page_title: George Hemming Mason
section_title: Return to England
hierarchical_section_title: George Hemming Mason / Life / Return to England
caption_attribution_description: English: The Cast Shoe (B/W reproduction)
context_page_description: George Heming Mason ARA was an English landscape painter of rural scenes, initially in Italy, then England itself. He was also known as "George Mason" or "George Hemming Mason".
context_section_description: In 1858, Mason returned to England and married Mary Emma Wood (daughter of Edward Gittens Wood of Bayston House, Shropshire) on the 5 August. They settled back at the old family mansion Wetley Abbey, and went on to have two sons and five daughters.
  The exchange of the blue skies of Italy for the grey and misty atmosphere of England at first depressed Mason. His friend Sir Frederick Leighton stimulated him, however, to exertion, and Mason's produced his first painting in England - "Wind on the Wold". Thenceforward he found inspiration in the exquisite though subdued colours of the Staffordshire country, and there followed from his brush a series of idylls which stamp him as the greatest of the idyllic painters of England.
  In 1863 Costa visited him at Wetley while Mason was painting "The End of the Day" and "Wetley Rocks". Afterwards they visited Paris together, and in 1864 Mason shifted his quarters to Westbourne House, Shaftesbury Road, Hammersmith (London), so as to enjoy the society of his fellow artists, but he still passed much of his time at Wetley. At Shaftesbury Road he painted "The Gander", "The Geese", "The Cast Shoe", "Yarrow", "The Young Anglers", "The Unwilling Playmate" and "The Evening Hymn".
  A fastidiousness, which increased with his years, was always characteristic of him. He altered the composition of "The Evening Hymn" after it was finished, and the exhibition of it was thus delayed for a year. "The Blackberry Gatherers" was twice repainted - first it was winter, with a hag gathering enchanted herbs, and a fiery-eyed raven on a bare branch overhead, and then he painted it as summer, before completing it as it now stands. A little landscape in Staffordshire was begun as an effect of early spring, then altered to summer, and eventually finished as a late autumn effect, when only the last few leaves were clinging to the trees.
caption: The Cast Shoe (B/W reproduction)
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