Going to the Hayfield

David Cox painted Going to the Hayfield in 1852, at the age of seventy-one, yet the work shows none of the weakness one might expect from an elderly artist — rather, it exemplifies the bold, energetic technique Cox developed late in his career on coarse Scottish wrapping paper that became his preferred support. Cox was among the most significant British landscape painters of the Romantic era, a Birmingham-born artist who studied under John Varley and became renowned for his ability to capture the movement of wind across open fields and heathland. The hayfield in summer was one of Cox's recurrent subjects — a scene that combined the pastoral ideals of the English countryside with the physical labour of agricultural life. By 1852, industrialisation was transforming the British landscape, and Cox's hayfield scenes carried an implicit nostalgia for pre-industrial rural rhythms. Victoria Art Gallery in Bath holds this work as part of its collection documenting British art of the nineteenth century. Cox's late style, sometimes criticised as merely rough, is now understood as a deliberate pursuit of atmospheric truth over finish.

Cox's late works on coarse paper or canvas show a deliberately broken touch in which individual brushstrokes are visible and contribute to the overall impression of movement and light. The sky is handled with particular freedom, clouds built up with loaded strokes of white and grey that suggest their mass without laboured description. Figures in the middle distance are impressionistic rather than detailed.