Taking Rest

The ruddy, cheerful good looks and picturesque attire of this mother and child embody an idealised vision of the British countryside valued among art collectors of Thomas Holloway’s generation. The painting was originally titled The Fisherman’s Beacon, later The Sailor’s Return. The distant boat just visible on the left brings the child’s father home to his family.

Scottish artist Thomas Faed worked in Edinburgh until he moved to London in 1852. There, he belonged to a painters’ society called the Auld Lang Syne Club. Members also included Erskine Nicol, whose painting The Missing Boat hangs nearby.

Faed also produced social commentaries and genre paintings. He believed that artists should paint pictures of contemporary life instead of classical or genre scenes. He urged other artists to ‘paint the gutter children rather than Helen of Troy, Agamemnon or Achilles’. By the mid-19th century, poverty and unrest in the Victorian countryside was widely reported. This scene of ‘domestic poetry’, as one reviewer described Faed’s commercial paintings, looks back towards an earlier age of rural contentment.

Bought by Thomas Holloway, 1882.