Summer Is Icumen In by Herbert Arnould Olivier

Summer Is Icumen In by Herbert Arnould Olivier (1902)

The title

"Sumer is icumen in" is the opening line of a medieval English round, roughly "summer has come". It dates from the mid-thirteenth century and is also called the Summer Canon, the Cuckoo Song, or the Reading Rota. The earliest known copy was found at Reading Abbey and is now in the British Library (Harley MS 978, copied between 1261 and 1264). It is the oldest known piece of music written for six voices. Four singers take the round and two more sing a repeating "foot" underneath.

Under the English words the manuscript also gives a Latin text, Perspice Christicola, "Observe, Christian". It speaks of the heavenly farmer who did not spare his Son but gave him up to death, and who gives life to captives half-dead from torment and crowns them with himself on the throne of heaven. The song that gave Olivier his title was copied, in its oldest surviving source, alongside a meditation on the Crucifixion.

What the painting shows

Olivier's picture is not itself a religious scene. A young woman with red-gold hair walks barefoot through a riverside meadow in spring. She wears a loose coral-pink robe over a pale ivory dress tied with a sash, and she gathers the hem in both hands as she walks, looking down. A branch of apple blossom arches over her from the left, and more apple trees stand in flower behind. A stream runs across the middle distance, and a path of bare reddish earth curves away to the right.

The flowers are painted closely. Snake's-head fritillaries, chequered purple and one white, hang their heads in the grass at lower right, among primroses, cowslips and the white heads of cow parsley. The picture is signed at lower left "H A Olivier 1902". The Sotheby's catalogue note compares it with spring-maiden subjects of the same years, including a girl in pink in a riverside meadow by John William Waterhouse.

Herbert Arnould Olivier

Olivier was born on 9 September 1861 at Battle in East Sussex, the son of a clergyman, the Rev. Henry Arnould Olivier. One of his brothers, Sydney, became Governor of Jamaica and later Secretary of State for India. Another, Gerard (1869–1939), became a clergyman and was the father of the actor Laurence Olivier, so the painter was Laurence Olivier's uncle.

He was at Sherborne School from 1875 to 1877 and entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1881, winning the Creswick Prize the next year. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1883, taught at the Bombay School of Art in the 1880s, and in 1884 travelled to Kashmir with the Duke and Duchess of Connaught. He was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1887. In 1917 he was appointed an official war artist. Paintings of the Supreme War Council and the Armistice meeting that he gave to the nation in 1924 are now in the Imperial War Museum. In 1922 he gave his painting Easter Morn to Sherborne. It had been meant for a church in Italy, but he withdrew it because it was hung in too poor a light. He died on Hayling Island, Hampshire, on 2 March 1952.

Exhibition and ownership

Olivier showed Summer Is Icumen In at the Royal Academy in 1902 (no. 168). It was then exhibited at Southport the same year, Buenos Aires in 1910, Rome in 1911, the White City in London in 1912, Paris in 1924 and London in 1935. It stayed in the Olivier family by descent until it was offered at Sotheby's in London in 2009.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole canvas, in its upright format, with the artist's signature and date at lower left and the fritillaries at lower right.

Sources: Sotheby's, Victorian & Edwardian Art, London 2009, lot 17 · Wikipedia, "Herbert Arnould Olivier" · Wikipedia, "Sumer is icumen in" · British Library, Harley MS 978