What did george clausen's painting the stone pickers say about Victorian society?

Answer 1

First, some facts: Clausen's "The Stone Pickers" was painted at Cookham in Berkshire in 1887. This was a mainly agricultural area and the local population was mostly made up of poor farm labourers. Stone picking involved regularly removing the larger stones from the fields in order to prevent damage to the horse-drawn plough; these stones could be used to improve roads or as building material.

This painting appears to show two women (one elderly, one young) engaged in collecting stones and dumping them in piles; but not only women did this work - another Clausen painting entitled "Stone Pickers, Midday" produced in 1882 shows a weary man engaged in the same task.

In fact, the young woman who is the main figure in this picture was not really a farm worker at all, but the artist's long-term model and nursemaid to the Clausen children: she was Mary Baldwin, known to the family as Polly. He arranged for her to pose for at least seven paintings, in the guise of a shepherdess, a haymaker and so on; so it is true to say that her normal day-to-day tasks did not include picking stones. In that sense the picture is faked.

Taken at face value, the painting demonstrates one of the everyday manual tasks carried out in rural England in Victorian times, many of which were just as they had been done since medieval times. It shows that women as well as men were engaged in these tasks; that the work was tiring, backbreaking, tediously boring, exposed to the extremes of the elements and very often dangerous.

Again taking this impression at face value, we could conclude that Victorian farming methods had not advanced significantly since medieval times - the truth is that this was exactly the time of the industrial revolution in farming, with steam engines, threshing and baling machines, seed drills and a host of other modern devices. But manual work still continued alongside these new inventions - so really this painting only tells half the story. In that sense it tells us far more about the artist and his particular view of rural England than it tells us about Victorian society.