13/05/2026
Two touched impressions of ‘The Weary Ploughman’ in our current exhibition: Samuel Palmer and his followers: A Poetic Vision.
Together with ‘The Early Ploughman’, this work forms one of those deliberate pairings in which the artist contrives a poetic symmetry: evening answering morning, return set against departure. In the former, the labourer, his task concluded, makes his homeward progress beneath the guidance of a full moon, whose pale authority determines the course of his journey. Passing a great chestnut, he follows his oxen as they descend towards a village half-concealed within its valley hollow, where the ascending threads of chimney smoke intimate rest and habitation. An impression was shown at the Royal Academy in 1865 (No. 876), accompanied by ‘The Rising Moon’ (No. 872), then bearing the title Evening Pastures. At that time, The Weary Ploughman carried a caption drawn from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard—“The ploughman homeward plods his weary way”—a borrowing at once apt and indicative of the artist’s literary affinities.
The title by which the plate is now known was later suggested by F. L. Griggs, and it has the merit of preserving the Gray association while also clarifying the relationship with its companion. In The Early Ploughman, the same figure, now seen at the outset of his day, enters from the opposing side of the design. There, in the cool lucidity of dawn, he cuts the first furrow as the sun’s initial rays begin to animate the landscape. A dense screen of cypress trees occupies the right, imparting a note more Mediterranean than English, while a woman bearing water crosses the field. Indeed, the entire conception suggests an origin less in the English countryside than in an imagined, Italianate pastoral—filtered, as so often, through the artist’s poetic sensibility rather than direct observation.