Wheat

In 1851 John Linnell, who had an established reputation as a portrait painter and engraver in London, moved to Redhill, Surrey. The large country property he acquired there was not only a boon for his family of nine children but also enabled him to indulge, as he put it in autobiographical notes published in the Art Journal in 1882, ‘my first love, poetic landscape, which I lived to paint; although I painted portraits to live’. (Art Journal Sept. 1882, p. 296) The move to Redhill was certainly a profitable one for Linnell, coinciding with the growing fashion for the kinds of shimmering landscapes he produced at his new domicile.

Wheat is one of five paintings that the London dealer William Agnew purchased from the artist in 1860, as works in progress, before they were even completed. Linnell was certainly pleased with this painting, writing to Agnew later that year:

I hope you are aware that I consider my picture of ‘Wheat’ as the most artistic picture I have done. I mean by ‘Artistic’ – qualities which it takes the education of an artist fully to appreciate and a poetic perception to enjoy. I do not say that my picture has much of this quality but more in my estimation than any other that I remember to have done. (David Linnell, Blake, Palmer, Linnell & Co. The Book Guild, Sussex, 1994, p.283)

Text by Dr Ted Gott from 19th century painting and sculpture in the international collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 24.