February Fill Dyke

There are paintings you admire and paintings you want to hang on your wall at home. February Fill Dyke by Benjamin Williams Leader falls in the first group. This is a painting of the utmost realism. No other picture or photograph depicts with such accuracy the damp cold misery of the English winter. This is not the bright sunny cold of the Alps or North America, but the damp clammy cold that creeps into your bones, that is with you even after you have gone indoors, and which can only be driven away by a hot bath. February Fill Dyke also shows the mud and the darkness of winter, when days on end are spent without sunshine or hardly any light, and when the sun has set at four o’clock in the afternoon. What makes this picture particularly important for me, however, is that it may be of my own village. Leader came from Worcester and specialised in local landscapes. The square church tower and the scattered houses of the village could all be Martley in the late 19th Century.

February Fill Dyke is probably the most famous painting by Leader, but it is not widely-known or particularly popular. This is because it does not fall into the second group of pictures, that you hang on your wall at home. Leader does not show a chocolate-box fantasy of rural England, all village green, neat thatched cottages and duckponds. Nor is it the Christmas card cliché of snow, stagecoaches, and quality street. How much better to put on your wall pictures of poppy fields in summer, sunflowers, dancers near the Seine, and so on. The impressionists were no better painters than Leader, but they were better at judging the market.