John Linnell

Bought from the artist by Serjeant Ralph Thomas (fl. 1845–1862);

James Orrock (1829–1913);

Arthur Thomas Hollingsworth (1847–1928);

His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 April 1929, lot 150 (as dated 1824), for £42 to Permian;

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 11 July 2017, lot 52, where acquired by the present owner for £50,000.

London, British Institution, 1830, no. 37;

Glasgow, Glasgow Dillettanti Society, 1830, no. 40;

London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of Works by the Old Masters and by deceased masters of the British School including a special selection from the works of John Linnell and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Winter 1883, no. 108 (lent by James Orrock);

Probably Glasgow , Kelvingrove Park, International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry, 1888, no. 47 (lent by James Orrock);

London, New Gallery, 1898, no. 204 (lent by A.T. Hollingsworth);

London, Royal Academy, 1903, no. 104 (lent by A.T. Hollingsworth);

London, Wembley Park, British Empire Exhibition, 1924.

Recorded in the artist’s landscape sketchbook under 1830 (the year that it was first exhibited);

G Crayon Junior, A Glance at the Exhibitions of the works by Living Artists: Under the Patronage of the Glasgow Dilettanti Society, Glasgow 1830, p. 54;

A.T. Story, The Life of John Linnell, vol. II, London 1891, p. 261;

D. Linnell, Blake, Palmer, Linnell and Co.: Life of John Linnell, Lewes 1994, pp. 133 and 357, no. 48(b).

This strikingly atmospheric scene on the Isle of Wight is a rare early oil painting by Linnell, based on drawings and watercolours done on a walking tour of the island in September 1815. A family is depicted gathering the last of the crop before winter, making the best use of what remains of the setting sun which casts a powerful autumn hue on the landscape. Linnell was very inspired by what he saw on the island and later paintings of what he saw drew on his vivid memories and on his well-filled sketchbooks. Linnell’s lifelong obsession with painting landscapes goes back to his early childhood. At a very early age his small-scale studies caught the attention of Benjamin West, who advised him to go directly to nature to record its forms, however transient. In 1805, when only thirteen, he entered the Royal Academy Schools, and with fellow students Hunt and Mulready became a pupil of John Varley. For the next few years the group concentrated on sketching out of doors, particularly along the banks of the Thames. In 1811, partly influenced by John Varley’s brother Cornelius, he had a religious conversion and there is from this date a heightened realism and intensity in his landscapes. He also developed a particular interest in sketching figures at work - a fine example is Kensington Gravel Pits of 1812 (Tate Gallery, London)¹ - and this preoccupation is evident in the sympathetic depiction of figures in The Potato Field. In 1817 he married and the increasing obligation to feed a growing family led to a move away from landscape painting to portraiture (his exhibits between 1824 and 1846 were nearly all portraits). Landscapes such as The Potato Field from his early period are therefore rare and much sought after.

Between the years 1813 and 1815 Linnell set out on a series of sketching trips, and it is from the sketches that he produced that many fine early paintings like The Potato Field are drawn. Following trips to North Wales (1813) and Derbyshire (1814), Linnell spent June 1815 in Windsor Forest moving on to Kingsclere and Newbury in the south of England. In September he travelled to Southampton from where he crossed the Solent to visit the Isle of Wight. He walked around nearly half the island and it seems clear that he relived here the inspiring experience of the wild landscape of North Wales a few years earlier. In fact his visit to the island produced an almost ecstatic vision which could have been experienced by his later friends William Blake and Samuel Palmer. In his unpublished autobiographical notes he described his walk from Newport to Niton: ‘It was a splendid day and the view northwards made me think of Xenophon’s account of the ten thousand. Nothing of the kind before or since was equal to that moment when I caught sight of that high horizon of light blue sea with the mid-day sun shining on it. Oh how vast, how infinite it seemed to me. I cried out in ecstasy though alone’. Something of this ecstatic vision was captured in the powerful effect of the setting sun, the ebbing clouds and the distant horizon in The Potato Field.

Whilst one of the defining moments of Linnell’s life was his religious conversion in 1813, the other was his meeting with William Blake in 1818. He shared similar views with Blake on both art and religion, and Linnell was able to help the older artist financially by commissioning engravings for his Book of Job and watercolour illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. A few years later Linnell met Samuel Palmer, whose life was to be so closely linked until Palmer’s death. Linnell introduced Palmer to Blake and this had a profound effect on the young artist. Palmer helped bring together a group of young artists called the Ancients who gathered around Blake at the end of his life and who set up a community in Kent at Shoreham in 1826. Whilst Linnell was never one of this group, he was greatly sympathetic to their aspirations and constantly gave advice to Palmer. The Potato Field was painted in 1829, a date of great significance as it was in that year that Linnell made his third and last visit to Shoreham. Linnell seems to have imbued this work with some of the intensity of vision which Palmer and his friends experienced in Shoreham.

Ralph Thomas, the first owner of The Potato Field, was an important early supporter of the artist and bought the picture with others in 1846. He was described as ‘book-seller, auctioneer and barrister’. He was a shrewd businessman whom Linnell first met when he visited Thomas’s offices in Chancery Lane on 30 October 1845. He took Thomas to his house in Porchester Terrace to see his paintings, and they did a deal whereby Thomas took a group of ten pictures and drawings (including The Potato Field) in exchange for a house in Hamilton Terrace, Hammersmith which Linnell wanted to own. Thomas did deals with other artists, notably the young Millais who agreed to paint small pictures for Thomas in return for an annual fee of £100 (the portrait of Thomas by Millais from 1848 is at the Tate Gallery, London). The Potato Field subsequently passed to the prolific landscape painter James Orrock, whose admiration for Linnell was recorded by Orrock’s biographer Byron Webber in 1903: 'There is no more original painter in the English School than is John Linnell. His work defies comparison with that of any other master'.² By 1898 the picture had passed into the collection of Arthur Hollingsworth, a prominent newspaper owner from Birmingham.

¹ https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/linnell-kensington-gravel-pits-n05776

² B. Webber, James Orrock, R.I.: Painter, Connoisseur, Collector, London 1993, vol. II, p.252.