In the first of these two articles showing the more faithful accounts of winter with its inglorious mud, I had reached the late nineteenth century and sunk into the mud of a Polish country market. Today’s paintings take that on into the twentieth century and the Great War, claimed at the time to be the War to End Wars.

Mud plays a significant role in this unusual modernised religious story by Fritz von Uhde, A Difficult Journey from 1890. This imagines Joseph and the pregnant Mary walking on a rough muddy track to Bethlehem, in a wintry European village. Joseph has a carpenter’s saw on his back as the tired couple move on through the dank mist.

Although the Franco-Prussian War started in the summer of 1870, its later stages, including much of the fighting around Paris and its siege took place in the late autumn and winter, when mud was at its height, or depth.

Anton von Werner’s In the Troops’ Quarters Outside Paris, from 1894, shows muddy soldiers in the luxurious Château de Brunoy, which had been abandoned to or requisitioned by occupying forces. Every boot seen is caked in mud, which covers the trouser legs of the orderly who is tending to the fire.

Artists in the Nordic countries were also starting to depict mud more faithfully in their paintings.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s Father Coming Home from 1896 shows a mother and two children awaiting the return of their husband and father. He is still quite distant along the muddy track in this poor rural community in Denmark.

Further north in the valleys of Norway, Nikolai Astrup painted Farmstead in Jølster in 1902. Two women, sheltering from the rain under black umbrellas, are walking up a muddy path threading its way through the wooden farm buildings, guiding a young girl with them. Astrup delights in the colourful patches making up the turf roofs, and the contrasting puddles on the grass. His unusual aerial view might prevent us from seeing the mud covering the hems of their coats and dresses, but we know it’s there.

A few years later, Ring painted Short Stay (1909), showing an elderly man and woman standing in the mud in silence and facing in opposite directions. He’s towing a small sledge bearing a sack; she’s carrying a basket containing a large fresh fish wrapped in paper.

Ring’s friend Hans Andersen Brendekilde painted this Village Scene in the Early Spring in 1911. The rutted mud track is slowly drying from its winter role as the main drain. A man is out cleaning the tiny windows of his cottage, and two women have stopped to talk in the distance. Smoke curls idly up from a chimney, and leafless pollards stand and wait for the season to progress.

Three years later, this muddy peace was shattered when Europe went to war, digging trenches across great swathes of the muddy fields of northern France and Belgium.

An official war artist, CRW Nevinson’s Paths of Glory was exhibited with a quotation from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written In A Country Church-Yard (1750):
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Like Marshall Ney, the bodies in Nevinson’s famous depiction of the aftermath of war lie face down in the mud. Here it isn’t dust to dust, or ashes to ashes, but mud to mud. Rifles, helmets and the men’s bodies are being engulfed in all-enveloping mud.

Other artists who went to the front recorded different aspects of its mud. François Flameng’s view of an Attack (1918) being made on duckboards over flooded marshland, brings home a clear picture of what actually happened over and in that deadly mud. His war paintings, many of which weren’t published until the end of the war, were criticised for being too real.

This scene of devastation at The Cliff of Craonne (1918) shows part of the battlefield of the Aisne in 1917 that gave rise to one of the famous anti-military songs of the Great War, La Chanson de Craonne. It’s a landscape where only the mud has escaped destruction.

Typical of Paul Nash’s paintings of the Western Front is his watercolour Wire (1918). It shows a characteristically deserted and devastated landscape, the mud pockmarked with shell-holes and festooned with wire fencing and barbed wire. Its only landmarks are the shattered stumps of what was once pleasant countryside.

Nash’s The Menin Road (1919) was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee in April 1918 for its Hall of Remembrance, for which John Singer Sargent’s Gassed was also intended. It shows a section of the Ypres Salient known as Tower Hamlets, after what’s now a part of eastern London. This area was reduced to barren mud during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge.

There I reach the end of this curiously brief history of mud in European painting. Perhaps it was just too commonplace to depict faithfully. But why might this mud be inglorious? There’s a wonderful Hippopotamus Song by the comedy duo Flanders and Swann with the refrain:
Mud, mud, glorious mud,
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So follow me, follow
Down to the hollow
And there let us wallow in glorious mud.

In the first of these two articles considering the reading of sewing in paintings, I looked at sewing for a purpose. More commonly, sewing is seen in its own right, as an activity performed almost exclusively by women of every age and class.

In Anna Ancher’s Two Little Girls Being Taught How to Sew from 1910, the girls’ mother/teacher stands sewing in the rich light from a window to the right. Cast shadows on the plain pale lemon wall behind are complex: the sun is low in the sky, and those shadows fall from a large houseplant at the right, and external branches too.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s sentimental rustic scene of Two Girls with Needlework Sitting in a Farmyard (1902) shows two young girls who are clean, well-dressed, and engaged in this light domestic task typical of the middle class. In the distance is a farmyard cat, and a woman is kneeling on a doorstep giving it a good scrub.

Sewing could also be a social activity, as seen in Eugene de Blaas’ Friendly Gossips from 1901. These three young women chat and joke together while they work through their sewing and repair baskets. They’re most probably unmarried daughter(s) and friend(s) within a middle class home, and the young man peering cautiously round the door looks as if he has come to woo one of them.

Women of wealthy families appear to have spent much of their time engaged in activities intended to pass the time. Gustave Caillebotte’s Portraits in the Countryside (1876) shows, from left to right, the artist’s cousin Marie, his aunt, a family friend Madame Hue, and the artist’s mother.

Three of the four are engaged in needlework, although it isn’t clear precisely what. Caillebotte’s mother is the exception: sitting in the distance, she is reading a book. Not only are these women sewing their lives away, waiting for the next event on their social calendar, but they sit apart, and concentrate on their work, without talking to one another. Their sewing provides them with a small world of their own, whose only hurt could be the infrequent prick of a needle.

For others, sewing is their profession.

Judging by the sheer volume of garments in Hans Best’s undated Sewing Women in the Room, these two women are professional seamstresses working at home, sharing the single sewing machine.

Anna Ancher makes the most of the light in her Sewing a Dress for a Costume Party of 1920. These three women look rather older than the average seamstress, and they’re working with the materials for a single dress. One of them performs the larger-scale sewing at the machine, while the others progress the manual work.

With sewing machines, clothing could also be made on a more industrial scale. When sewing by hand, homeworking had been the order of the day, and there’s no value in pooling those workers into a factory. Once seamstresses were working with sewing machines, the situation was reversed, and many came to be employed in factories or sewing mills. Karl Armbrust’s Interior of a Sewing Mill with Seamstresses at Work from 1927 shows what became commonplace in garment manufacture. These women didn’t need the skills of those sewing by hand, and were consequently paid a pittance.

I conclude with two oddities.

Paul Gauguin’s Study of a Nude (Suzanne Sewing) from 1880 is thoroughly odd: the model is undeniably sewing, with a thimble on the middle finger of her right hand, so why is she not clothed? It’s perhaps understandable that the artist’s wife is recorded as refusing to allow this painting to be hung on the wall of their home.

Félix Vallotton’s Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures from 1904 is one of his series of disturbing domestic interiors, with an incomplete narrative. The lady of the house is standing over her maid as the latter is sewing up her evening gown, in her bedroom. The mistress stands with her back to the viewer, and her face is only revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room, where the maid is all but invisible. These three figures appear in perspective recession, and to the right of the wardrobe is a doorway, presumably leading through to the master’s bedroom. Are these just running repairs made before or after a night out, or is there something else going on?