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Edward Calvert: The Ploughman 1827.
There’s a body of work by Devonshire-born Calvert in the British Museum, including many of his woodcuts and etchings from the period 1825-1835. Attending the Royal Academy School in 1824 he fell under the spell of William Blake, and became a member of The Ancients - the Blake-inspired group led by Samuel Palmer. Calvert’s work was tragically ignored until his son published some of his prints in the 1890s. But I want to draw your attention to his fabulous mythic-bucolic visions of rural England, that although already threatened by encroaching industrialism, urban expansion and the Railways, could still evoke utopian visions of a glorious semi-mythical pattern of the past. In the 20th century, writing of Slad and the Cotswolds, the poet Laurie Lee could still sense, and wonder at, this persistent sense of ‘Olde England’ as late as the 1930s-1950s (Cider with Rosie 1959). Calvert chooses cider as the central theme in this bacchanal of 1828 - the vision of a harvest festival, the cider-press, the abundant fruit, young people liberated from the toil of the year, dancing in the harvest moonlight - Calvert expresses this in his woodcut, which literally drips with the abundance of harvest, and celebrates the timelessness of cider-making. and the gentle primordial visions that cider drinking evokes. Calvert celebrates the spiritual integration of the people and the farmed landscape. Take a look at his The Primitive City (1832), and other works of this period.
The essential hero of the bucolic life - the Ploughman - made heroic here in Calvert’s mistily romantic and visionary imagining of the ‘spiritual ecosystem’ that binds us humans into its intricate patternings. Calvert shares Blake’s vision of England as a magical Albion - a ‘new Jerusalem’ of divine harmony - marrying the primordial pagan and Christian symbolism for a new 19th century generation. The seeds of the 20th century ‘counter-culture’ were sown in the 1820s....