Henry Nelson O'Neil, A.R.A. 1817-1880

Anon. sale, Sotheby's, London, 15 March 1983, lot 28;

The Prudential Art Collection, Holborn Bars;

London, Christie's, 10th June 1999, lot 21;

Private collection

Times, 4 May 1861, p.12;

Athenaeum, no. 1749, 4 May 1861, p.599;

Athenaeum, no. 1750, 11 May 1861, p.636;

Art Journal, 1861, p.165;

The Prudential Art Collection at Holborn Bars, not dated, pl. 39;

Christopher Wood, The Victorian Panorama, 1976, p.226

‘As the sails rose to the wind, and the ship began to move, there broke from all the boats, three resounding cheers, which those on board took up, and echoed back, and which are echoed and re-echoed. My heart burst out when I heard the sound, and beheld the waiving of the hats and handkerchiefs.’ Charles Dickins, David Copperfield.

In 1861 Henry Nelson O’Neil endeavoured to repeat the success that he had achieved with Eastward Ho! August 1857 (Fig 1. private collection), by exhibiting the present work The Parting Cheer, in which the same heart-rending emotion is captured so beautifully and with such varied expression, making this picture stand out among the very greatest images of social realism to emerge from the period.

Large, impressive and complex in composition, The Parting Cheer is immediately engaging as a picture that draws the spectator in as a witness to the event before them. The scene depicted is the crucial moment, as the emigrant’s ship is tugged away from the dock and their distraught families wave them farewell, perhaps for the last time. The scene was described by the Athenaeum thus, ‘Some red and blue shirted sailors are cheering from the sides and rigging of an emigrant ship. The emigrants themselves cheer from the portholes. Ahead of the ship the steam tug has just got under way; in front of the picture a crowd of parting friends is gathered; amongst them a widow weeps violently at parting with her son; a smart girl consoles her, although we presume we are intended to imagine (that) the girl herself has equal cause to require sympathy. Next is a boy with a face of more genuine earnestness than Mr O’Neil usually achieves. A girl – whose lover, we suppose, is departing – sinks in the arms of her town-bred, pale-faced brother. This little group is excellently composed.’ (Athenaeum, no. 1749, 4 May 1861, p. 599). The only two figures unmoved by the scene are the old mariner towards the left edge of the composition who nonchalantly smokes his pipe and is so used to departures that the unfolding scene of grief around him moves him none, and the little orange seller beside him, who seems little more than bemused by the event. The vast majority of the picture is taken up with the throng of mainly female figures and the spectator views the unfolding scene from the vantage of being amid the crowd. The central focus is around the figure of the grieving widow, dressed in beautifully rendered black silk, her sister dressed more joyously in her splendid bright hat and shawl, a concerned young child and the ever faithful shaggy dog. The tender sensitivity in which the emotions are portrayed captures a powerful pathos and in every part of the picture there is a face full of realistic expression and charm. Thus the spectator’s vision is distracted through the composition from one personal melodrama to another, emphasising the feeling of gesture and movement, tension and emotional outpouring. As Tom Taylor, writing in The Times explained, ‘The friends and families of emigrants [are] at the very agony of separation. The ship is just warping out, and the crew are clustered in chains for a last cheer to those they are leaving behind’ (Tom Taylor in The Times, 4 May 1861, p.12).

The Parting Cheer received mixed reviews when it was first exhibited. Several critics were concerned with the outpouring of emotion, disliking the realism, which was deemed inappropriate to contemporary taste. It is this realistic approach to the portrayal of historically significant events, which makes The Parting Cheer so successful to today’s eyes, rather than to the contrary. Contemporary criticism was not wholly derisive, the Art Journal finding the painting an enormous success, described it as ‘a great book, overflowing with the depth and dignity of human nature – a book that requires to be read in detail, and most amply will it repay the labour… The Parting Cheer contains as many incidents and as many excellent heads as would have made three pictures of the same subject… It would take a page of the Art Journal to go over and do justice to the wilderness of fine feeling and expression displayed in this work, and the tax upon space might unduly trench upon the attention of readers, and yet not adequately set forth the merits of the details… We can only recommend readers to go and carefully study the picture for themselves.’ (Art Journal, 1861, p.165) 

The great poverty of the 1840s lead to a boom in emigration in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, as the desperate poor sought more fruitful lives away from the inner city slums where disease and starvation was rife and the impoverished countryside. The cities were overpopulated and polluted and the rural poor were being forced from their land by government policies and practices, which favoured wealthy landowners. The Scots were hit first by the wave of poverty which swept Britain, after the potato crop failed and the herring fisheries struggled to maintain their yield and the first emigrants left Scotland in the 1830s, closely followed by the Irish in the 1840s during the Great Hunger. During the peak of emigration in the 1840s, over 925,000 people left Britain for America, where immigration tax was lower than elsewhere and passage fare was cheaper. Ships to Canada, New Zealand and Australia were also crowded with those seeking passage to greener pastures. Between 1840 and 1870, one in six British citizens emigrated and it has been estimated that the number of emigrants approached or even exceeded ten million.

The subject of emigration was a topic of great debate as hundreds of thousands of people left British and Irish shores to seek a new life in the Colonies. As Susan P Casteras has explained ‘The panacea for overpopulation, agricultural disasters, superfluous numbers of women, the Great Famine, and other problems afflicting Victorian England was often claimed to be emigration’ (Susan P Casteras, Oh! Emigration! Thou’rt the curse…; Victorian Images of Emigration Themes, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 1 November 1985, p.14).

The trails and tribulations of the poorer members of society fascinated Victorian artists and the subject of migration was particularly popular. Artists tended to avoid any suggestion of economic depression or the hardships of an underprivileged life and conveyed the drama and sentiment of the subject through leave-takings and letters being read by emigrants relatives, as seen in James Collinson’s Answering the Emigrant’s Letter of 1850 (Manchester City Art Gallery). Paul Falconer Poole’s The Emigrant’s Departure of 1838 (private collection) was the earliest painting of the subject, painted preceding the great exodus after 1845, when numbers of émigrés steeply increased. Throughout the next thirty years, the subject of emigrants’ departures increased in popularity and notable paintings of the theme include Frederick Goodall’s The Emigrant’s Departure of 1848, Thomas Marshall’s Emigration – Parting Day of 1852 and Richard Redgrave’s The Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home of 1858. Probably the best known image of the subject is Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England (Birmingham City Art Gallery) painted between 1853 and 1855, which was painted in reaction to the departure of the sculptor Thomas Woolner for Australia in July 1852. In Scotland a sub-genre was formed by John Watson Nicol and Thomas Faed, who specifically depicted the departure of the Scots forced after the Highland Clearances to leave their native land.

The subject of emigration was not only popular with artists, but also greatly inspired the writers of the day. The most famous account of the terrible suffering endured, is given by Charles Dickins in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit published first in 1843 and David Copperfield which followed in 1849. In the latter novel, Dickens devoted an entire chapter to the story of Micawber and his family preparing to embark for Australia, the scene quoted at the start of this note being very similar to that depicted in The Parting Cheer. Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village also explored the theme, the lines most relevant to the present picture being; ‘Good Heaven! What sorrows gloom’d that parting day, That called them from their native walks away;’ (Julian Treuherz, Hard Times; Social Realism in Victorian Art, 1987, p.18).

The Bavarian emigrant Hubert Von Herkomer’s Pressing to the West; A Scene in Castle Garden, New York of 1884 (Fig 2. Leipzig Museum), depicts the crowded hall at the docks of New York where immigrants first landed on American soil. Herkomer's image portrays a more gritty image of the cramped anxious conditions and it may be that this was due to the fact that Herkomer and his family had been emigrants to America when Hubert was young. Both O'Neil and Herkomer were condemned for painting the reality of emigration, the emotional charge and realism being too much for Victorian taste. It is this realism which once regarded with shock and scorn, is now seen as being the fundamental quality of these images. This is one of the last important immigration pictures from this period to remain in private hands. 

We now look upon these images of emigration with eyes that are open to the realities of a difficult time in the history of Great Britain and its Colonies, but also a time of immense hope and widened prospects. The Parting Cheer is an important record of social history, laden with the very best of sentiment and beauty by an artist who perfectly understood his canon and how best to depict it for greatest effect.