As one of the most promising students training at the celebrated social realist artist Hubert Herkomer’s School of Art in Bushey, Hertfordshire, Ernest Borough Johnson exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1887 onwards.
The art critic A. L. Baldry, writing in 1898 about the artist who ‘has not, as yet, reached an age which justifies us in regarding him as committed to any one course in art’, nonetheless singled out Johnson’s A Salvation Army shelter, 1891 as
an appallingly faithful representation of an incident in East End life, a ghastly statement of the mental and physical squalor which is the lot of so large a section of our London population … its stern recognition of horrible facts … recognises also the element of fanaticism which dulls the poverty-stricken mind into acceptance of ills which need to be met with energy, not fatalistic endurance.1A. L. Baldry, ‘The Work of E. Borough Johnson’, The Studio, vol. 13, no. 59, Feb. 1898, p. 12.
A Salvation Army shelter, 1891, was first shown in London in 1892, in an exhibition organised by the Fine Art Society devoted to the students of Hubert Herkomer. In addition to the work’s title, its frame included a plaque with a New Testament quote from the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’.2Catalogue of an Exhibition of Works by Prof. Herkomer, R.A. and His Pupils, Fine Art Society, London, 1892, no. 161.
Herkomer had achieved a reputation as one of Britain’s pre-eminent contemporary artists at this time, and the art school he had established at Bushey outside London had become known for its experimental curriculum that was both radical and innovative. As Herkomer himself put it:
The curriculum was simple: painting from the nude living model from nine until three, five days in the week: drawing in charcoal or pencil from the nude model at night from seven till nine: on the Saturday morning, a village model was requisitioned for head painting only. There were no prizes to be given, therefore competition – that most uncertain and unfair of methods for gauging talent – was eliminated. The students were taught neither tricks nor hard-and-fast methods of work. I did not intend to give them ‘crutches’ with which to hobble about as lame Herkomers when they left the school.3Hubert von Herkomer, My School and My Gospel, Doubleday, Page and Company, New York, 1908, p. 14. In 1901 it was noted that ‘no present-day artist has acquired a more enviable reputation, and none perhaps has secured for himself a surer place in fame, than Hubert von Herkomer’. Merrill E. Abbott, ‘An appreciation of Hubert von Herkomer’, Brush and Pencil, vol. 9. no. 3, Dec. 1901, p. 176.
A Salvation Army shelter stood out as one of the highlights of the exhibition. The art critic for The Times (1892) noted how:
In the large room, which contains the work of the pupils, attention will be first arrested by the powerful painting of a Salvation Army service by a quite new painter, Mr. E. Borough Johnson (161), whose vigour in expression is quite remarkable.4‘Art exhibitions. At the Fine Art Society’s’, The Times, 4 May 1892, p. 4.
The weekly Fun magazine (1892) dubbed it ‘one of the finest and most impressive works in the collection’, while the Daily News (1892) felt that Borough Johnson ‘seems to have had the warm colouring of some old master in mind in depicting his story of poverty and woe’.5‘Professor Herkomer, R. A., and his pupils’, Fun, 11 May 1892, p. 201. ‘The Fine Art Society’; The Daily News, 3 May 1892, p. 2. For The Graphic (1892), Johnson’s painting ‘while sternly realistic, has many admirable qualities of art’.6‘Professor Herkomer and his pupils’, The Graphic, 14 May 1892, p. 16. The Standard (1892) was slightly more critical, commenting that the artist made ‘fairly discreet use of the uncomely emotionalism and the facile hysteria of the Salvation Army’, echoing contemporary criticism of the Army’s boisterous activities.7‘The Fine Art Society’s Gallery’, The Standard, 3 May 1892, p. 3.
The Salvation Army was founded in 1865 by William and Catherine Booth as the East London Christian Mission, but was reorganised along military lines and rebranded in 1878. The Army’s mission was to provide practical and spiritual help for the poverty-stricken inhabitants of the slums in London’s East End. In 1890, the year before Johnson painted A Salvation Army shelter, William Booth published his bestselling book In Darkest England, and the Way Out, which proposed a social welfare agenda for countering homelessness, unemployment and alcoholism. Booth and the Army were not without opposition, facing hostile press for their perceived fanaticism and angering the alcohol industry with their campaign to ween the poorer classes off drink. The Church of England was also alarmed by Booth’s granting of equal status to women within his Methodist ministry. Physical attacks upon members of the Army were common in the 1880s and early 1890s. In June 1891, for example, the police narrowly prevented rioting in the streets of the seaside town of Eastbourne as protesters opposed a Salvation Army band from marching through the town on a Sunday. Thirty Salvationists were subsequently fined and imprisoned.8 ‘The Salvation Army at Eastbourne’, The Times, 11 Jun. 1891, p. 11; ‘The Salvation Army at Eastbourne’, The Times, 26 Jun. 1891, p. 11. In the south of England in the 1880s, there arose a firm opposition to the Salvation Army’s marches against alcohol in the form of the Skeleton Army who disrupted the Salvationists’ demonstrations with both verbal and physical abuse. The stakes were high, for where the Salvation Army launched ‘a vigorous campaign against drink, tobacco, gambling, boxing, music halls, and other “social evils” – which were much enjoyed pleasures for the working classes’, the Skeleton Army exploited the fact that ‘the working classes would fear the closing down of pubs and other places of amusement; churchmen would resent the noisy and “undignified” parades and open-air preachings; the shopkeepers and hoteliers … would fear loss of trade and injury to the town’s good name … [and] the upper classes might view the Salvationists as suspect trouble-makers’. Chris Hare, ‘The Salvation Army and the bonfire boys, Worthing, 1884’, Folklore, vol. 99, no. 2, 1988, pp. 221–2.
Johnson’s painting was thus timely and relevant for its day. In A Salvation Army shelter we see a rather spartan interior presumably set in the East End. This is a newly established mission, for the back of the canvas bears a pencil annotation ‘Private Davy’s Foundation Est. May 13/91’.9Annette Dixon, former Curator, NGV, noted that this was possibly one of the shelters established by the Salvation Army after the London dock strike of 1889, citing information supplied by Mr George Ellis, Territorial Archivist, Salvation Army Melbourne, 1988. Annette Dixon research papers, National Gallery of Victoria. At the left a Salvation Army officer leans over a destitute elderly man. Next to this pair, a kneeling woman dressed in Army uniform implores the heavens in tearful prayer, a timbrel resting against her dress. At the right, another woman, staring out at the viewer in abject despair, nurses an ailing child. A crowded cast of the despairing and poor surround these central characters, creating a frieze of intermingled misery and hope. Depressing as the painting’s setting is, it may actually have glamourised the reality of many of London’s Salvation Army shelters at this time. In October 1892, an Australian newspaper reprinted an account from the Daily Telegraph of a night spent by a reporter among the impoverished in a shelter in Whitechapel in the East End, which noted the nudity, filth and stench encountered in a building where ‘the most elementary principles of personal cleanliness and decency are ignored’ and concluded that ‘there is absolutely nothing in these shelters that can possibly tend to raise a man socially or morally’.10‘A night in a Salvation Army Shelter’, Wagga Wagga Express, 22 Oct. 1892, p. 7.
A Salvation Army shelter was purchased for the NGV in June 1892 by Hubert Herkomer, who had in the previous year begun acting as the London-based Felton Adviser for the Gallery. His selection of a work by one of his own students caused comment in Melbourne, The Argus noting that
Professor Herkomer may be considered in some quarters to have displayed a certain courageous disregard for appearances in selecting a picture, which he thinks good, notwithstanding that it is the work of one of his own students, but on the other hand his choice is sure to be looked at more or less critically by many people on this account. Salvation Army studies, however (no matter how well carried out)’[its critic concluded,] ‘are hardly the kind of pictures we should care to see for all time on the walls of our National Gallery.11‘The new picture for the National Gallery. “Come Unto Me All Ye That Labour” ’, The Argus, 16 Jun. 1892, p. 7; article reprinted in The Australasian, 25 Jun. 1892, p. 123.
When the painting arrived in Melbourne in September 1892, it was denounced in the Age, whose arts writer lamented its laborious ‘want of spontaneity’, its ‘inexplicable errors in the drawing and proportions’, its ‘excessive use of bitumen’ and its ‘general unsatisfactoriness’.12‘Art notes’, The Age, 17 Sept. 1892, p. 14. This article was reprinted verbatim in the Leader, 24 Sept. 1892, p. 32; and in the Illustrated Australian News, 1 Oct. 1892, p. 5. Viva, a Sydney gossip columnist, defended the painting however as a work ‘sure to attract a great deal of attention’, for despite the fact that
the critics have found fault with the drawing and painting of some of the figures … to the general public the picture remains a very interesting and novel piece of work.13Viva, ‘Melbourne Gossip’, The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 8 Oct. 1892, p. 80.
Johnson’s painting brought a new narrative to the collections of the NGV at this time: the gritty documentation of contemporary social inequality and the suffering of the urban poor. This was a genre that his teacher Herkomer had popularised in Britain in the 1870s and 1880s.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
