Oil painting, '"Where the Waters Gently Pass": Landscape with Stream', John Clayton Adams, 1882

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon

Exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1882 (no. 34); Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon, 1886

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.

The quotation in the title of this painting is from a poem by John Keble (1792-1866), a Church of England Clergyman, in whose memory Keble College, Oxford was named. Keble's hugely influential collection of poems, The Christian Year, was first published in 1827. This was probably the widest-selling book of poetry in the 19th century, and 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. 'Where the waters gently pass' is a line in the fourth stanza of the poem 'The First Sunday after Epiphany':

See the soft green willow springing
Where the waters gently pass,
Every way her free arms flinging
O'er the moist and reedy grass.
Long ere winter blasts are fled,
See her tipp'd with vernal red,
And her kindly flower display'd
Ere her leaf can cast a shade.

However, rather than setting the painting in the early spring, as the poem's title would suggest (the period of Epiphany extending from 6th January to Ash Wednesday), Adams depicts a summer's day. The viewpoint is a riverbank; in the foreground is cow parsley and on the right of the painting a line of silver birch trees in leaf recedes into the distance. On the other side of the river a horse-drawn cart is laden with hay, and farmers with pitchforks collect the mown grass which has been left out to dry in the sun.

Landscapes such as this enjoyed great popularity in the 19th century. The combination of detailed depictions of plants and trees within a beautiful and cultivated landscape, often including farming activity, was a successful formula. Nature is depicted as richly fertile and, importantly, under human control; the land is farmed and hay gathered for the winter. A village with a church spire is visible in the middle distance, symbolising the divine order inherent in rural life.

However, this kind of bucolic scene was a symptom 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 were represented in paintings 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.

This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1882 (no. 34), where it was presumably purchased by Joshua Dixon (1811-1885), with whose bequest it came to the Bethnal Green Museum (later part of the V&A) in 1886. Dixon was originally from Leeds, with a family background in the textile industry. His collection included 90 modern British and Continental oil paintings as well as over 170 watercolours, mostly conventional genre scenes and landscapes.

1002-1886