Thomas Walter Wilson

Biography

Thomas Walter Wilson studied at the National Art Training School in London and was principally a painter of landscapes, marine and architectural subjects, working in France, Belgium and Holland. During the 1870s he exhibited at the Society of British Artists and the Institute of Painters in Water Colours, of which he was elected a member in 1879. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Besides this, Wilson also worked as a black-and-white illustrator for a number of journals including The Graphic, a popular weekly news magazine with a concern for the lot of the poor and contemporary social problems. An engraved version of Widowed and fatherless was reproduced on the magazine’s cover in September 1878.

We are invited to imagine what event has led to this woeful domestic scene in which two children, indifferent to their grieving mother, draw our attention to the fact that in their innocence they have been left fatherless. Contemporary critics, such as the reviewer of the 1878 exhibition of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours, evoked a scenario of death at sea, describing the bereft figure as ‘the wife of a Dutch fisherman’. The contrast between her emotional state and the infantile incomprehension of ‘her youngest baby in her arms’ and ‘an elder child… playing with the dog’ made the tragedy all the more affecting.

Death was a conspicuous aspect of Victorian culture, and people revelled in the trappings of funerals and mourning rituals. The tragic outcomes of seafaring disasters, particularly their impact on the families of sailors and fishermen, became an important theme in pictorial art and provided powerful opportunities to explore pathos. Charles Kingsley’s lugubrious ballad, The three fishers (1851) addressed this very topic:

Three fishers went sailing out into the West,
Out into the West as the sun went down;
Each thought on the woman who lov’d him the best;
And the children stood watching them out of the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And there’s little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbour bar be moaning.

The poem concludes with the sorry aftermath of a storm at sea:

Three corpses lay out on the shining sands
In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands
For those who will never come back to the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And the sooner it’s over, the sooner to sleep —
And good-by to the bar and its moaning.

Adapted from Victorian watercolours, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2017