Song of the Shirt

Painting height: 144.8 cm
Painting width: 127 cm
Frame height: 176 cm
Frame width: 153 cm

This is one of just four paintings which Watts produced around 1850 and which deal directly with contemporary social problems. In the early Victorian period, needlework was one of the few ways that a woman could earn money respectably. But exploitative employers set piecework rates so low that woman workers, despite long hours, faced the choice between starvation and prostitution. Government research and crusading journalism drew attention to their situation. So did Thomas Hood’s popular poem, the Song of the Shirt. Watts supported the protests with this major painting of a haggard and exhausted needlewoman.

Also known as The Seamstress, this work is another of the four works [including Under the Dry Arch (COMWG.171, 184-1850), Found Drowned (COMWG.161, 1848-1850), and Irish Famine (COMWG.132, 1848-1850)] that G.F. Watts created between 1848 and 1850 focusing on social issues of the time- shortly after he returned from an extended stay in Italy).  Like Found Drowned, this painting is also based on a poem by Thomas Hood also titled “Song of the Shirt” written in 1843.  Mary Watts noted that G.F. Watts began this work at his Studio at Charles Street, but completed it at Little Holland House in London. [1]

        As well as inspiring Watts and other paintings, upon its publication this poem created a sensation and awareness of members of the working poor who lived in horrible conditions.  The poem’s opening stanza states: 

With fingers weary and worn,

   With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat in unwomanly rags,

   Plying her needle and thread—

      Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

   And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

She sang the “Song of the Shirt”  [2].

Here the evokes the helplessness and weariness of the working poor as it notes how the subject is worn and hungry, but still driving to complete her work.  Other contemporary works such as The Seamstress by Anelay, The Sempstress by Redgrave, Hope Dreams by Cope, and Leisure Hour by Nichols also likely drew inspiration from this poem, and like Watts, feature a single figure at work or resting over some needlework [3].

        In his biography of Watts, published in 1903, Hugh Macmillan notes how this work specifically captures the spirit of the poem. He wrote:

Sterner and sadder still are some aspects of life which Watts brings before us, with the avowed object of creating pity in our minds for the wants and woes of humanity. The poverty of the housewife is caused by her own indolence, but in the picture of the "Seamstress," there is the utmost industry, accompanied by the utmost poverty. The surroundings are sordid in the extreme, with nothing to relieve their ghastly grimness; and the painting of Watts is in all respects a representation to the eye of what Hood so powerfully called up before the imagination in his " Song of a Shirt" [4].

Macmillan starts this passage by noting how Watts addressed social issues in his work evokes pity for these subjects while also raising awareness.  Echoing the themes of the poem (as seen above) he Macmillan notes that Watts portrays the subject as industrious, but living in poverty despite all of her hard work as in the poem by Hood.

Footnotes:

[1]    Mary Watts, Catalogue of the Works of G.F. Watts, page 134; Mary Watts, The Annals of an Artist’s Life, Volume 1, page 126.

[2]    Thomas Hood, “Song of the Shirt,”.

[3]   T.J. Edelstein, “They Sang ‘The Song of the Shirt’: The Visual Iconology of the Seamstress” Victorian Studies 23: 2 (1980).

[4]   Hugh Macmillian, The Life-work of George Frederick Watts, R.A., page 217.

Text by Dr Ryan Nutting