All creatures great and small
Childlike but charming – these animal paintings may seem crude but they are a wonderful reminder of our rural past
ASK a child to draw a picture of a farmyard animal and the result will not be dissimilar to the paintings illustrated here – at least in terms of bodies shaped like oversize oblongs supported on improbable legs.
You’ll be able to see plenty of the latter at the Northern Antiques Fair in Harrogate later this month (see panel), exhibited by Leicester dealers Blackbrook Gallery.
They date from the era that saw unprecedented industrial and agricultural change. By 1801, UK population had grown from an estimated 5.5million to 10.75 million and everyone needed feeding. For decades before, farmers and landowners had become acutely aware they needed to increase food production, key to which was improving the country’s livestock.
One of the pioneers was Robert Bakewell (1725-1795), of Dishley Grange, near Loughborough, Leicestershire, whose new breeds of animals were capable of producing double the amount of meat in half the time.
His aim was to put meat onto the table of every family in the country.
Fat meat provided cheap nourishment for the labouring population and tallow for their candles. His inspirational work led to the blueprint for all livestock breeding and his methods and animals were exported worldwide.
“It seems hard for us to believe that the animals could have been bred to assume such fantastic shapes, but there is clear documentary evidence that animals at the time were bred to be excessively fat and tallow was a highly valued product,” Blackbrook proprietor John Stanley said.
“Some pigs, for example, were so large their chins had to be supported on wooden logs when they slept to stop them suffocating.”
During the 1700s to 1850s, a booming trade for artists grew around the exhibition and sale of farm animals. Artists became an essential component of the agricultural industry. Their paintings were a wonderful way of disseminating information on the new and improved breeds and promoting the merits of individual animals to prospective purchasers.
Breeders commissioned animal portraits to impress visiting farmers or to commemorate a particularly fine specimen. “One artist, Ben Marshall is quoted as saying that ‘many a man will pay me 50gns for painting his horse who thinks 10gns too much for painting his wife’.”
Artists who undertook these works ranged from the highly accomplished and well paid, to local jobbing artists whose images are nonetheless charming. “These paintings, described as ‘primitive’ or ‘naïve’, reveal the natural artistry and way of life before the Industrial Revolution had completely transformed society,” John said.
“They are historic documents, showing animals, farm buildings and landscapes of a vanished age and these once common paintings are now a rarity and eagerly sought and collected internationally.”
Some animals became celebrities touring the country to be exhibited at fairs and fêtes to advertise the virtues of their particular breed, and the enormous weights that they were able to achieve.
Arguably the most famous was the “Durham Ox” which had many inns along the route named after it. The 216-stone beast was bred by the Collings Brothers, who are given much of the credit for the development of the Durham Shorthorn.
The ox was sold and sold again, his price rising from £140 to the £2,000, offered to its new owner John Day but refused. Realising its potential exhibition fees, from 1801 to 1807, Day toured the ox around 200 fairs all over the country, where it became a sensation.
One of the most famous portraits of the animal was done in 1801 by John Boultbee (1753-1812). More than 2,000 copies of the engraving of the picture were sold in the first year, a copy of which today is worth £1,000-1,500 at auction.
Boultbee was one of the first artists to specialise in cattle painting. Family records show that he was a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds and entered the Royal Academy in 1775.
Born in Leicestershire, his patrons included all of the leading cattle breeders of the day, notably Robert Bakewell himself and Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester.
The almost equally famous White Ox was an even heavier Durham shorthorn, bred by JD Nesham, of Houghton-le-Spring. It tipped the scales at 223 stone and measured 8 feet 8 inches “from tail to pole”. The animal was painted by George Garrard (1760-1826) painter of horses to the Prince of Wales.
Garrard was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1800, the same year that he published a volume of coloured prints titled “A Description of the different varieties of Oxen common in the British Isles.”
Several other artists also travelled around the show circuit to record prizewinners for their proud owners One of them was Cotswold-based Richard Whitford, (c. 1839-1887) whose intended career was as a customs and excise officer. He turned to painting after being accused of misappropriating 5s. 3d. duty paid by a Manchester tobacco dealer.
He returned with his family to his native Evesham and, based in an important great sheep breeding area of England, sheep portraiture figured heavily in his work.
Whitford’s earliest known painted works are of horses done in 1855. A large part of his clientele was the local gentry, but he also had aristocratic patrons and executed several commissions for Queen Victoria.
From 1862, he signed himself “Animal painter to the Queen”. He died in London in 1890.
“Whitford’s animal paintings have enormous charm,” John said. “His subjects are painted against a backdrop of a landscape usually evocative of the Cotswold countryside with its rolling hills and a church spire or windmill usually features in the background, with birds wheeling in the sky above.”
Gourlay Steell, RSA (1819-1894) the son of an Edinburgh engraver was appointed animal painter to the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland. He was also animal painter to HM Queen Victoria in Scotland after the death of Sir Edwin Landseer in 1878.
John Miles (c.1811-1840), of Northleach, Gloucestershire, painted prize animals, specialising in anecdotal rural scenes such as an old carthorse chasing his executioner, or Adam naming the birds and beasts.
E.S. England (1890-1910), meanwhile, was born in Halifax and was well known for painting Northern livestock.