Oil paint on canvas
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<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/john-linnell-351" aria-label="More by John Linnell" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">John Linnell</a>
Kensington Gravel Pits
Purchased 1947
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<p>John Linnell shared a house at Kensington Gravel Pits, London, with the painter William Mulready from 1809 to 1811. Named after its quarries, this area was part of London’s rural hinterland, supplying the city’s building trade. The area was home to many labourers and, increasingly, artists. Linnell made detailed outdoor watercolour studies of the quarries and workers for this picture. Rather than painting a picturesque scene, Linnell shows labouring men in a startlingly naturalistic working landscape. He clearly valued labour and would refer to his own painting practice as his ‘trade’.</p><p><em>Gallery label, May 2023</em></p>
painting oil paint canvas
15 October 2001 – 4 August 2002
2002-08-04
15 October 2001 – 4 August 2002
2002-08-04
2001-10-15
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2001-10-15
Constable: Outdoor Sketching
Collection based display
19 August 2002 – 27 April 2003
2003-04-27
19 August 2002 – 27 April 2003
2003-04-27
2002-08-19
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2002-08-19
Outdoor Sketching
Collection based display
1 April 2003 – 12 July 2004
2004-07-12
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2003-04-01
Images of Rural Life
Collection based display
8 May 2006 – 22 May 2007
2007-05-22
8 May 2006
2006-05-08
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2006-05-08
John Constable
Collection based display
5 August 2010 – 17 April 2012
2012-04-17
5 August 2010 – 17 April 2012
2012-04-17
2010-08-05
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2010-08-05
Constable: Sketching from Nature
Collection based display
8 June 2021 – 14 January 2024
2024-01-14
8 July 2021 – 14 November 2021
2021-11-14
2021-07-08
Museum of Art Pudong (Shanghai, China)
2021-06-08
Light
Tate partnerships & programmes
26 September 2022
26 September 2022
2022-09-26
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2022-09-26
Gallery 10
Collection based display
Kensington Gravel Pits
support: 711 × 1067 mm
frame: 876 × 1240 × 105 mm
Purchased 1947
<p>Between 1809 and 1811 Linnell shared lodgings with his close friend and mentor the painter William Mulready (1786–1863) in the village of Kensington Gravel Pits, at the junction of present-day Bayswater Road and Kensington Church Street, now known as Notting Hill Gate in west London. The name referred to the gravel quarries which lay to the south, between the village itself and the town of Kensington, bordering the gardens of Kensington Palace. Kensington at this time was still rural, a resort for Londoners seeking fresh air and a pleasant environment. The village of Kensington Gravel Pits was said by Thomas Faulkner in his <i>History of Kensington</i> (1820) to enjoy ‘excellent air, and beautiful prospects to the North’ (quoted in Pasmore, p.1335). Gravel had been dug in the area from at least the early sixteenth century, supplying the building trade in London’s West End. 
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<br/>Linnell and Mulready joined a number of artists, including Augustus Wall Callcott (1779–1844) and Thomas Webster (1800–86), who lived and painted in the area around Kensington Gravel Pits in the early nineteenth century. Mulready and Linnell, following the advice of their teacher John Varley (1778–1842) to ‘go to Nature for everything’, sketched frequently together. In 1812, Linnell made a series of detailed outdoor watercolour studies of the gravel quarries, brick-kilns and pit workers in Kensington which relate to <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/linnell-kensington-gravel-pits-n05776" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N05776</span></a>. Mulready painted <i>A Gravel Pit</i> in 1807–8 (private collection) and later <i>The Mall, Kensington Gravel Pits</i>, 1811–12 and <i>Near the Mall, Kensington Gravel Pits</i>, 1812–13 (both Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
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<br/>Linnell probably completed <i>Kensington Gravel Pits</i> in 1812, after he had moved into his own lodgings in nearby Edgware Road. The work is unusual and innovative for its date, demonstrating a departure from the picturesque landscape tradition in taking as its sole subject a detailed, accurate and uncontrived depiction of men labouring in a naturalistic working landscape. Linnell’s attention to local colour and its freshness and clarity contribute to the work’s startling directness. A slightly earlier treatment of the subject, <i>The Gravel Diggers</i> (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/morland-the-gravel-diggers-n01067" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N01067</span></a>) by George Morland (1763–1804) in which workmen are resting in a pastoral setting and there is no detail of the workings of the pits, is an interesting comparison. The figures of the workmen in Linnell’s work are vigorously and convincingly painted, a result of his interest in the painting of high Renaissance artists Michelangelo and Raphael and his assiduous attendance at the Royal Academy Schools’ life drawing classes. Linnell wrote: ‘I went every evening nearly all the season to the ... Academy to draw with Mulready’ (quoted in Crouan, p.8).
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<br/>The work was exhibited as <i>The Gravel Pits</i> at the British Institution in 1813. Linnell recounted the mixed critical response to the work in an autobiographical note: ‘I was told that Flaxman [John Flaxman (1755–1826), at the time professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy] spoke of this picture very favourably at some party. It was well placed but not purchased.’(Quoted in P.&amp;D. Colnaghi, <i>A Loan Exhibition of Drawings, Watercolours and Paintings by John Linnell and his Circle</i>, London 1973, cat.18.) Linnell sent the unsold painting, along with five others, to the exhibition at the Liverpool Academy later that year when it was bought for 45 guineas by Henry Hole, who, as a pupil of the wood engraver Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), may have appreciated the closely-observed detail in Linnell’s work.
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<br/>Linnell painted a later version of <span>N05776</span> with the same title in 1857 (private collection). Linnell wrote of this that he had ‘endeavoured to beat my former self’ (quoted in Linnell, p.266). The figures in the 1857 painting are similar, but with more lyrical, narrative detail, and the landscape has a more rural, open aspect, with views of distant countryside.
<br/> </p>
<h3>
<a name="Heading11"></a><b>Further reading:</b></h3>
<h2>
<a name="Heading12"></a>Kathleen Crouan, <i>John Linnell: A Centennial Exhibition,</i>exhibition catalogue, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 1982, pp.8–9, reproduced pp.84–5.</h2>
<p>David Linnell, <i>Blake, Palmer, Linnell and Co.: The Life of John Linnell</i>, Lewes 1994, pp.25 and 266, reproduced pp.116–7.
<br/>Stephen Pasmore, ‘When Gravel was Dug in Kensington’, <i>Country Life</i>, 13 November 1975, p.1335, reproduced.
<br/>
<br/>Cathy Johns
<br/>May 2002</p>
<h2>
</h2>
<p>
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Summary
2010-03-19T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<div class="text">
<p>John Linnell shared a house at Kensington Gravel Pits, London, with the painter William Mulready from 1809 to 1811. Named after its quarries, this area was part of London’s rural hinterland, supplying the city’s building trade. The area was home to many labourers and, increasingly, artists. Linnell made detailed outdoor watercolour studies of the quarries and workers for this picture. Rather than painting a picturesque scene, Linnell shows labouring men in a startlingly naturalistic working landscape. He clearly valued labour and would refer to his own painting practice as his ‘trade’.</p>
</div>

Online caption
2023-11-29T00:00:00
online-caption
ONLINE_CAPTION
agriculture, gardening & fishing architecture cart England hill industrial industrial and crafts industrial worker Kensington - non-specific landscape objects places quarry society transport: land UK countries and regions UK London wheelbarrow work and occupations