James Smetham

Fine Art Society, London, April 1990

The panel appears sound and the work in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals some minor retouchings along the upper left and upper edges. There is some fluorescing to touches of grass in the foreground and in the water, which may be later retouchings or a result of the pigment used by the artist. Held under glass in a gilt plaster frame; unexamined out of frame.
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Going Home is one of a number of pictures by Smetham with the same title depicting rustic travellers wending homewards - a subject that also appears in his poetry. Smetham identified himself with this type of figure: 'I seemed like a pilgrim in spirit. I dare not tarry in all the plain. Here were the everlasting hills and there they are still, and pilgrim I must be; but with I trust a different feeling.' (Casteras, pp.118-9) The desire to return to the security and comfort of home also frequently appears in Smetham's correspondence, for example in a letter from 1853: 'It is well to watch home with soberness your midnight in still reds and look up to the stars and down the long bridge and the wide black rivere with the 1000 lamps and then to remember that you are HOME and happy and calm-hearted and simple here in Babylon - broad, vast Babylon - yet to have a semi-shudder as you cross it like a wilderness... to have a feeling that it is like a finger touching one of the remote basschords of the soul.' (Susan P. Caseras, James Smetham - Artist, Author, Pre-Raphaelite Associate, 1995, p.118)

Smetham's landscapes often have a spiritual intensity and melancholic atmosphere, bearing similarities with the work of Samuel Palmer or John Linnell. In Going Home Smetham created the tranquillity of an evening pastoral, with a donkey quietly grazing in the foreground, ducks wandering in a repeating line from the pool and a line of birds flying to their roost - another re-occurring element that can be seen in The Many Winter'd Crow (Birmingham City Art Gallery). Human activity is contrasted with the cottage on the right with its plume of smoke suggesting a cosy interior and the wandering traveller on the left.