Despite the incursions of automation in the early twentieth century, rural life in Cornwall remained largely untouched. As elsewhere in coastal areas, the closer a traveller progressed towards Land’s End, the more inhospitable the landscape became, and if Harold Harvey moved inland it was to the rich, temperate fields and woodlands around Tredavoe, the village directly above Newlyn where he is thought to have painted The Plough Team (Private Collection) around 1900. Here, and in the peaceful fields and orchards around his native Penzance, clumps of self-seeded daffodils grew in springtime, to be gathered for kitchen displays in middle-class homes. The commercial production of flowers in Cornwall, a new and expanding industry seen in Harvey’s later canvas, Anemones, 1926 (Private Collection), was yet to come, but here, in Daffodils, in the days leading up to the Great War, a gentler activity is in progress. As his reputation had grown in the early years of the century, the artist looked beyond the harbour to this kind of rural subject matter in smaller works such as Spring in the orchard, narcissus, circa 1912.
This charming anticipation of Daffodils is handled in a broadly similar way – particularly in the contrast between the dark green strokes deployed in the flowering clumps, and the warmer surrounding greens and yellows of the grassy floor. Picking flowers was something for all ages. During his boyhood, the Harvey family supported two serving girls, like those we see in the present work and it is not unlikely that maids such as these went off at moments of respite to pick flowers. Other aspects of the work suggest comparison with Apples 1912, in a composition that takes the eye from a wicker basket, resting on the lower edge of the picture, to the principal standing figure, before delving under leafless trees to find a kneeling woman and her companion. In the present case, all three figures are sculpted by light, as they work with their backs to the sun.
The ensemble is one loosely derived from Bastien-Lepage and adopted to great effect in the orchard and woodland scenes of Henry Herbert La Thangue, in works such as Cutting bracken, 1898, (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne) and Gathering plums 1901, – one of Harvey’s mentors.,/p>
What the Cornish artist brings to the subject is, however, a deeper space, a more varied Impressionist touch, and that moment of respite, when under a hot sun, a young woman stands, rests her back and lifts her head, to straighten locks of hair that fallen when she was stooping. In so doing she casts an eye to the heavens on this sultry day in spring. If this was to be claimed as the ‘Cornish feeling’ in Harvey’s art, it was universal.