The “Dreary Landscape” as a Background for Scenes of Rural Poverty in Victorian Paintings

Abstract

One of the most striking developments in British painting around 1870 was the growing emphasis on scenes of rural poverty. The reasons for this are not entirely clear but in part they may be laid to the revelations in government reports at that time of the hunger, disease, joblessness, inadequate housing, and the lack of sanitary facilities among both urban and country laborers. Conditions became severe after the outbreak of the depression in 1873 and in many areas did not significantly improve until the turn of the century. Writers — from Engels, Carlyle, Mayhew, and Dickens to Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, George Moore, and General Booth — made the plight of the poor familiar to readers for half a century. Finally in painting there was the growing influence of continental realism, in particular, the works of Jozef Israels and such French artists as Edouard Frere, Gustave Dore, Alphonse Legros, Leon Lhermitte, and Jules Bastien-Lepage. These painters worked or exhibited extensively in Britain during the last...