Harvest

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Artist: John Frederick Herring, Sr. (British, 1795–1865)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 41 13/16 x 73 3/16 inches (106.2 x 185.9 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Victorian representations of country life were often colored by nostalgia and an emphasis on the supposed physical and moral benefits of rustic simplicity. John Frederick Herring, a successful sporting artist, purchased a country estate in Kent in 1853, and this harvest landscape is almost certainly based on the stretch of countryside that he owned. Although this landscape reflects the Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm for plein air study, Herring’s idyllic image ignores the agricultural improvements of the 1850.

Instead, he represents traditional manual harvesting methods, as well as idealized workers and closely observed draft horses, rather than the farming machinery that was in wide use throughout England by the 1850s. Herring’s vision is one of stability, not change: healthy and contented laborers in the foreground, Herring’s manor house in the background, and the new squire, Herring himself, out riding with his dogs.

Text: Yale Center for British Art.