Haymakers

A loaded cart fills the middle of George Stubbs’s Haymakers. Men lift and arrange the hay while women gather it from the ground. Two dark horses wait to the right. Among the angled tools and reaching arms, a woman in blue stands almost upright, looking towards us. The work continues around her pause: one field contains several different rhythms of movement. ^[1]

This is the 1785 painting in Tate’s collection, accession T02256. Its wooden support measures 89.5 by 135.3 centimetres, and Tate identifies the medium as oil paint. It belongs with the separately catalogued Reapers. Tate acquired it in 1977 with help from the Friends of the Tate Gallery, Art Fund, Pilgrim Trust and public subscribers. The familiar haymaking design also survives in earlier paint, print and later enamel, making the date and physical object essential to its identification. ^[2]

Raking, lifting and loading

At the left edge, two women lean into their rakes. Their long handles cross the foreground at shallow angles, drawing our attention down towards the scattered hay. Beside the cart, a man raises a fork towards another man who bends over the load to receive it. Their opposing reaches make a continuous action across the height of the hay. Above them, a further worker stands against the sky, his tool almost vertical. ^[1]

The remaining man stands with his back towards us, to the right of the central woman. His raised arms lead up towards the cart. The seven figures occupy different levels: feet on the ground, a body leaning over the load, another body upright on its summit. Sleeves, hats, skirts and breeches separate the people even where their limbs and implements overlap. We can follow the jobs without losing the individual silhouettes. ^[1]

Stubbs leaves a particularly clear space around the woman in blue. One hand holds her rake upright; the other rests at her waist. Her pale apron makes a long light shape against the darker cart and hay. She looks out across the picture’s edge while the nearby workers look or reach towards their tasks. Her stillness interrupts the chain of lifting and raking, but the handle beside her repeats the upright tool of the man above. ^[1]

The horses extend the composition beyond the workers. The nearer animal is shown largely in profile, its white lower legs sharply visible against the ground; the second horse’s head appears closer to the cart. Harness lines connect animal bodies and vehicle. Neither horse is displayed against an empty background. They share the field with the load, wheels, scattered hay and working people, occupying the quieter right-hand end of the same arrangement. ^[1]

The earlier painting and the redesigned field

Stubbs had already painted The Haymakers in 1783. That signed work belongs to the National Trust at Upton House, accession 446708. The holder records oil paint and enamel on oak, with a support of 91.4 by 137.2 centimetres. It is a separate painting with four figures, rather than an alternative date for Tate’s seven-figure picture. ^[15]

In the earlier image, the cart stands to the left and the large trees rise on the right. Two women occupy the foreground beside a man lifting hay, with one further man on the load. The blue-clad woman already pauses with an upright rake, but she stands towards the left rather than near the middle. The horses face right beneath the trees. More sky opens above the cart than above the animals. ^[16]

The painted scene with seven figures redistributes those masses. Trees now shelter the left side, while the sky opens above and beyond the horses on the right. Additional workers surround the cart, and the standing man on top raises the group’s highest point. The load still dominates the middle distance, but the foreground becomes a longer succession of bodies and tools. Comparing the two wholes reveals changes in balance and spacing, rather than simply an expanded list of people. ^{[1] [16]}

The earlier panel also has its own collection history. It was with Sir Walter Gilbey by 1898, passed through Agnew at the 1915 sale and Knoedler in 1919, and was bought for Lord Bearsted that November for £1,000. It entered the National Trust’s care through the 1948 gift. ^[15]

Terry Riggs’s Tate account proposes a relationship with Thomas Hearne’s 1783 watercolour of a haymaking scene associated with Thomson’s Seasons. Shared poses might indicate borrowing or study of a similar scene. The relationship remains a suggestion; the particular field in Stubbs’s painting has not been securely identified. ^[2]

Wooden supports and material experiment

The National Trust describes the 1783 panel as abraded and suggests that the thin consistency of its enamel colours may help explain that condition. The holder’s proposal concerns the particular handling and condition of the earlier panel; it leaves the materials of other painted versions to be investigated separately. ^[15]

The physical support interested the conservator Ian McClure. Writing in the Getty’s 1998 volume on panel conservation, he noted cradles attached to Upton House’s 1783 Haymakers and Reapers. He proposed that Stubbs might have used such reinforcement preventively, seeking wooden supports as stable as the ceramic plaques made for him by Wedgwood. McClure presented the artist’s responsibility and intention as possibilities, rather than documented facts about who attached the cradles. ^[17]

McClure placed these panels among Stubbs’s experiments with substantial oak and mahogany supports during the 1770s and 1780s, when wax and animal fat were among the media he explored. That wider material history helps explain why the carrier deserves attention alongside the image. It supplies no recipe for Tate’s Haymakers. Similar subjects can occupy related wooden supports without having identical binders, preparation or subsequent treatment. ^[17]

Exhibiting in London and Liverpool

The original Royal Academy catalogue for 1786 lists Reapers as number 77 and Haymakers as number 94, both under G. Stubbs, Associate. The eighteenth annual exhibition thus brought the companion subjects before a London public the year after their completion. ^[18]

They reached another audience in August 1787 at the second exhibition of Liverpool’s Society for Promoting Painting and Design. Joseph Mayer’s 1876 book reproduces that catalogue: number 100 is a harvest scene with reapers, and number 101 a corresponding scene with haymakers. Stubbs is identified as an Associate of the Royal Academy, working at Somerset Street, Portman Square, London. ^[19]

The Liverpool catalogue’s preface explains the organisers’ ambitions. They wanted to encourage interest in art beyond the capital and had sought assistance from artists outside their immediate region. It also admits the difficulty of finding a sufficiently large exhibition room. Read in that setting, the two harvest pictures participated in an effort to put accomplished metropolitan work before a provincial public. ^[19]

Studies, a sale and a rediscovered drawing

Evidence of preparation survives in the record of Stubbs’s posthumous sale. The catalogue transcribed by Gilbey in 1898 includes six studies of reapers and two further drawings, a design for a cornfield with reapers, and a design for a hayfield with men loading a hay cart. These descriptions show that the subjects generated drawings as well as finished paintings. They do not allow every listed sheet to be matched to one surviving picture. ^[20]

The distinction between hay and corn matters here. A neighbouring sale entry describes men loading a cart in Lord Torrington’s garden; another specifically names the hayfield. Treating every rural cart drawing as the same design would erase differences already recognised in the sale. The drawings are evidence of working resources and developing arrangements, even where a sheet’s later whereabouts remain uncertain. ^[20]

A later rediscovery complicates older statements that all the relevant studies had disappeared. In 2015–16, Lowell Libson presented The Legs of a Draughthorse, a small graphite drawing heightened with white, inscribed with Stubbs’s name by James Ward. The dealer related the arrangement most directly to the horse in Stubbs’s 1786 harrowing picture, while also noting its closeness to the horse at the right of Haymakers. That comparison does not make it a securely identified preparatory study for the Tate panel. ^{[21] [22]}

The proposed sale history is equally specific. The leg study was associated with Ward’s purchase of a drawing of four horse’s legs and two academic figures in the 1807 sale. That is a different lot from the hayfield-and-cart design. The attribution and connections recover a possible part of Stubbs’s practice; they cannot restore a complete sequence of drawings for the 1785 composition. ^[21]

The 1791 print and its different states

Stubbs also made the subject available as a print. The Art Institute of Chicago holds Hay-Makers, dated 1791, accession 2000.105. Its description specifies stipple engraving with roulette on ivory laid paper. The plate and image measure 48.4 by 68.5 centimetres; the sheet measures 53.7 by 71.3. These dimensions describe a paper impression with margins, not the painted support at Tate. ^[23]

Chicago identifies its impression as Lennox-Boyd 89, state II of III: the second of three catalogued forms of the plate. Its title appears in dark lettering below the image. The form of that lettering provides another way to distinguish this particular impression from other versions of the printed design. ^[23]

A pair catalogued by Christie’s provides a concrete comparison: Hay-Makers and Reapers, both dated 1791, were described as first states of three, with titles in open letters. The catalogue credits Stubbs with engraving and publishing them in London. Those sheets therefore differ in state from Chicago’s impression even though the pair belongs to the same publication of the harvest designs. Their measurements cannot be substituted for the Chicago sheet’s. ^{[23] [24]}

The printed image reverses the arrangement of the painted group. The horses stand on the left and the trees rise on the right, while the working group keeps its recognisable sequence around the cart. In monochrome, the light aprons and sleeves remain clear against the dark load and foliage. The title sits below the image. The design is familiar, but its direction, surface and surrounding paper make the encounter different. ^{[1] [23]}

Later enamels and the shapes of the composition

The Lady Lever Art Gallery holds two later enamel works on Wedgwood biscuit earthenware. Current Art UK records identify Haymakers, accession LL3682, as 1794, measuring 74.5 by 103.5 centimetres, and Haycarting, LL3683, as 1795, measuring 77 by 105. Both came from Lord Leverhulme’s private collection in 1922. ^{[25] [26]}

The Haycarting oval retains the high cart, the worker standing above it and the horses to the right. Yet the foreground woman who pauses with an upright rake in the rectangular painted design now leans into the action of raking. The oval boundary also presses closely around the workers and horses. Recasting the subject involved the arrangement of figures as well as a change of support. ^{[1] [26] [27]}

In 1918, The Landswoman, the journal of the Land Army and the Women’s Institutes, brought the pictures to an unusually practical audience. It reproduced both oval enamels and the earlier rectangular Haymakers. In an article signed H. F., the writer admired the enamel pictures’ colour and lifelike figures, then compared the eighteenth-century women’s clothes with the uniform worn by contemporary landswomen. Picturesque costume, the writer observed, was less suitable for hard work. The comment followed discussion of the enamels; it was not a review of Tate’s 1785 painting alone. ^[27]

The editor had introduced the reproductions as a change from ordinary photographs. Stubbs’s rural subjects were therefore offered to readers already engaged with agricultural work and its public image. The article’s combination of admiration and practical qualification shows how a later audience could value the pictures while measuring their appearance against another experience of work. ^[27]

Frames, dignity and idealisation

Frames also formed part of the pictures’ public life. The Frame Blog’s 2026 study, citing information from Judy Egerton, reports Stubbs’s 1787 request to Daniel Daulby for plain frames for Haymakers and Reapers, concerned about damage to original frames. It suggests that the Rococo frames now around the Tate pair were probably supplied by a later purchaser. ^[28]

For its 2007 exhibition, the Frick described the 1785 paintings as an ambitious attempt to reach a broader audience through rural subjects. Its retrospective account characterises their 1786 reception as lukewarm, with critics wanting more sentiment and narrative incident. The same account interprets the central woman as a classical presence around whom the work is organised. ^[29]

Tate’s current caption takes the workers’ immaculate appearance seriously. It interprets their elegance and apparent composure as both dignifying labour and offering wealthy viewers a reassuring picture of working conditions. The precision of individual tasks need not make the scene a complete account of agricultural life. ^[2]

Simon Schama reached a sharper judgement when reviewing the Frick exhibition in 2007. He recognised the convincing labourers and cart horses, but argued that their unusually clean bodies and carefully arranged movements produced a comforting countryside for the gentry. This is a critical reading of how the pictures address their audience. ^[30]

The public campaign to acquire the pair

In 1977, Haymakers and Reapers became the subject of a public acquisition campaign. Art Fund records a total purchase cost of £771,000 for the pair and its own contribution of £20,000. Its archival account describes Tate’s use of lotteries as a first for a public gallery. The paintings’ public ownership resulted from several kinds of support. ^[31]

The government’s offer had a defined condition. Answering Andrew Faulds in the House of Commons on 27 July 1977, Gordon Oakes said that Tate would commit a substantial part of its normal purchasing funds and launch an appeal. Government money would match the amount raised, pound for pound, up to £190,000. The special contribution was to come from savings elsewhere in the Department of Education and Science’s programmes, within existing cash limits. ^[32]

Oakes also explained that the necessary financial provision would follow once Tate’s success in raising its share was known. This was a promise tied to the appeal’s result, not simply an unconditional announcement that the full matching sum had already been paid. The parliamentary answer makes the public fundraising integral to the proposed purchase. ^[32]

A September 1977 report in JS Journal makes the campaign tangible. Tate and supporting funds could find about £441,000; a promised government contribution of £190,000 still left £140,000 to raise. The private owner had allowed until Christmas to assemble the £771,000 asking price. Sainsbury’s supplied £250 in grocery gift tokens as prizes, British Leyland promised a Mini, and Wedgwood offered a dinner service. Lotteries and competitions translated a museum purchase into a campaign people could join. ^[33]

The journal reported that the pictures were already on view at Tate and urged readers to consider the loss if they went overseas or returned to private seclusion. Its appeal joined direct access to the paintings with the attraction of donated prizes. The work of a hayfield had become a cause for public giving. ^[33]