Literature
William Michael Rossetti, Fine Arts: The British Institution, Spectator 9.1442, 16 Feb. 1856, page 195-196: Mr. Collinson's 'Son of the Soil'-a lusty labourer seated in a public-house with his pewter pot of beer before him, and behind him an advertisement for men to serve in the Army Works Corps- is an exact study from nature.

Exhibition History
London, The British Institution, 1856, number 375

Description / Expertise
One of the seven original founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, James Collinson was a fellow student of Millais, Rossetti and Holman Hunt at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1847, Rossetti had noticed his exhibit, The Charity Boy's Debut, for its attention to detail when it hung at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Subsequently, Collinson was persuaded by him to become a founder member of the Brotherhood.

James Collinson was, according to Rossetti a born stunner. In spite of his good looks, he was a quiet, intensely religious young man whom the other members of the PRB nicknamed 'the dormouse'. Collinson's The Child Jesus was one of the four etchings in the Pre-Raphaelites' publication, The Germ, and his most important Pre-Raphaelite painting, The Renunciation of The Queen of Hungary (1850), was also a religious subject. Collinson fell in love with Rossetti's sister, the poet Christina Rossetti, and converted from Roman Catholicism to the Church of England in order to be accepted as her finance. He ended the engagement in the spring of 1850, when he reverted back to the Roman faith and resigned from the Brotherhood, on the grounds that he could not, as a Catholic, assist in spreading the artistic opinions of those who are not. He sold all his artistic equipment and entered the Jesuit College at Stonyhurst in Lancashire as a novice.

It would seem that he did continue to paint during his training for the priesthood, as he exhibited again at the Royal Academy in 1855. By the following year, his relationship with William Michael Rossetti had been restored sufficiently for him to provide paintings for the Exhibition of British Art that was to tour America during 1857 and 1858, to show in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. It was intended to go to Washington, D.C. but rain in Boston damaged some pictures and they came back to England. The tour was arranged by William Michael Rossetti and Ernest Gambart.(1)

A Son of the Soil was Collinson's exhibit for the 1856 British Institution exhibition. Painted in pure glazes over a white ground, the work was in keeping with the Brotherhoods' original philosophies. These were outlined in the Germ in 1850: Sincerity- perfection in small things; To choose for the subjects of the paintings important issues: religious, literary or from modern life- usually with a moral message aimed at a contemporary audience; and they followed the teachings of John Ruskin, especially Truth to Nature. The labourer sits pensively with his pewter mug of beer under a poster for the newly formed 'Army Works Corps', initiated to encourage rural workers to enlist for the Crimean War in 1855. Men were needed for a joint military and civilian project to build a railway from the port of Balaclava to Sebastopol. The Balaclava Military Railway moved two hundred tons of stores daily; returning trains evacuated casualties.

In its confrontation of a contemporary social issue, A Son of The Soil, like Collinson's earlier painting, Answering the Emigrant's Letter (1850), presages later ideas and images of British social realism such as August Leopold Egg's Past and Present (1858) and Madox Brown's Work (completed in 1865). Abraham Solomon, in his Academy exhibit of 1854, uses the same device- a social message in a poster (Second Class- The Parting, now in the Australian National Gallery in Canberra).


1. Jason Rosenfeld in his article for Apollo Magazine, May 1997