The Wife's Remonstrance

James Campbell

Date: 1858

Materials: Oil on canvas

Provincial P. R. painting

On its re-appearance in the saleroom almost a hundred years after it was painted, this picture was thought to be 'The Poacher's Wife', a lost work by Millais. Its eventual identification as one of the most important surviving paintings by the Liverpool artist James Campbell has happily provided the Birmingham collection with its only significant example of provincial Pre-Raphaelitism.

Along with his contemporaries William Davis, William Windus and Daniel Williamson, Campbell was greatly impressed by the Pre-Raphaelite paintings exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in the early 1850s.  

Penalties of poaching

The narrative tension and concern for detail in Campbell's genre paintings stamps his work with a distinct Pre-Raphaelite hallmark. This work was declared by Ruskin to be "by far the best picture" in the Society of British Artists' exhibition of 1858.

Campbell seemed to have difficulty in marrying figure and landscape, although the moss-covered tree and dry-stone wall here are individually well observed. The wife's dramatic gesture, reinforced by the child's expression of alarm, is not only appropriate to the role of woman as moral guardian: in the mid-nineteenth century, poaching carried severe penalties, from imprisonment to hanging, the husband's actions thereby jeopardising his family's already limited security.