The Earnshaw Family by the Fireside

c.1899

In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment

Artist: Lady Edna Clarke Hall 1879–1979
Medium: Ink, watercolour and gouache on paper
Dimensions: Support: 356 x 254 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by Mrs F. Samuel, Mrs E. Bishop and Michel H. Salaman through the Contemporary Art Society 1941
Reference: N05421

Catalogue entry

N05421 THE EARNSHAW FAMILY BY THE FIRESIDE

Not inscribed.
Pen and sepia wash, heightened with white, 14×10 (35·5×25).
Presented by Mrs F. Samuel, Mrs E. Bishop and Michel H. Salaman through the Contemporary Art Society 1941.
Coll: As for N05418.

Old Earnshaw on his return from Liverpool, where he found Heathcliff abandoned, is showing the child to his wife and children: ‘He threw himself into a chair, laughing and groaning and bid them stand off, for he was nearly killed.... We crowded round and over Miss Cathy's head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged black-haired child’ (Chapter 4). A rough sketch for the composition, with some of the figures differently placed (the boy Hindley is standing on the right by the fire, and Nelly Dean is nearer the group), is reproduced in The Slade, 1893–1907, ed. by John Fothergill, 1907, pl.42. A study for Nelly Dean putting a log on the fire (as in N05421) is reproduced in Studio, CVI, 1933, p.215.

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, I