GEORGE HENRY R.A., R.S.A., R.S.W. (SCOTTISH 1858-1943)

GEORGE HENRY R.A., R.S.A., R.S.W. (SCOTTISH 1858-1943)
THE BANKS OF ALLAN WATER: AUTUMN
Oil on canvas
111cm x 104cm (43.75in x 41in)
Presented by J. A. D. McKean, Esq., 1922.
On the Banks of Allan Water,When brown Autumn spreads its storeThere I saw the Miller’s daughter,But she smiled no more. For the summer grief had brought herAnd her soldier, false was he;On the Banks of Allan Water,None so sad as she.Titled ‘Autumn’ in Illustrated Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture in the Collections of Paisley Corporation and Paisley Art Institute, 1948.       Exhibited:Paisley, A Paisley Legacy, The Paisley Art Institute Collection, Centenaries Catalogue, 2015, no.97.Literature:Martin, David, The Glasgow School of Painting, 1897 (George Bell & Sons), p.26;McConkey, Kenneth, ‘Listening to the Voices: A study of some aspects of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Jeanne d’Arc …’ Arts Magazine, (New York), vol.56, no.5, January 1982, p.156 (illus fig 5). Neglected in the modern literature on the Glasgow Boys, George Henry’s decorative scheme of 1888 ‘illustrative of The Banks of Allan Water’ was, we are told by David Martin, installed in a ‘west of Scotland mansion-house’ and has ‘never been shown in public’.  A major sequence of three works designed for an interior, this passing reference gives no hint of the scale and content of the triptych, the importance of which merits ongoing research, fuller scholarly debate and greater appreciation. Best known for his 1890 collaboration with Edward Atkinson Hornel in The Druids, bringing in the Mistletoe (Glasgow Museums), and for his year-long trip to Japan with Hornel (1893-4), Henry’s perspicacity was hailed in A Galloway Landscape (1889) for its instinctive accentuation of the abstract shapes and colours that characterise a very specific terrain. It was, wrote Baldwin Brown, ‘a manifesto’ for the new Glasgow painting. All at once, it seemed as though the young artist had articulated new principles of landscape painting that were less concerned with documentary accuracy than with a fundamental understanding of the primordial forces governing its form. Contemporary critics scrambled to understand this painting, reaching for the term ‘Impressionism’ – a catch-all for anything not quite conventional in contemporary art. Only latterly did it seem possible that this was ‘obviously a post-impressionist picture … fully in spirit with some of the ideas being propagated contemporaneously by the rebellious Gauguin and his circle in France’. Although the signs were there, it has never been fully understood how and why Henry arrived at this large ambitious work. Smaller works, ‘boilers’ he called them, provide a series of clues, but these often indicate ambivalence, and the sense that the artist’s work in the preceding years could move in any of a number of directions.  Although he had visited key sites – Brig-o-Turk, Cockburnspath and Kirkcudbright – the melting pots for the new Glasgow painting, Henry was no camp follower, and anxious to resolve the visual dilemmas posed by Bastien-Lepage’s Naturalism, he sought to make his mark. His ambition would be expressed in a triptych based on three of the four seasons that would resolve the conflict between direct observation and symbolic intent. To do this he turned to a popular song, On the Banks of Allan Water, taking each of its three verses as a separate theme. On the Banks of Allan WaterWhen the sweet springtime did fallWas the miller’s lovely daughter,Fairest of them all,For his bride a soldier sought her,And a winning tongue had he!On the Banks of Allan Water,None so gay as she.On the Banks of Allan Water,When brown Autumn spreads its storeThere I saw the Miller’s daughter,But she smiled no more. For the summer grief had brought herAnd her soldier, false was he;On the Banks of Allan Water,None so sad as she.On the Banks of Allan Water,When the winter snow fell fast, There I saw the Miller’s daughter;Chilling blew the blast,But the miller’s lovely daughter,Both from care and cold was free;On the Banks of Allan Water,There a corpse lay she.The popular ‘Broadside’ ballad in three stanzas that gives rise to this important sequence is thought to have been written by the gothic novelist, Matthew Lewis (1775-1818).  It describes the love of a miller’s daughter who withers and dies like the flowers of spring when her soldier-lover is untrue to her. It is considered to have been one of the inspirations for Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). Its afterlife includes a famous rendition by Adelina Patti, with music by Emma Raymond, sung in the 1880s and recorded in 1905, and, with an elaborated plot, On the Banks of Allan Water was used as the basis for a movie in 1916. It appears that Henry’s triptych was acquired by James Anderson Dunlop MacKean (1849-1932), future Paisley Burgh Treasurer and Honorary President of the Paisley Art Institute. His grandfather and father, William MacKean and William Muir MacKean, served as Provosts of the town (1879-1882 & 1908-1913).  A director of William MacKean Ltd, the family firm of starch producers at St Mirren’s Walks, Macdowall Street, Paisley, it is possible that he commissioned the Henry series for ‘Rozelle’, the JAD MacKean family home. The commission, if such it was, may have come through James Mavor, who took over editorship of The Scottish Art Review in October 1888, from Macaulay Stevenson. Despite the fact that Henry had visited Bridge of Allan, near Stirling in December 1887 for a gathering of the Glasgow Boys at Cambuskenneth, the confluence of the Allan with the Forth at Bridge of Allan is unlikely to have had much to do with his choice of subject matter for the series - his three paintings being closely related to the girl’s decline in ‘sweet springtime’, ‘brown Autumn’ and ‘Winter snow’. Of greater significance are the connections with Henry’s recent works and the confidence this project gave him in moving forward from Lepage-centred Naturalism to a more decorative and Symbolist facture seen in later addresses to ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’.  The present Spring and Autumn however, with their echoes of Lepage’s Jeanne d’Arc, should be regarded as an envoi to this earlier phase of Henry’s career. As for the prone figure in Winter, it may well be the case that Henry was aware of the Edward Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose series or indeed, John William Waterhouse’s Ophelia, a work to be shown at the Royal Academy in 1889, but these are unlikely precedents.  Equally improbable is its anticipation of Giovanni Segantini’s 1891 Symbolist painting, The Punishment of Lust, (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) with its prone figures and frieze-like format.  It is more probable that the artist was impressed by fellow ‘Glasgow Boy’ Alexander Roche’s Good King Wenceslas (Private Collection) of the previous year. In his own work, the mise-en-scène – a grid of vertical tree trunks punctuating a hillside and glowing – as in the present picture, had been a consistent feature for a number of years, while in his practice and in that of Roche and Macaulay Stevenson, the sinking sun and rising red-yellow moon became a familiar motif.  In Winter, trees and dead fronds form a warp with the deep indigo weft of Allan Water, flowing calmly, and for ever, under its fiery moon. Romantic anthropomorphism - growth and decay, a river-run, a music of time, in tune with human forms and feelings. More than simply ‘illustrative’ of a popular air, this is nature’s poetic requiem for lost love, and the key turning point in Henry’s career. We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for writing this catalogue entry.