IN 1814, in Book 1 of his long poem The Excursion, William Wordsworth described the landscape as it emerged tentatively after winter: on a ‘sunny bank’, he wrote, ‘the primrose flower peeped forth, to give an earnest of the Spring’. It is not perhaps his best line, but, nevertheless, some 30 years later, John William Inchbold—an adherent of the Pre-Raphaelite Brother-hood—was inspired enough to paint a literal and descriptive picture of the image Wordsworth had evoked. A Study, In March was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855.
Inchbold would spend the later part of his life abroad, but in this picture of an upland ridge lit by a low sun, he captured an archetypal British spring in which Wordsworth’s words have been interpreted in crisp and minute detail. John Ruskin, the great evangelist of ‘truth to Nature’, praised Inchbold for his fidelity to what he saw. The ewe and her lamb may be
