FREDERICK WILLIAM JACKSON (BRITISH 1859-1918)
HARVEST-TIME
Signed, oil on canvas
51cm x 61cm (20in x 24in)
Note: Frederick William Jackson’s Harvest-Time encapsulates the amalgam of tradition and artistic innovation for which the Staithes School is renowned. Over successive harvest seasons the Staithes coastline would have turned to gold as generations of farmhands piled hay into stacks. By the turn of the century, the livelihood of Staithes’ farmers and fishermen were threatened by encroaching industrialisation. The Staithes painters, themselves fleeing urbanisation, were enchanted by the coastal community’s connection to the land and sea, and sought to document their dwindling way of life. The artistic activity buoyed the town’s economy, and the Staithes Group coexisted with the locals in an unlikely but mutually-beneficial harmony. Jackson evokes the brilliance and clarity of the coastal light in late summer. The expansive sky, sea and fields are denoted with an almost exclusive use of pale blue and golden yellow pigment. These contrasting hues (directly opposed on the colour wheel) and the bisection of the composition along the horizon invest the scene with striking lucidity - which Jackson disrupts by inverting the tones of the land and sky in the farm hand’s straw hat and worker’s jacket.In the spare palette and compositional balance, one might identify the European modernist impulse to eschew pure representation and instead prioritise form, line, colour and atmosphere. Exceedingly well-travelled, Jackson had just returned from a years-long sojourn in Paris where he studied the Barbizon School, and he brought to Staithes inflections of an impressionist style and a commitment to painting en plein air. Harvest-Time is a superlative example of the artist’s work from this period, which Lyon & Turnbull are delighted to present to the market.