The Last Muster

The Last Muster is an 1875 oil painting by Sir Hubert von Herkomer, based on his wood engraving Sunday at the Chelsea Hospital published in The Graphic on 18 February 1871. The painting is in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral.

Description

The work depicts a group of

Chelsea Pensioners at a Sunday morning service in the chapel of the Royal Hospital Chelsea

. The aged pensioner at the near end of the second row has died; his neighbour is holding his wrist, checking in vain for a pulse. The painting measures 214.5 by 159 centimetres (84.4 in × 62.6 in).

Several of the figures in the painting are based on sketches of inmates at the hospital, made by Herkomer directly on the canvas. Others are based on his friends or family. The figure with white beard in the third row is based on Herkomer's father. In the background are Herkomer's wife Anna, and also his patron the photographer

Clarence Edmund Fry

and members of Fry's family.

Reception

The painting was exhibited at the

The Salon d'Or, Homburg. Previous examples include Frith's The Derby Day in 1858 and David Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch

in 1822.

Among those who admired the painting was Vincent van Gogh, who collected several prints by Herkomer while he was living in London from 1873 to 1875. The Last Muster inspired Van Gogh's 1882 pencil drawing Worn Out and his 1890 painting At Eternity's Gate.

Herkomer's painting was bought for £1,200 by Clarence Edmund Fry, and exhibited at the business premises of Elliott & Fry on Baker Street, where the paintings were displayed alongside their photographs to demonstrate their artistic merit.

The work made Herkomer internationally famous. It won a gold Medaille d'Honneur at the

légion d'honneur in 1879, ennobled by King Otto of Bavaria

in 1899 (adding "von" to his name), and knighted in England in 1907.

The painting sold to the stockbroker and accountant William Cuthbert Quilter in 1881, and it was then exhibited at the Munich International Exposition in 1883, at the Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibition in 1885, at the Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester in 1887, and at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It was sold at auction in 1909 for £3,000, and bought at Christie's in 1923 by William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme for the newly-opened Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, where it remains.

References

The Last Muster: Sunday at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea 1875, Lady Lever Art Gallery
About the artwork, National Museums Liverpool
The Last Muster, Sunday at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, ArtUK
"Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: "The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869-1891", Andrea Korda, p. 150-153
The Last Muster, Sunday at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, victorianweb.org
The last muster, Library of Congress
The last muster, Library of Congress
The last muster, Library of Congress
Sunday at Chelsea Hospital (from "The Graphic"), Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Last Muster
Letter 199, To Theo van Gogh. The Hague, Sunday, 8 or Monday, 9 January 1882, vangoghletters.org
Letter 337, To Theo van Gogh. The Hague, on or about Saturday, 21 April 1883, vangoghletters.org