Joseph Farquharson R.A. 1846-1935

Dundee, Robertson Bruce Limited:

Private collection

The title of this work is taken from Act II scene VII from Shakespear's As You Like It, 'Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind, Thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude.' Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition with Day Departing in the West, Through the Woodland Snow and All in a Garden Fair, four at least depicting sheep herded through the snow. In the 1920s a young Scottish artist was told ''Farquharson has taken all the money out of snow", a perceptive comment on the enormous popularity of Farquharson's paintings of sheep in snowy landscapes. In 1926, the painter Walter Richard Sickert compared Farquharson's snow scenes with those of Gustave Courbet, which he described as 'painted with the palette knife and looking like Christmas cards sprinkled with mica' whereas Farquharson 'has painted subjects that interest him in the familiar, taditional style that a succession of good painters have taught the world to read currently. There is no jolt. The painter immerses his audience in the subject, partly because he does not distract their attention by archaisms or neologisms of technique.'' (Fine Art Society, Joseph Farquharson of Finzean, exhibition catalogue, pg.5). Farquharson's interest in such subjects lead to him becoming known affectionately as 'Frozen Mutton Farquharson'.

The Art Annual of 1912 described Farquharson's snow covered landscapes, thus 'There is not one of Farquharson's pastoral landscapes which is not treated from the contemplative or poetic point of view: the poetry of snow either in its suggestion of desolation or of the endurance of peasantry life, or the exquisite beauty of rare tints of sun or moon on deep snow surfaces and seen through leafless trees' (William MacDonald Sinclair, The Art of Joseph Farquharson, A.R.A., The Art Annual, Christmas 1912, pp.1-2). Farquharson had a portable painting studio constructed in which he could paint outdoor amid snow storms in relative comfort with the aid of an oil heater. Unfortunately it was a less pleasant experience for Duncan, the poor man who posed as the shepherd in many of these paintings. One one occassion 'the artist noticed that the man was looking blue with cold, so he opened the window of the hut, and said, "Duncan, you'd better go into the farmhouse and warm yourself." "Are ye done? he asked. "Not quite," said the painter. "Och, then, never mind me," he said; "I'm fine and comfortable!" (ibid Sinclair, pg.21).

The dramatic suggestion of the swirling blizzard snow in Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind recalls Farquharson's canvas of 1910 entitled Winter Comes With Stormy Blast in which the sheep are almost engulfed by the snow as it blusters around them. The snow encrusted wall had also appeared in Through the Calm and Frosty Air of 1908 but Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind was based upon a much earlier painting The Joyless Winter Day of 1883. The 1883 picture was a horizontal composition but the figures of the shepherd cowering from the wind and the sheep grazing undisturbed among the drifts are very similar. The Joyless Winter Day had been the first of Farquharson's great snowscapes and was purchased by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest for the collection which became the Tate Gallery. A watercolour version of The Joyless Winter Day was exhibited at the Fine Art Society exhibition devoted to Farquhason in 1985, as the Tate picture was in such an unstable condition.