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Seaweed Gatherers
Edward Mitchell Bannister (born St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada 1828-died Providence, RI 1901)
1898?
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 25 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. (65.7 x 50.6 cm.)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of H. Alan and Melvin Frank
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
This scene of a worker pushing his wheelbarrow is similar to the paintings of French artist Jean-François Millet, whose landscapes celebrated rural scenes and the nobility of peasant life. Edward Bannister praised Millet as “the profoundest, most sympathetic, and deeply religious artistic spirit of our time.” (Hartigan, Sharing Traditions, 1985). Millet’s scenes of peasant life commented on industrialization by showing hardworking country folk, who embodied the moral values that were swiftly fading from urban centers. In Seaweed Gatherers, Bannister positioned his worker in the center of the composition so that he and his cart take on monumental proportions, heightening the viewer’s identification with him.
