|
The Cottagers Placed around a wooden spinning wheel, three female figures dominate this exterior composition. To the right, a spinstress sits while operating her spinning wheel. White gauze, wrapped around her head, points down to the spinning wheel and up to the standing female figure. Her red dress and green apron appear to made of rough cloth. The woman faces the center of the composition, while her eyes glance towards the child at left. Her left arm falls to her side creating a strong vertical line that is carried up through the vertical line of the house. The central female, standing in a classical pose, gazes out to the viewer. With her raised right arm she holds a sheaf of wheat on top of her slightly tilted head - the binding of which is directly over the center of her face. Her curly hair is echoed in the rough textures of the wheat's bundling. The red-orange dress is of the Empire style. The dress falls from her left shoulder, leaving it exposed. The diagonal line of the woman's shoulders is parallel with her neck and waistline, and then again with the wooden front of the spinning wheel. In standing, the woman creates a strong vertical echoed with her right arm, the trees at left and the house at right. The barefoot young girl at left bends from the waist to feed several chickens. Turning, she looks to the spinstress. In order to hold the seed, the young woman holds the front of her red dress up, revealing her white slip underneath. Her dress falls from her left shoulder as well. The visual line created from her outstretched arms and neckline counterbalances the standing woman. Framing the figures, strong verticals are created by the lines of the house at right and the trees at left. Birds and a large black and white dog balance and ground the foreground. Together they visually serve as the base of a pyramid, the apex of which is the knot on the sheaf of wheat. The figures fill the interior. Background Reynolds created this image as a visual rendering of 'Autumn' for James Thomson's poem The Seasons. The composition, for sophisticated city dwellers, was illustrative of the 'simple' life in the country. In actuality, it is an idealized view. Until the advent of industrial spinning mills, spinning fibers for weaving was a task primarily done at home by women and children. Weaving fabric, another pre-industrial cottage task, was a highly regarded skill done by men. The women in this composition attest to this ideal. The heavily dressed female at right sits outside the cottage, not inside. The mullioned window is small, and would allow little light inside. Her body, although appearing to be at rest, sits erectly on a hard stone. She breaks from her labor to converse with her companions. Both the child and standing woman do agricultural tasks: feeding livestock and gathering the last of the wheat. All of the figures do not look the worst for their labors. They appear clean and healthy. It is the tasks, however, that epitomize their pastoral life away from the cities: wheat, essential for food production; fibers, essential for cloth production; food for consumption, and clothing for protection from the elements. The workshop of the weaver was a rural cottage, from which when he was tired of sedentary labour he could easily sally forth into his little garden, and with the spade or the hoe tend its culinary productions. The cotton wool which was to form his weft was picked clean by the fingers of his younger children, and was carded and spun by the older girls assisted by his wife, and the yarn was woven by himself assisted by his sons. When he could not procure within his family a supply of yarn adequate to the demands of his loom, he had recourse to the spinsters of his neighbourhood. One good weaver could keep three active women at work upon the wheel, spinning weft. On fine days the women and children might be found in the streets and lanes fully employed with the labour of spinning upon the one thread wheel, in which they greatly excelled…contentment at the cottage door. …since the introduction of Machinery there is much more work for the women and children in the villages than formerly.
|