Frank Holl, R.A., R.W.S.

‘It was in the fisher homes of Criccieth, North Wales, that Holl truly mastered the use of chiaroscuro with his depictions of the deprivation and fear that so blighted the life of a fisherman’s wife. In the figure of a woman he sought to represent ideals of strength and depths of emotion such as hope and despair.’¹

A modern transcription on the lining of the canvas is presumably based on an old inscription now obscured. It states that the picture was painted in 1879 which would place the picture amongst a group of paintings by Holl painted in the Welsh fishing town of Criccieth in Gwynedd between 1877 and 1883. According to his daughter, Mrs A.M. Reynolds, Holl had first visited Wales in 1863, but it was in the mid-1870s that he was greatly inspired by the harsh life of the people who lived along its coast. Much of his inspiration at that time was a woman described as his ‘most inspiring model’ who he met accidentally in 1876; ‘Wandering one day over the sandy dunes to the right of the village, he took shelter from the rain in a little cottage, scarcely more than a hut, on the banks of a stream which flows through the marshy ground between Criccieth and Afonwen. This hut was tenanted by a widow with two young children, one still a baby the other some five or six years old. The woman had scarcely any English, but her magnificent build and presence at once inspired my father… She was of a massive and almost savage type, living quite alone with her children, and seeing no one for weeks together.’² He depicted the mother and her two children in the humble interior of her cottage in the pair of pictures Hush!³ and Hushed ⁴; in the first, the mother looks anxiously over her sick infant’s crib and in the second picture the silence of the cradle tells the tragic outcome of the child’s illness. The present picture depicts a less mournful scene of a weary woman warming herself by the firelight at the end of the day – the crescent moon just rising over the horizon seen through the window. Her faithful dog is curled up asleep and her child is tucked-up in bed beneath its vast canopy, her doll placed on the chair beside her. The brown-glazed teapot placed on the table by the window appears in Hushed and also a later picture in the series, A Fisherman’s Home in which Holl painted himself as the husband dressed for the sea.⁵

The present picture is probably one of those recalled by Mrs Reynolds as painted during the Holl family’s summer holiday in Wales in 1879; ‘At Criccieth my father was painting the whole time, and completed four, if not five pictures there. We went to tea one afternoon with father’s wonderful fisherwoman at her cottage, to reach which we had to cross the little stream in a boat, which made the dunes where her cottage lay, almost an island. She welcomed us most heartily, expressing her welcome most admirably and convincingly in much gesture, facial play, and voluble Welsh, none of which could we understand.’⁶

¹ M. Bills, Frank Holl – Emerging from the Shadows, London 2013, p. 126.

² A.M. Reynolds, The Life and Work of Frank Holl, London 1912, p. 133.

³ Oil on canvas, 1877, 34 x 44 cm. Tate, London. No. N01535.

⁴ Oil on canvas, 1877, 34 x 44 cm. Tate, London. No. N01536.

⁵ Oil on canvas, 101 x 128 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. No. WAG 2933.

⁶ Reynolds 1912, pp. 169–170.