Eyre Crowe (1824-1910)

Reproduction of ‘School Treat’ by Eyre Crowe A.R.A. (1878)

Pen and ink version of the painting, by Eyre Crowe, published in Henry Blackburn’s Academy Notes, no. 4, May 1878, p. 52

Medium: oil

Size: 46 x 78 inches

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1878

A pen and ink sketch of the painting, by Eyre Crowe, was published in Henry Blackburn’s Academy Notes, no. 4, May 1878, p. 52

The Times, 11 May 1878:

Mr. Eyre Crowe has shown an equal power of getting rid of the picturesque in his ‘School Feast’ [sic] (567), from which all that charms in painting has been as completely expunged as it is from ‘The Return of Captain Cameron’ [by another artist]. The two pictures, considering their size and the position of the painters, are among the curiosities of the year in this respect.

Daily Telegraph, 16 May 1878:

Peace, it is obvious, has its triumphs as well as war; and, as a lively, bustling and picturesque example of a pacific pageant of modern times, the visitor to the Academy may be counselled to bestow earnest attention on (567) Mr. Eyre Crowe, A.R.A.’s “School Treat.” The work, crowded as it is with figures and replete with elaborate detail, represents the outlay of a prodigious amount of labour and skilfulness. The white horses attached to the wagon in the central foreground are really astonishing specimens of painstaking, and the multifarious phases of child-life brought together at a celebration so typically English as a school-treat are observingly and appreciately depicted. “Sarah Anne” and “Maria Jane” are here in all their glory; and the entire tableau is redolent of bread-and-butter, buns, plumcake – with not too many plums in it – and scriptural quotations emblazoned in glowing hues on Bristol board, intermixed with those more prosaically admonitory placards which enjoin the juvenile participants in the treat to “eat all, but pocket none”.

The Times, 18 May 1878: [in relation to another artist’s work]

Nothing needs so robust a courage and so self-dependent a spirit in the artist as the treatment of contemporary themes … You must go groping among the interests, the relationships, and the feelings of all this crowd to apportion and appreciate them … Mr. Staniland has been greviously weighted with the painters’ usual difficulty to make an English crowd picturesque … how marvellously Cope and Eyre Crowe and J. Clark have missed it we have noticed in another article.

Illustrated London News, 18 May 1878:

The vice of hardness in execution is one to which many more clever modern painters seem to be addicted. It mars the effect of Mr. Eyre Crowe A.R.A.’s otherwise most able ‘School Treat’ (567), a wonderfully bustling and painstaking composition, admirably grouped, full of varied movement and graphic expression; but throughout, in handling, as hard as the nether millstone.

Henry Blackburn’s Academy Notes, no. 4, May 1878:

The Newcastle Courant etc, 27 September 1878

[Newcastle Arts Association Exhibition]. “A School Treat” is not a picturesque subject, although artists like Eyre Crowe have contrived to make even less attractive themes really interesting …