A Field Officer’s Charger - James E. Bourhill, 1887

Overall: 81cm (32in) x 100cm (39.5in) Oil on canvas. A Royal Engineer officer’s charger, with his master, a lieutenant-colonel in a frock coat seated in a bell tent to the right, and a tented camp to the left with a bugler and sentries. Signed and dated lower left ‘J.E. Bourhill / 1887’. Canvas: 71cm (28in) x 91cm (36in) James Easton Bourhill (1840-1900) was born in Inveresk, Midlothian. He worked in Edinburgh as an interior decorator and artist and enjoyed some success selling, in 1879, a work titled ‘Caught in the Act’ from the annual exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy. Bourhill was an member of the Master Painters’ Association of Edinburgh, an employers’ organisation for the house painters and decorators trade. Evidently margins were tight. In 1877 he resisted a wage demand of tuppence an hour from a penny. Read more ~section 2~ If Bourhill’s work life was fraught, his home life was far worse. In 1874 he was compelled to bring a complaint against his wife to the attention of the magistrate at the City Police Court. Bourhill testified how his wife was frequently drunk, foul mouthed and violent towards him. Their ten year-old son, John, corroborated his father’s claims, causing Bailie Methven to banish the drunken woman from the family home in Nelson Street to the House of Refuge. Bourhill found his own refuge in painting, and took to studying the animals in the Edinburgh Zoological Gardens. He set them in imaginary landscapes, and they became the enigmatic subjects of his best known works. Tellingly perhaps only a few of his known paintings have humans in them. ‘The Rhino Hunt’, being one example. Like the present work the ‘Hunt’ no doubt necessarily had to include Bourhill’s patron. Where the present picture is concerned the officer’s charger is very definitely the star of the show over his master in the bell tent beyond. In 1887, the same year the present equestrian portrait was executed, further tragedy struck Bourhill with death at the age of 22 of his son John. Interestingly, John E. Bourhill had artistic aspirations too, being described in his obituary notice as ‘artist’. In April 1883 yet more misfortune befell the house of Bourhill when he ‘JAMES EASTON BOURHILL, house painter. Nelson Street, Edinburgh’ was listed as bankrupt in the Edinburgh Gazette - whence his debts were to be addressed by the sale of his chattels at the ‘Rooms of Lyon & Turnbull, 61 George Street, Edinburgh’. Bourhill’s legacy was preserved in 20th century in the collections of two notable society figures, the casino and zoo owner John Aspinall and the Anglo-Irish society hostess the Hon. Aileen Plunkett. Aspinall’s large collection was housed at his Mayfair club, and featured great cats, great apes and other animals. The Hon. Aileen Plunkett’s collection of Bourhills was displayed at her renowned home Luttrellstown Castle outside Dublin and included paintings of parrots, flamingoes, frogs, turtles, rabbits and pigeons.