The Stonebreaker

The Stonebreaker depicts a manual labourer who appears to be asleep, worn out by his work, but may have been worked to death. Wallis gave no outright statement that the man depicted was dead, but there are many suggestions to this effect. The frame was inscribed with a line paraphrased from Tennyson’s A Dirge (1830): “Now is thy long day’s work done”; the muted colours and setting sun give a feeling of finality; the man’s posture indicates that his hammer has slipped from his grasp as he was working rather than being laid aside while he rests, and his body is so still that a stoat, only visible on close examination, has climbed onto his right foot.

Although Wallis was not the first to portray such hardships, his painting attracted much attention through its combination of shocking realism and glorious sunset.

After The Death of Chatterton, The Stonebreaker was the other major success of Wallis’s relatively brief Pre-Raphaelite period. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858 and was highly rated by Ruskin who wrote of the painting, ‘On the whole, to my mind, the picture of the year; and but narrowly missing being a first-rate of any year.’