley below, and hills beyond. In a sense, the picture follows the Pre-Raphaelite pattern of the single figure in an elaborate and brightly coloured environment, but the extensive background and sunset effect reflect the later development of Pre-Raphaelitism in Millais's Autumn Leaves. Some details, such as the leaves above the horizon, are minutely and separately painted, but in the larger mass of the bank behind the dead man, the minutely drawn foliate detail of Hunt, Millais, or Hughes is absent. Throughout the foreground Wallis' colours have an extremely high key. They are thinly painted over a white ground, and the effect is dazzling. As there is relatively little detail - simply areas of green and red, suggesting patches of grass and earth - the foreground comes to the surface primarily as abstract colour. Individual details such as the rodent at the dead worker's foot, and even the stonebreaker himself, do not stand out, but are absorbed as part of the pattern. The figure is painted in earthier colours than his setting. Nature glows vibrantly, but the dead man recedes into the landscape and becomes the quieter in death. [88])
Mike Hickox in a personal communication has suggested the picture was painted during Wallis’ trip to North Wales with Mary Ellen in the summer of 1857. He thinks that the location was near Maentwrog, where Mary Ellen's mother was born, and that the river in the mid-ground is the Dwyryd. In the nineteenth century there was a slate quarry nearby.
When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858, no. 562, instead of a title it was accompanied by a catalogue entry quoting lines from Chapter four, Book III, of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus:
Venerable to me is the hard Hand, crooked, coarse; indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too is the rugged face, all weather tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence, for it is the face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee. Hardly-entreated Brother! For us thy back was so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred. For in thee too lay a god-created Form, but it was not to be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom.”
The original frame was inscribed with a line from Tennyson’s poem "A Dirge": “Now is done the long day’s work" and the painting was exhibited under this title in Birmingham in 1861. In his Academy Notes of 1858, Ruskin was once again enthusiastic about Wallis’s painting and recognized its greatness:
On the whole, to my mind, the picture of the year; and but narrowly missing being a first-rate of any year. It is entirely pathetic and beautiful in purpose and colour; its only fault being a somewhat too heavy laying of the body of paint, more especially in the distant sky, which has no joy nor clearness when it is looked close into, and in the blue of the hills that rise against it, which is, also, too uniform and dead. All perfect painting is light painting – light at some point of the touch at all events; no half inch of a good picture but tells, when it is looked at, ‘None but my master could have laid me so. [170])
While Ruskin wrote that Wallis's foreground seemed somewhat hastily painted, he forgave it as the colours were beautiful and it would have been in false taste to elaborate the subject further. He was more critical of the distance, which suffered from “a too heavy laying of the body of paint." The blue of the hills was "too uniform and dead", and the sky above them had "no joy nor clearness when it is looked into." Although joy is possibly the last quality we would expect to find in a painting of such a gloomy subject, it is possible to see what Ruskin means. In treatment of both foreground and background, Wallis seems to have adopted Pre-Raphaelite effects of colour without basing them on the scrupulously detailed observation of early Pre-Raphaelitism.
In general, however, the picture received mixed reviews from the critics when it was shown at the Royal Academy and was not hung in a favourable position. The critic of The Spectator considered it one of the principal works in the show: "In the few words we have to say on the present occasion, we of course propose to accomplish nothing beyond the bare mention of the most prominent works…and the greatest work included in it is from one of the distinctly Praeraffaelite painters. We mean Mr. Wallis’s dead Stonebreaker: a picture very wonderful dreadful, yet with a great peace in it too”(471).
W. M. Rossetti writing in The Saturday Review had great praise for this work considering it the principal paintings of the exhibition:
We do not hesitate to single out the Dead Stonebreaker of Mr. Wallis as the master-work of the gallery. It is at the head both of its thought and of its art, and presents a notable combination of the great qualities in the new movement. It takes the hard fact of our own day as its inspiration, finds that this too has elements of eternal pathos and significance, associates and calms its bitter human literality with the glory of external nature, and realizes all – the mournfulness, the strangeness, the beauty, the actual truth – to the uttermost. Mr. Wallis tells his meaning so well in the mottoes which he has selected, that we shall let them speak for him. The full-fraught line from Tennyson, inscribed on the frame, is almost enough of itself– Now is done thy long day’s work; to which the catalogue adds that other from Carlyle – "Hardly entreated brother! for us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our conscript on whom the lot fell, and, fighting our battles, wert so marred. For in thee too lay a God-created form, but it was not to be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom." The painter has probed low for his subject, but only to show us that we are wrong in calling it low. An old pauper set to break stones by the road-side, who has died over his work – that is all. No horror, no grimace no anti-poor-law stump oratory. It is mournful and terrible; yet there is more of peace at the heart of it than of terror. The old man is not a scarecrow, but a strong-knit stalwart labourer, not long past the vigour of his manhood. His task has been steadily worked at – the hammer has slipped quietly from his hand – grey under the twilight shadow, his face, which the inquisitive stoat stands to look at, has settled into calm. The yellow sunset broods over the blue hills, and, reflected in the still river, the sky comes nearer to the dead man than the hollow gloom of earth – Now is done thy long day’s work: the great deliverer and changer has come. There is certainly no painter of the time who deserves better of the public than Mr. Wallis. He always gives them of his best. Whatever it is in him to think and do, he thinks gravely and does thoroughly. [500]
Not everyone initially recognized the greatness of this painting, however. The reviewer for The Athenaeum, for instance, was less than enthusiastic:
Mr. Wallis is not very successful this year... His Dead Stonebreaker (562) may be a protest against the Poor-law, but still it is somewhat repulsive and unaccounted for. In a purple, mouldy, rather opaque twilight, on a heap of angular granite stones, in the vicinity of trees and brambles, dim and dark, against a thickened sky, lies a dead pauper stonebreaker - smock, cords, highlows, complete. His face, wan and sunken, is drooped against the bank, - they will wait long at home for him. His switchy hammer has dropped from his hand; a long, thin, wiry stoat has already, so quiet is he, so harmless and so uncomplaining, mounted on his foot, scenting death, and curious about who and what he is, whether dangerous or food. This may be a protest against the Poor-law - against a social system that makes the workhouse or stonebreaking the end of the model peasant; but it may also be a mere attempt to excite and to startle by the poetically horrible. If one dead man pleases, paint another, may be the argument, - the logic should be, if I make one triumph by a dead man, paint no more. There is the Morgue, there are dead-houses in Bedlam, there is the thief just down from the gallows, there is the suicide-painter, - but who but an undertaker would pelt us with skulls?" (567).
The reviewers for The Royal Academy Review also objected to the painter focusing on death as a subject: "Mr. Wallis in the charnel-house again! The dead body of a workhouse pauper on a stone-heap. He has died at his task. Night is falling, and a weazel stands fearlessly on the corpse. The whole painting is exaggerated in colour, and too low in tone, especially the dead pauper. The purple curtain at the back of the picture may be intended for a hill or a cloud: and it is only upon examination, and the discovery of certain trees on the summit, standing out from a bright lemon-coloured sky, that we arrive at any certain conclusion upon the matter. We are willing to admit that nature frequently exhibits extraordinarily twilight effects, and renders it extremely difficult to distinguish distant hills from clouds. Mr. Wallis, however, by his strong predilection for bright purples and lemon colours, and his hard outlines and want of gradation of light - dresses Nature in such fantastic attire, that renders confusion worse compounded. The corpse and the foreground are somewhat flimsily executed. The broke flints are not equal to those so photographically portrayed in Mr. Brett's ‘Stone-breaker’ (No.1089), and Mr. Wallis' reptilian delineation is inferior to Mr. Paton's in the ‘Bluidy Tryste'” (30).
Wallis was not the first artist to have painted stonebreakers. In 1830, early in his career, Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) painted The Stonebreaker and his Daughter, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Wallis may very well have been influenced in his subject by Gustave Courbet's The Stonebreakers, painted in 1849 and exhibited at the 1851 Salon, at a time when Wallis was studying at Gleyre's studio in Paris. It is impossible to say, however, whether he saw Courbet's work or not because no mention of this painting has been found in his correspondence from this time. Curiously the Royal Academy exhibition of 1858 showed another Stonebreaker, this one painted by John Brett, another member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. The picture is now at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
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Bibliography
“Fine Arts. Royal Academy.” The Athenaeum, No. 1592 (May 1, 1858): 65-568.
Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh. London: Saunders and Otley, 1838.
Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. Academy Notes, vol. XIV. Eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: Allen and Unwin, 1904.
Lessens, Ronald and Dennis T. Lanigan. Henry Wallis. From Pre-Raphaelite Painter to Collector/Connoisseur. Woodbridge: ACC Art Books, 2019, cat. 28, 97-100.
The Council of Four. “A Guide to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts,” The Royal Academy Review. London: Thomas F. A. Day, 1858.
“The Fine Art of 1858 – Oil Paintings.” The Saturday Review V (May 15, 1858): 500-06.
“Fine Arts. The Royal Academy Exhibition.” The Spectator XXXI (1858): 470-71.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
BibliographyLast modified 15 October 2022