Eyre Crowe (1824-1910)

Medium: oil

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1869

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.

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.