The quotations at the head of each section are taken from Graves' list of Royal Academy exhibitors, and represent the inspiration for the painting, as submitted to the Academy's catalogue by Eyre Crowe.

Title: Shinglers (1869)

Medium: oil

Size: 151.8 cm x 238.4 cm (60 x 94 inches)

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1869

Current owner: Milwaukee School of Engineering

Athenaeum, 15 May 1869:

In [Shinglers] men are forging iron, and the effect desired would seem to be Rembrandtish, if not worthy of Rembrandt, who would have sacrificed all things to the fierce brilliance of the incandescent metal. Mr. Crowe has remained faithful to his knowledge of form, sacrificed chiaroscuro, and, we might almost add, foregone light and shade in this by no means brilliant but very masculine picture. It needs some point of interesting nature to redeem it.

Art Journal, 1869, p. 164:

Mr. E. Crowe is another artist of genius which will not condescend to please: very clever, but not a little disagreeable, are 'Shinglers' (61) and 'The Jacobite' (96).

The Times, 11 June 1869:

Mr. E. Crowe's large picture of 'Shinglers' (61) at work in the glare of the foundry, bringing a mass of red-hot iron under the beam of the steam hammer, their faces and limbs shielded by armour-like guards against the intense heat, is such a subject as Wright of Derby would have revelled in, and Mr. Crowe has treated it with courageous breadth and strength of light and shade. It is the most rigorous painting we remember from a painter who has generally confined himself to anecdotic history of cabinet size.

Shinglers marked a turning-point in Crowe's artistic career. Not since 1861 (Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia) had he exhibited a painting depicting the realities of contemporary industrial or commercial life. Yet the paintings he was to produce in the 1870s were to be dominated by modern scenes, including works of social realism. The picture formed part of an exhibition at Manchester City Art Gallery in 1987, and was noted in the exhibition catalogue by Julian Treuherz (Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art, p. 105), as as 'a remarkable scene of workers in an iron foundry, with an eerie lighting effect derived from Joseph Wright of Derby'.

Crowe had long been interested in industrial processes. His diaries reveal that he began a sketch of iron workers after visiting an ironworks at Falkirk in June 1862. In October of the same year he visited Mr Foster's Iron Works at Stourbridge and was introduced to the process of shingling, after which he again made a sketch of the 'Shinglers at the Forge'. Crowe was giving serious thought to a painting on the subject in September 1868, when a letter from his brother Edward (an engineer) advised that he paint a pair of pictures, one showing iron-workers at work and the other showing them on strike. 'This I had thought of, but tried to shirk. It must be done so, however', he wrote in his diary. It is not known whether a companion painting of striking iron-workers was ever begun. In October 1868, Crowe visited Hopkins' Iron Works in Middlesborough and observed shingling in progress, and on 24 November 1868 he revisited the Stourbridge Iron Works and sketched the hammer there. The painting, on a large scale of 151.8cm x 238.4cm (60 inches x 94 inches) was finished by April 1869 when it was submitted to the Royal Academy. Mr Hopkins of the Middlesborough Iron Works later informed Crowe that he had painted a helve hammer instead of a nasmith.

Shinglers, by then called The Foundry, was acquired by the Forbes Collection in 1981, and was sold at auction by Christie's of London in February 2003, for £29,875. The purchaser, Ernhart G. Grohmann, President of the Aluminum Casting and Engineering Co. of Milwaukee, donated the painting to the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where it is on public display.

Title: The Jacobite (1869)

Medium: oil

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1869

Athenaeum, 15 May 1869:

The Jacobite (96), where two soldiers arrest an old gentleman, who has been disguised as a spinster, and sits at a wheel. This work is rich in action and character, and full of good technical qualities.

Art Journal, 1869, p. 164:

Mr. E. Crowe is another artist of genius which will not condescend to please: very clever, but not a little disagreeable, are 'Shinglers' (61) and 'The Jacobite' (96). Mr. Crowe is independent, he has an original way of looking at a subject, peculiarly his own. To what other painter would have occurred the idea of dressing the Jacobite as an old woman seated at a spinning wheel, and who else would have thought of detecting the disguise of sex by the thrust of a soldier's gun? Trousers beneath petticoats is somewhat a coarse joke. Yet the work shows good painting.

The Times, 11 June 1869:

Mr. Crowe's third picture, a stalwart Jacobite discovered in the gude-wife's mutch and petticoat at the spinning wheel by a couple of Hanoverian soldiers, has the merit of a well-told story, but the execution is hard and dry, and the picture wants some touch of beauty to correct the harshness of its elements.

Title: The Penance of Dr. Johnson, 1784 (1869)

Medium: oil

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1869

Current owner: Dr Johnson House Museum, Gough Square, London

Athenaeum, 15 May 1869:

The Penance of Dr. Johnson (768) by Mr. E. Crowe, shows with perfect clearness the subject the artist has chosen ... There is much sound work and capital rendering of expression here. The picture is a little hard and opaque.

Illustrated London News, 22 May 1869:

Mr. Eyre Crowe is a contrast to the last-named painter [Mr. A. Johnston] in earnestness, thoughtfulness, and careful fidelity to nature; he is, indeed, apt to fall into the opposite extreme of hard prosaic literalness, to the neglect of the legitimate charms of art. His principal work this year is a well-told version of the story of Dr. Johnson standing an hour bareheaded, exposed to the inclemency of the weather and the sneers of the passers-by, in Uttoxeter Market, by way of penance for having refused to keep his father's bookstall in the market fifty years previously.

The Times, 11 June 1869:

The absorbed look of the brave doctor, as true to his purpose and served by the feeling that prompted it, he allows the taunts and jeers of the market boors to go by him, and the touch of sympathy in the look of the country girls, are well conceived. The colour is not so agreeable.

Crowe visited Uttoxeter on 18 and 19 November 1868, and sketched a little in the market place, but was dismayed to find that it had changed so much since Johnson's day. He was advised to visit a Mr Redfern, a cooper and local antiquarian, who was able to furnish him with much useful information about the contemporary look and layout of the market place. Further research was done at the British Museum.

The painting, which is as least two metres in length, is now part of the collection of the Dr Johnson House Museum, and hangs in the garret room used by Dr Johnson to compile his Dictionary. Postcards and slides of the work are available from the Museum (http://www.drjh.dircon.co.uk/)

Title: Returning from Church (1869)

Medium: oil

Exhibited: Dudley Gallery, 1869 

Athenaeum, 30 October 1869:

... a farmer and his 'womenkind' going home - the former is in a meditatative mood, smoking, and moved by the sermon of the day. The flimsy background here - a landscape in crude tints - is evidently but temporary. The figures are striking in their completeness; the sound fruit of sound studies, - solid, and not easily exhausted of its interest.

Art Journal, December 1869:

Mr. Crowe's small picture, 'Returning from Church', is one of his very best products: the artist - while here, as ever, clever - does not overstep the simplicity of nature.

According to his diary entries, Crowe based this painting on a sketch made while on holiday in Germany in June 1843. He refers to it variously as 'Going to Church' and 'Returning from Church', not settling on the final title until it was submitted for exhibition at the Dudley Gallery at the beginning of October 1869.

Title: The Village Fountain (1869)

Medium: oil

Exhibited: Dudley Gallery, 1869

Art Journal, December 1869:

Eyre Crowe always paints with a purpose, but the characters around 'The Village Fountain' are, as often with this artist, overdone; thus in this picture water cannot be drawn from a pump except with a solemn intensity worthy of tragedy.

According to his diary entries, Crowe based this painting on a sketch made while on holiday in Germany in June 1843. It was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in the winter of 1869-70.

Copyright (c) 2005 Kathryn J. Summerwill. All rights reserved.