Upcoming Exhibition

Misery and Beauty

Harry Becker's Portrait of East Anglian Farm Labour around the Great War

Our autumn exhibition will be a focus on East Anglian farm labour around the First World War, as portrayed in the haunting pictures of Harry Becker (1865-1928).

Raised in Colchester, the son of a German emigrant doctor, Becker trained at the Royal Academy Schools in Antwerp - where he just missed coinciding with Vincent van Gogh - and in Paris under portrait painter Carolus-Duran, tutor of John Singer Sargent. After near brushes with greatness, he went his own way.
Settling in London, and marrying fellow artist Georgina Waddington, Becker had some success as a draughtsman, painter and printmaker of sundry subjects while gradually finding his vocation on trips to rural Holland, Kent and East Anglia. He felt on common ground with farm workers scraping a meagre living from the land.

Depicting back-breaking labour in breath-taking landscapes before industrialised agriculture, he produced Underground posters and cartoons for department store murals commissioned by Gordon Selfridge. The latter project, abandoned when the shop owner questioned the accuracy of the compositions, threw the artist into crisis.

^{Harry Becker (1865-1928): A Man with a Scythe, Mowing - Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service}

In 1913, with anti-German sentiment building before the First World War, he fled with his wife and daughter to north-east Suffolk. For the last 15 years of his life he worked with feverish intensity in perfect anonymity on the images which would ultimately make his name.

Rural East Anglia had been in deepening recession since the 1870s, and although subsidies during the Great War catastrophe would bring brief relief, decline was set to deepen into the Great Depression. Becker caught the personal and communal dignity of working families with all manner of skills branded simply as 'labourers' and paid a pittance. 

Following his subjects into the fields at dawn, the artist worked as hard as they did on lighting drawings and paintings rooted as precise records but with an impressionistic air. He produced monumental lithographs - drawing on huge stone blocks carted by the horses he also portrayed.

Misery and Beauty: Harry Becker and East Anglian Farm Labour around the Great War celebrates a gift of regional pictures from our Honorary Fellow Robert Cripps. Curated by art historian and biographer Ian Collins, the exhibition also includes vintage farm implements and artefacts lent by the Food Museum in Stowmarket. The harvesting scene from Peter Hall's film of Akenfield will be looped into the show, while a tape of birdsong will recreate the soundtrack of the unmechanised countryside.

Header Image 
Harry Becker: The Joyous Noise of Work Charcoal and conté crayon (1908) 81 x 180 cm