Today’s sketch – from the imagination, of course.
Very late, I know, but I have just finished planting my potatoes and I usually gather seaweed to lay between the rows: technically it may not be much of a manure, but it definitely enhances the flavour of potatoes; tomatoes, too.
Having been looking at some art books recently, I had the idea of portraying a typical coastal village children’s task in previous generations: seaweed was free, so it must be fetched for the kitchen garden in large quantities.
Quite a few artists of the later Victorian/Edwardian era well portrayed busy children: one feels for those girls in their heavy long dresses, probably the same patched handmedown worn every day except perhaps Sundays! As for the mothers, many of whom felt obliged to put their daughters in starched white pinafores, regardless of how grubby their work…
The Newlyn artists Stanhope Forbes and Harold Harvey typically showed girls charged with looking after their younger siblings or doing lighter tasks such as gathering apples; but George Clausen’s subjects raked hay, picked stones, and joined in with other tough jobs like gleaning. And the photographer Frank Meadow Sutcliffe certainly showed the hard side of life around Whitby from an early age.
The lower sketch, done yesterday, hadn’t worked so well because the poses weren’t right; today’s effort, though completed faster, works better I think because I carefully worked out the “framing” of the figures before clothing them. Plus, those forward leans give a better impression of effort.
Maybe a painting one day…?
