Myles Birket Foster, R.W.S.

Frost & Reed, London, by 1973

Richard Green, London, by 1983

Purchased from the above by a private collector and thence by descent

London, Royal Society of Painters and Watercolours, Summer Exhibition, 1890, no. 63 (sold at the private view for £500)

Herbert Minton Cundall, Birket Foster, London, 1960, p. 202

Frank Lewis, Myles Birket Foster 1825-1899, Leigh-on-Sea, 1973, p. 38, pl. 22 (illustrated)

Jan Reynolds, Birket Foster, London, 1984, no. 103, p. 172

Myles Birket Foster moved to Surrey in 1863, when he purchased the Tudor-style country-house 'The Hill' in the village of Witley near Godalming, where he commissioned his friends Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris to decorate the interior. Living in the beautiful Surrey countryside provided him with endless subjects of rural life to paint. The present picture depicts a scene he would have witnessed every year when working-class families from London travelled to the Home Counties to help with the annual harvest of hops for the brewing industry. As an acute observer of human life Birket-Foster constructed a superb composition of several families who have arrived at the hop-fields near Farnham and are unloading their provisions and preparing to set-up camp with bundles of clothing and bedding – including a patchwork quilt. The older children are helping unload the wagonette, priority given to a blackened kettle so that tea can be made. Mothers nursing babies wait patiently and in the lower-left corner a young girl, her terrier and a baby, are snoozing in the shade – she has been picking plums and the basket for the hops and her sharp cutting-blade have been put aside for the day. In the background, beyond the hop-fields, are the oast-houses used for drying the harvested hops and the tower of the church of St Andrew’s which at that time would have been the highest structure in Farnham.