What a big hoe and cry!
QUESTION Why did the 19th century painting L’Homme à La Houe (The Man With A Hoe) cause such a storm of controversy in France at the time? The Man With A hoe is a painting by Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875), one of the forefathers of the French realism movement. Millet submitted his painting to the Salon, the official art exhibition of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in 1863.
It caused a sensation because for the patrons of the Salon art was meant to be beautiful; this was brutally realistic.
It depicted a labourer, hunched over in a rocky field with a weary expression, utilitarian clothing, and a drooping neckline to match a slack-jawed mouth. It was the exact opposite of what Parisian bourgeoisie audiences were accustomed to seeing on the exhibition walls.
The Industrial Revolution had caused a steady exodus from French farms, and The Man With A hoe was interpreted as a socialist protest about the peasants’ plight.
It drew a ferocious response from critics, most famously in a diatribe from the author and critic Paul Saint-Victor, who believed Millet had deliberately sought out the basest form among the peasantry: ‘he lights his lantern and looks for a cretin; he must have searched for a long time before finding his peasant leaning on a hoe.
‘Such types are uncommon, even at the Hospice de Bicetre (a home for the insane). Imagine a monster without a skull, with eyes whose lights have been extinguished, with an idiot’s grin, planted with legs askew like a scarecrow in the middle of a field.
‘No glimmer of intelligence humanises this brute at rest. There is no gleam of human intelligence in this animal. has he just come from working — or from murdering?’
Shortly before this painting was made, a serial killer named Martin Dumollard, a former peasant, had been captured after he’d murdered at least six women between 1855 and 1861. Rumours of cannibalism and vampirism surrounded the case. Dumollard was guillotined in 1863.
Despite the critics’ assertions that the artist was a socialist or political agitator, Millet denied being interested in politics. he explained in a letter to a friend: ‘To tell the truth, peasant subjects suit my nature best, for I must confess, at the risk of your taking me to be a socialist, that the human side is what touches me most in art.’
The son of a farmer, Millet was aware of the hardships faced by agricultural labourers, and he described their backbreaking work as ‘true humanity and great poetry’. While not generally regarded as a great artist, his influence was profound.
his subject matter fascinated the likes of Georges Seurat and Van Gogh. The latter wrote: ‘Millet is father Millet . . . counsellor and mentor in everything for young artists.’
Many of Van Gogh’s early Dutch paintings of painters and weavers were inspired by Millet. The Man With A hoe is currently in the J. Paul Getty Museum in California.
Mrs Debbie Wilson, Newbury, Berks.
QUESTION Who was the clergyman once described as ‘A dunghill covered with flowers’? The Reverend henry Ward Beecher (18131887) was a popular and controversial Christian minister in the U.S., from the 1850s through to the 1880s.
Beecher was a firm anti-slavery activist and an outspoken supporter of the war against the Confederacy.
Most Christians of the time believed the Old Testament sanctioned race-based slavery, but Beecher demonstrated how the New Testament could be interpreted as repudiating this base trade.
Along with his sister, harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the best- selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Beecher made the antislavery movement respectable.
Beecher, a flamboyant preacher dubbed ‘the Shakespeare of the pulpit’, won praise from such luminaries as Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman (though Oscar Wilde considered him ‘a clown’).
One of his tactics was to hold auctions in which members of his congregation were asked to buy freedom for actual slaves.
his liberal views on science, psychology, art, entertainment and popular culture helped liberate Americans from long-held prejudice and usher in modern thought. In 1885, he published evolution And Religion, his acceptance of Darwinian theory expressing the idea that God was a part of nature and not the causal force of the universe.
After his death in 1887, an admirer wrote: ‘Abraham Lincoln emancipated men’s bodies; henry Ward Beecher emancipated their minds. The one delivered them from injustice; the other, from superstition.’
In the 1870s, Beecher was the subject of a public adultery scandal. A prominent congregation member, elizabeth ‘ Libby’ Tilton, claimed she’d had an affair with him.
Libby was the wife of Theodore Tilton, a newspaper editor and assistant to Beecher. In 1874, he filed criminal charges against Beecher seeking $100,000 for ‘criminal intimacy’ with his wife.
The jury failed to agree, but for several years the question of his guilt became a national referendum on Beecher’s beliefs.
‘We can recall no one event since the murder of Lincoln that has so moved the people as this question whether henry Ward Beecher is the basest of men,’ declared the New York herald in 1874. Rachel Milner, Shrewsbury,
Shropshire.
QUESTION Who’s the oldest person to have had a No1 hit? FURTHER to the previous answers, while Cher is usually considered the oldest female No 1 artist, we shouldn’t dismiss the claim of hilda Woodward. She played the piano for Lieutenant Pigeon on their 1972 hit Mouldy Old Dough.
hilda, 60 at the time of the recording, died in 1999, aged 85. The group was fronted by her son Rob, with Nigel Fletcher, drums, and Stephen Johnson, bass. Their other UK hit was Desperate Dan, in December 1972.
Simon Deacon, Cwmbran, Gwent.
QUESTION Did the Tomainis, a husband-and-wife circus act where one was a giant and the other very small, have any children? FURTHER to the previous answer, Aurelio Al Tomaini had been billed at as much as 8ft 6½ in. Circus giants were often billed at exaggerated heights.
Your correspondent gave his actual height as 7 ft 11in. however, even that is likely to have been an exaggeration; most sources claim he was 7ft 4in at most — still an impressive height. he also weighed around 25 st and wore size-27 shoes.
Ray White, Newcastle upon Tyne.