A Breezy Day: Going to the Hayfield

A Breezy Day: Going to the Hayfield, dated 1852 and held in Bury Art Museum, is one of several related haymaking compositions Cox produced in this period — along with Going to the Hayfield (Victoria Art Gallery) and Haymaking near Conway — suggesting sustained engagement with the subject across a single productive season. The breezy day qualifier is significant: Cox was not content to paint haymaking as a simple summer idyll but insisted on the meteorological reality of British summer, in which hay must be turned and carted against the threat of rain. This breezy-day version emphasises the wind's presence through the handling of figures, sky, and field vegetation. Bury Art Museum's significant Cox collection reflects the civic patronage of the Lancashire cotton town's prosperous Victorian bourgeoisie, who valued landscape paintings that evoked the rural world their industrial economy was transforming.

Matching the earlier Going to the Hayfield stylistically, this canvas shows Cox's late technique at full development: sky broadly painted with loaded strokes, figures suggested rather than described, and field grasses animated by directional brushwork. The 'breezy' quality is rendered through visible surface movement across the entire canvas, giving even relatively static elements the appearance of motion.