Medium: oil
Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1869; Royal Horticultural Society exhibition galleries, South Kensington, 1872
A heliotype engraving of ‘The Jacobite’ was one of the illustrations featured in The St James’s Magazine Holiday Annual’ published in 1872. According to a reviewer in the Derby Mercury, 17 July 1872, the Annual ‘should be included in the luggage of every tourist’.
Athenaeum, 15 May 1869:
The Jacobite (96), where two soldiers arrest an old gentleman, who has been disguised as a spinster, and sits at a wheel. This work is rich in action and character, and full of good technical qualities.
Art Journal, 1869, p. 164:
Mr. E. Crowe is another artist of genius which will not condescend to please: very clever, but not a little disagreeable, are ‘Shinglers’ (61) and ‘The Jacobite’ (96). Mr. Crowe is independent, he has an original way of looking at a subject, peculiarly his own. To what other painter would have occurred the idea of dressing the Jacobite as an old woman seated at a spinning wheel, and who else would have thought of detecting the disguise of sex by the thrust of a soldier’s gun? Trousers beneath petticoats is somewhat a coarse joke. Yet the work shows good painting.
Daily Telegraph, 25 May 1869:
Mr. Eyre Crowe has a “Jacobite” picture, and a very meritorious one it is, especially insofar as it abounds in that quality in which Mr. Yeames’s parallel work is deficient. Mr Crowe’s (96) “The Jacobite” is full of brio, or go. The story we have already related – that of a political fugitive who has assumed a feminine disguise, but is pounced upon at the spinning-wheel by two determined grenadiers, who make very short of the women’s clothes worn by the refugee, turning up the skirts thereof with their firelocks. These grenadiers of Mr. Eyre Crowe seem to have marched bodily out of Hogarth’s picture of the “March to Finchley.” Altogether, though we are sorry for the dejected Jacobite, the artist has conveyed so much broad humour into his work that it is difficult to avoid the impression that the affair will not end fatally for the gentleman in difficulties – that this will be no hanging, drawing, and quartering matter, but one that will blow over after a brief detention in the custody of one of his Majesty’s messengers, and one or two examinations before the Secretary at the Cockpit.
The Times, 11 June 1869:
Mr. Crowe’s third picture, a stalwart Jacobite discovered in the gude-wife’s mutch and petticoat at the spinning wheel by a couple of Hanoverian soldiers, has the merit of a well-told story, but the execution is hard and dry, and the picture wants some touch of beauty to correct the harshness of its elements.
Eyre Crowe (1824-1910) 