Homeward

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20732

Title

Homeward

Description

A farmyard scene of waddling geese heading home to the farm. The use of earthy tones and delicate brushstrokes highlights the rural qualities of the landscape. The light gently illuminates the small bodies of the geese as they walk towards a figure of a woman. To the right of the painting a small pond shimmers like a mirror. Lilly flowers and pads float with a delicate glow as the setting sun gently covers the whole scene.

Artist / maker

Melville, Arthur

Size

64.5 x 96.8cm

Location

City Art Centre

Accession number

CAC1977/5

The most important group of painters to emerge from Scotland in the late 19th Century were the Glasgow School, who formed a group in the 1880s. They took as their subjects the lives of ordinary country people in Scotland, urban landscapes and portraits of friends and relatives. This early painting by Melville was painted in 1880, when the artist was 22 and is unusual for an artist who later became better known for his watercolour paintings of foreign subjects. After leaving the Edinburgh College of Art, later spending time at the artist colony of Grez-sur-Loing in Northern France, where he was influenced by the work of other French artists working in a rural and realist genre such as Bastien- Lepage.

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