Fresh and feisty

Harry Becker (1865–1928) is one of those artists too often dismissed as being of regional interest only, who feature but rarely in the art chronicles of the period.

Harry Becker (1865–1928) is one of those artists too often dismissed as being of regional interest only, who feature but rarely in the art chronicles of the period. He is most widely known for his illustrations to Adrian Bell’s celebrated Suffolk trilogy — Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree — and it is worth noting that Becker’s pictures were matched to Bell’s prose after the artist’s death, though they seem to be made for each other in their near-perfect fit. Becker only moved from London to Suffolk in 1913, but he found there his perfect setting. As Bell wrote of him: ‘He painted the whole struggle of man in the getting of bread — with earth and weather.’

Becker’s fresh and feisty realism, which borders on Impressionism (in its British manifestation, at any rate), is a superb tribute to the East Anglian landscape and the people who worked it.

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For this reason, Gainsborough’s House has made Becker the subject of Part II of a themed exhibition, following a show of the photographs of Justin Partyka (born 1972) who portrays the plight of the modern agrarian community. Becker’s ploughmen, harvesters, sowers and gleaners are in the long tradition of Breughel, Millet and van Gogh, but depicted with a fluidity and lightness of touch that reconnects him to the work of Gainsborough and Constable. Becker initially discovered his theme of manual labour (one to be later so thoroughly explored by Josef Herman) at Antwerp, where he studied at the Royal Academy. His freedom of expression was encouraged by working with Carolus-Duran in Paris, who recommended open-air painting and among whose other pupils was Sargent, and developed out of an increasing passion for working from life.