Cole, George (1810-83; English)
Hay Waggon 1870
Oil on canvas, 43.2 x 63.4 cm
Purchased, 1870
National Gallery of Victoria (p.302.12-1)
This lugubrious landscape is listed in the 1875 and 1894 NGV catalogues, but not in NGV 1905 (suggesting it was not then on display).
The entry in NGV 1894 accords the artist rather faint praise (“apprenticed to a ship painter, his success in executing several large canvas advertisements for the proprietor of a travelling circus induced him to adopt art of a higher kind as a profession”), while noting that he became Vice-President of the Society of British Artists in 1878.
His son, George Vicat Cole (1833-93), was also a successful landscape painter, and an 1890 reference suggests that the portrait-painter Tennyson Cole – see Cole (T.) The Hon.Duncan Gillies 1891 {1891} SLV [PA] – may also have been a relative.
Refs.
AR 1870, p.95; NGV 1875, p.27 and NGV 1894, p.72 (IV.McArthur Gallery, no.5): title given in each case as Harvest Waggon; not listed in NGV 1905 [£70]
For Cole Senior, see AKL 20 (1998), pp.221-22 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cole_%28artist%29. For G.V.Cole, see Bénézit 3, pp.1208-9; AKL20 (1998), p.222; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Vicat_Cole (the latter entry citing an 1890 Hobart Mercury article on Tennyson Cole, suggesting that he was related). Also noted: T.Barringer, The Cole Family: Painters of the English Landscape, 1838-1975, Portsmouth, 1988 (exh.cat.) [yet to see]