Oil painting, 'The Evening Sun - View on Ewhurst Hill, near Guildford', John Clayton Adams, 1878

Bequeathed by Rev. M. Davison

Bequeathed by Rev. M. Davison, 1899

Historical significance: The landscape painter John Clayton Adams (1840-1906) lived in Edmondton and Guildford in Surrey. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere over a thirty-year period between 1863 and 1893. His subjects were mostly views in Surrey and the southern counties. Adams lived at Ewhurst Hill near Guildford, the setting for this painting, from 1873 until his death in 1906.

The Evening Sun: View on Ewhurst Hill, near Guildford depicts a idyllic pastoral scene on a summer's evening with a shepherd resting on a sunlit slope in the foreground, his sheep grazing around him. Beyond him, farmers are gathering hay, with a large full haycart being drawn by two horses. A church and a windmill are visible in the middle distance. The landscape, partly wooded, partly pasture, stretches away into the hazy, bluish distance.

Idyllic landscape scenes like this one enjoyed great popularity in the later 19th century. Here, nature is depicted as richly fertile and, importantly, under human control: the land is farmed, sheep are kept, and flour is produced by the miller. The church spire in the distance symbolises divine order. However, this kind of bucolic scene was the result of nostalgia; for many second or third generation town and city-dwellers, rural life had become associated with the past and tradition. The rural idylls which paintings like these create had little to do with the realities of rural life in the 1870s and 1880s, which, due to a series of bad harvests, local taxation and other economic factors during these years, were actually experiencing a severe agricultural depression.

Another reason for the popularity of bucolic scenes was the steady erosion of the landscape at this time. Unprecedented numbers of newly-built houses were spreading out of the towns and cities into suburbs which encroached on the English countryside.

551-1899