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Universitätsbibliothek HeidelbergUniversitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
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International studio — 23.1904

DOI issue:
No. 90 (August, 1904)
DOI article:
Holland, Clive: The work of Frederick Whitehead, a painter of Thomas Hardy's "Wessex"
DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.26962#0151

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A Painter of Hardy s Wessex


“HIGH WEST STREET, DORCHESTER”

FROM THE ETCHING BY F. WHITEHEAD

sion regarding the locale of his principal sphere of
work.
In the same year (1893) Mr. Whitehead’s first
important “Wessex” picture was painted and hung
in the Royal Academy. It had for its subject the
romantically situated manor-house at Wool, familiar
to sojourners in South Dorset, once the property of
the D’Urberville family ; and it was well hung. It
depicted the ancient Jacobean manor-house with
its time-worn, weather-stained walls under a strong
sky, with its picturesque foreground of rush-bordered
stream, and the Elizabethan bridge over which (so
tradition asserts) the spectral coach of a wicked,
damsel-abducting D’Urberville passes on a certain
night in each year, though it is never seen except
by a more or less direct descendant of the family.
It is in this same dwelling of a departed and fallen
race that the two oil paintings—sometimes erro-
neously referred to as fresco portraits—are to be
seen let into the wall depicting two of poor unlucky
Tess’ ancestresses mentioned in Mr. Hardy’s fine
romance. The one, with her “ long, pointed features,
narrow eyes, and a smirk, so suggestive of ferocity; ”
the other, with “ bill hook nose, large teeth, and
bold eyes suggesting arrogance to the point of
ferocity.” Twoterribleseventeenth-centuryD’Urber-

villes, with history writ large in their faces. It was
in the kitchen of this same manor-house that Mr.
Hardy describes Tess and Angel Clare as passing
their brief, unhappy honeymoon; and across the
meads lies Bindon Mill—much the same now, as
shown in Mr. Whitehead’s painting, as it was when
the novelist described it—whence Angel Clare went
daily to learn the miller’s craft. The picture shows
the great pictorial beauty of the old mill, and its
position under the shadow of the trees surrounding
the ruins of the aforetime wealthy Cistercian Abbey.
This canvas exhibits a good example of a type of
sky, often seen in Wessex, which is strong without
being lowering.
Among the successes of the 1894 Royal Academy
was a broadly treated landscape, The Purheck Hills
frorii the Frome, from Mr. Whitehead’s easel, whilst
at one of the smaller exhibitions Poplars at Stoke,
Dorset, a subdued but clever rendering of a simple
subject, presented yet another phase of that wonder-
fully varying district, the valley of the Frome—or,
as Mr. Hardy calls it, “ the valley of the great
dairies.” In the following year Mr. Whitehead
took a moorland subject, and his contribution to
the Royal Academy was a large picture entitled
Far Jrom the Haunts of Man, which might well
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