Oil painting, 'In Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire: Winter Evening After Rain', Andrew MacCallum, 1881

Given by the artist

Given by the artist, 1885

Historical significance: The landscape painter Andrew MacCallum (1821-1902) was born at Nottingham. (1) While apprenticed to a hosiery firm he sketched in Sherwood Forest and attended drawing classes held at the Nottingham Mechanics' Institution taught by the Derby painter Moses Webster. MacCallum began to teach elementary drawing himself, and when he was twenty-two he became a student at the new Nottingham School of Design. His first exhibited work was a landscape, shown at the Birmingham Society of Artists' Exhibition in 1846.

Around 1849 MacCallum enrolled at the Government School of Design at Somerset House, London. He soon became a teacher in the related regional design schools, first in Manchester in 1850, and later in Stourbridge.

In 1854 MacCallum was awarded a scholarship by the Science and Art Department (the government body which at this time ran the South Kensington Museum and the related art schools) to travel to Italy in order to make studies of mural decorations and ornamental art. He remained in Italy from 1854 till 1857. He recorded his impressions in a manuscript, 'Report of a sojourn in Italy from the year 1854 to 1857', now in the National Art Library at the V&A.

On his return to England, MacCallum was commissioned to decorate the interior of the new lecture theatre of the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A). He also decorated the exterior of the Sheepshanks Gallery in the technique of sgraffito with portraits of artists including Reynolds, Opie and Barry. (2)

MacCallum continued to paint and to exhibit landscape subjects. He became known in particular for his paintings of trees. In Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire - Winter Evening after Rain is presumably identical with the painting exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1882 under the title A Winter's Evening: Sherwood Forest. The following verse by John Keble (1792-1866), the first stanza of a poem entitled 'November', was quoted (unattributed) in the catalogue:

Red o'er the forest peers the setting sun,
The line of yellow light dies fast away
That crowned the eastern copse, and chill and dreary
Falls on the wood the brief November day.

Keble's hugely influential collection of poems, The Christian Year, first published in 1827, was probably the widest-selling book of poetry in the 19th century. By the time of Keble's death in 1866 the book had gone into 95 editions; seven years later, when copyright expired, the number had risen to 158.

In Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire - Winter Evening after Rain, although principally a composition concentrating on the silhouettes of the trees and the atmospheric effects of a late afternoon glow with rising mist, has a narrative element. A woman stands against the trunk of the nearest tree - the implied scale emphasising its massiveness - while a small child plays by her side. Concealed by the tree trunk, she appears to be gazing down the path after the figures of a man and a woman who walk away into the distance.

MacCallum gave this painting to the museum in 1885.


Notes
(1) The source for the biographical material given here is the entry on MacCallum by B. S. Long, rev. by Mary Guyatt, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
(2) John Physick, The Victoria and Albert Museum: the history of its building, London 1982, p. 29 and p.37.

155-1885