This splendid mid-19th-century oil painting is a collaborative work by English artists, Edward Charles Williams (1807-1881) and William Shayer (1787-1879). It depicts a busy country inn on a bright summer's day in 1850. Travellers have stopped with their horses and wagon, villagers gather outside the building, and a shepherd drives his flock along the winding road beyond.
Williams and Shayer were particularly well suited as collaborators. Williams provided the landscape, architecture and atmosphere, while Shayer specialised in the people and animals that brought such places to life. Shayer's characters seem to belong naturally within Williams's landscape. Everyone has arrived for a reason.
At the centre, two sturdy horses remain harnessed to a covered wagon, which has pulled up beneath the trees beside the inn. Another horse buries its head into well-earned fodder. Around them unfolds a wonderful collection of minor encounters. Several men have gathered in conversation outside the inn. Others sit at tables beneath the trees. Farther along the road, a shepherd accompanies a flock of sheep while travellers approach from the opposite direction. Each group occupies its own little world, yet together they create the impression of a place temporarily brought alive by people passing through.
And then there is the solitary man sitting beside the road. Can you spot him there alongside the trough? Shayer has given him remarkably little to do. Hat pulled low, one leg comfortably extended, he sits quietly while the enormous wagon and its horses wait immediately beside him. Perhaps he's a traveller taking the weight from his feet, perhaps connected with the wagon, or simply a local watching the traffic come and go.
Shayer understood these characters particularly well. Born the son of a Southampton publican, he had grown up in the Horse and Jockey inn and spent much of his career painting the working communities of Hampshire and the New Forest. Inns, wagoners, labourers, horses and rural travellers belonged to a social world with which he had been familiar since childhood.
His figures possess an appealing solidity. The horses have weight, the men lean and slouch rather than pose, and conversations seem already underway before we notice them. His interest was less in individual identity than in the gestures and relationships through which a community becomes believable.
Williams provides an expansive stage for these encounters. An old rendered and timbered inn nestles beneath enormous trees, its patched walls and irregular roofline suggesting a building that has developed gradually over generations. Beyond it, the road rises gently through open countryside before disappearing among the trees.
Following conservation, the atmosphere is particularly impressive. What previously appeared to be a rather sombre landscape has emerged as a luminous daytime scene. Sunlight breaks through the shifting clouds and catches the road, white horses, inn walls and distant fields, while cooler passages of blue and grey sweep across the enormous sky.
A painting you'll return to time and time again.
Monogrammed by both artists in the lower right, dated, and held in a fine later gilt frame.
Learn more about Edward Charles Williams and William Shayer in our directory.
Medium: Oil on canvas
Overall size: 56½” x 37” / 143cm x 94cm
Year of creation: 1850
Provenance: Private collection, UK.
Condition: Cleaned. Revarnished. Canvas relined. Fine craquelure throughout. The paint layer is stable. Frame in good condition with minor age-related wear.
Artist’s auction maximum: William Shayer: £57,700 achieved in 1996 for ‘Isle of Wight with Figures and Horses (1854)’, Edward Charles Williams: £25,000 achieved in 2006 for ‘Punch and Judy/The Itinerant Musician’.
Our reference: BRV2339
