John Absolon RI Farm Worker with Scythe Tool

An original mid-19th-century watercolour painting, John Absolom RI, Farm Worker with Scythe Tool.

A beautiful figure study by John Absolon RI (1815–1895). Absolon was highly regarded for his pastoral scenes and figure paintings in watercolour. In 1892 The Art Journal critic James Dafforne described him as ‘one of the most popular of our figure-painters in water-colours’, and concluded that ‘his style of treatment is natural and unaffected, his pencilling free yet careful, and his colouring brilliant without exaggeration, or a straining after effect by violent contrasts’.

Absolon painted many rustic subjects depicting an idealised vision of rural life. This figure subject may be a study for one of his elaborate compositions, such as The Peat Gatherers or The Haymakers, 1850s (Art Gallery NSW). Typically, Absolon's pastoral figures are well dressed and cheerful. Among Absolon’s most important projects was the series of ten pictures completed in 1868 for Guy’s Hospital in London, unveiled at the New Society of Painters in Water Colours, which comprised scenes of harvesting, haymaking, dalliance and churchgoing, as well as various idyllic Swiss and Italian subjects.