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The Woolwashers A rural composition, the figures and landscape elements circle around the two houses in the center of this pen and ink drawing. The larger of the two houses has a light front. Several figures appear to be sitting and resting. Trees, in a vertical axis, surround the houses. A central tree is placed between the two. In the foreground, a horizontal band of shrubbery parallels the stream, dividing the line of water from the land. The horizontal line is further emphasized with the line of the houses and shrubs in the middle ground, and a line on shrubbery at the top. In the immediate foreground, a line of women, in groups of two, are involved in a series of washing activities at the stream. They are in simple clothing, their heads wrapped in scarves. The line of the women leads the viewer's eye on a diagonal path across the path and up to the central house. Background Activities, such as this, were common in rural surroundings. In the process of refining the wool for spinning and weaving, washers would first cleanse the raw wool. In pre-industrial Britain, spinners and weavers worked at their homes. As small mills began to proliferate the countryside, there was a greater need for bulk fibers. Rowlandson depicted rural countryside life, much of it in a humorous way. In the early 19th century Rowlandson helped to foster a taste for 'picturesque' rural scenery, creating hundreds of illustrations for William Combe's verse, The Tour of Doctor Syntax. The wool, after being combed, was sent out by travelers in tilted carts, who left it with the spinners in one journey, and took back the yarn paying the amount of spinning, at the next.James; History of the Worsted Manufacture Formerly the mode of making cloth in this large clothing district was as follows: A class of men with tolerable capitals called woolstaplers, rode over the country about cliptime, to buy up the wool from the growers. They then have the fleece carefully broke into its various qualities, and afterwards sell it out in small quantities thus assorted, to innumerable master manufacturers of little or no capitals, spread around in the adjacent villages. These master- makers superintend all the remaining operations; have many performed in their own houses and hire out the rest to their neighbouring families: the whole of which husbands, wives, and children, were employed together in their own dwellings, some in weaving, others in scribbling, carding or spinning. |