BY THE TIME we finish the backdrop, eventually with even David, our resident joiner helping to fill in the blanks, it looks a ridiculously simple cartoon-style scene . . . something that a child could have drawn in about an hour perhaps – but it’s taken us (four of us, off and on) most of the weekend.
Just time for this snow scene before the light fades. It snowed last night but during the day most of it has melted.
I’VE WRITTEN several times about my great grandfather George who worked in the cutlery trade in Sheffield. Here’s a watercolour by his son Maurice Swift, my grandfather. It’s signed ‘M. Swift age 13′ so that means that he painted it around 1900.
The farmhouse on the hillside with its shelter belt of trees could be a real location on the Peak District side of Sheffield, or perhaps it is imagined with that kind of country in mind. I phoned my mum to say that I’d been surprised to come across it in a drawer in my plan chest – I’d forgotten all about it. She suggests that it might be a copy of a picture and remembers that it was once framed. It’s mounted on a kind of brittle card, 2 or 3 millimetres thick, which is typical of that period.
Like so many family treasures, my mum had put it in an anonymous brown envelope, (postmark dated December 1986, which I guess might have been about the time that she handed it to me; she’s pencilled my name in block capitals on the back of the envelope).