Figure Pictures
Boughton is well known for his genre, landscape, portrait, and historical paintings of scenes from England, Scotland, France, and, from 1881, Holland. Pretty women, peasants, romantic historical scenes including Hester Prynne (1881), Muiden, N. Holland (1882), An Exchange of Greetings (1882), and Milton Visited by Andrew Marvel (1885), were popular and financially successful. Puritans Going to Church (1867) utilizes a dark palette for the background with the figures spread out over a flat landscape of snow. Boughton's figure paintings can be precious, but this weakness is balanced by his strong compositional skills.[1]
Spring Idyll, which has been reproduced often due to its popularity, illuminates one style and subject of his work: romantic and idealized women. Another work, Weeding the Pavement (1882), is a Dutch scene, typical of his works portraying working life.[2] Joseph Hatton in "Some Glimpses of Artistic London," an article focused on the houses of popular artists in the late 1800s, wrote that at work, Boughton wore an ordinary gray suit of clothes with a velvet cap, and often would paint with a companion: “He is as genial as many of his latter-day subjects.”[3] As an artist, Boughton’s successes can be attributed to his landscapes, but his figural renditions were also quite strong, practiced with consistency and intellectual intention. These works can be categorized as “examples of historical genre, poetically fanciful design, imaginative representation of the life of past centuries, and local character study.” Works like The Puritan’s First Winter in New England (1890) and The Last of the Mayflower (shown at the Goupil Gallery in 1871) were valued for their historical and dramatic directness in recounting specific incidents. These works were some of Boughton’s most popular. But even in other pieces, A Winter’s Tale (1893), A Morning Walk (1864), or Cutting Herbage (1884), for example, scenes of everyday English life sprang to life, without becoming trivial.[4]
[1] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Boughton, George Henry (1833–1905),” by Martin Hardie, rev. Olivia Fitzpatrick, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. David Cannadine, January 2013, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31984 (accessed December 6, 2016).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Joseph Hatton, “Some Glimpses of Artistic London,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 67, no. 402 (November 1883): 842.
[4] Alfred Lys Baldry, George H. Boughton (Royal Academician) His Life and Work (London: Virtue & Co., 1904), 9-10.