This ploughing scene reminds me of a later one, painted a few years ago, of two oxen coming up the furrow with their massive, leisurely movement, while behind them the light is mounting up in floods of crimson, that overflow upon the broad backs of the beasts and lap the cool, glistening earth. It represents the first moments in nature’s daily awakening to life and in man’s daily routine of labour. Both in the sky and on the earth there is the steady gathering of force; not a burst of energy, but that massing of energy that will not readily expend itself. I have heard it remarked that the oxen look tired already, and the men likewise; but perhaps it is rather a passivity of feeling that is conveyed, that slow, unquestioning resignation, that is at once so pathetic and heroic in the true peasant.
And in another way many of these canvases of Walker’s involve this heroic suggestion. While close studies of pastoral and agricultural life in a portion of this continent to-day, they have a more universal significance and set one’s imagination back in the Old World that we call Homeric; times of spaciousness and simplicity, when we fancy that man’s strength was in closest affinity with nature’s; times of wholesomeness and poise of mind and body, when man lived by nature’s rule, and labour was loving.
This universal suggestion is the product of the force, united with persuasiveness, that one marked at the outset as characteristic of Walker and his work. It comes of the large seriousness with which he thinks and works, of the true perspective through which he views his subject, wherein facts and sentiment take their due place not only in the foreground, but in their relation to a distant horizon. These risings and settings of the sun, that he loves so much, have run their course through ages; not a little of his love for them no doubt is due to their suggestion of infinity in relation to the life of man; and that life, too, he prefers to view as itself a heritage of the ages.
For many of us life is now a complicated affair, with much whirring of human machinery within ourselves and around us; yet it still has elemental facts and emotions. The painter who can express these with their personal, local significance, and show, as well, their relation to the universal, is one whose work will be likely to endure.