"Harrowing with Polly & Jack"
Charcoal & Conte on Paper
46x56cm
Signed Lower Left, Dated 1919
rov: Private Collection Adelaide
$6,000-8,000
The working horses Polly and Jack became two of the most familiar subjects in Hans Heysen’s paintings of rural life around Hahndorf. The pair belonged to local farmer Kramm, who regularly brought his horses to plough and cultivate the land at The Cedars. Heysen came to know both the farmer and his Clydesdales well, observing them at work and producing numerous drawings, watercolours and prints recording the horses, ploughmen and agricultural life of the district.
From around 1918, these subjects assumed particular importance in Heysen’s work. While celebrated for his monumental gums, he was equally interested in the people and animals whose labour shaped the Adelaide Hills landscape. He filled sheets with studies in pencil and charcoal, observing the movement and weight of the draught horses as they pulled ploughs and harrows through the fields. These were not idealised rural scenes removed from everyday experience; they grew from Heysen’s close familiarity with the German farming community surrounding Hahndorf and a way of agricultural life he witnessed firsthand.
Polly and Jack appeared repeatedly during this period. A watercolour of the pair ploughing dates from 1917, while Heysen also explored the subject through drawing and printmaking. The series reached its most important expression in The Toilers of 1920, in which the two horses and
their labourer are shown resting momentarily in the autumn light. Heysen regarded the painting as bringing him closer to the earth than his previous treatments of the subject, and it was awarded the Wynne Prize for 1920. Today The Toilers remains in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
