Standing full length in a landscape. Face turned three quarters right, proper left arm akimbo, right hand on handle of a hoe. Dressed in grey coat, tan waistcoat, black breeches, white stockings and black shoes, simple white neck cloth and ruffles at sleeves. To the left is a bee hive. Wheat field, river and farm buildings in background.
The modest dress of the man in this portrait identifies him as a poor farmer who probably does not own the land he works. Unembellished by embroidery, lace, or other costly ornaments, his simple wool suit and plain linen cuffs and cravat immediately distinguish him from the landed gentry and middle-class professionals who normally sat to Hayman. Nevertheless, Hayman invests this humble farmer with the same elegance and dignity that he brought to wealthier subjects. The solid balance of the man's stance gains an air of grace from his akimbo arm and the echoing bend of his proper right leg, which shifts his weight convincingly onto the locked left leg. The fabrics of the suit and vest are enlivened by Hayman's brushwork, which carves out dynamic patterns of folds, shadows, and puckers. The springy sinuousness of Hayman's line reveals the influence of French rococo style, with its love of elegant, irregular silhouettes and scalloped curves. It would have been extraordinary for a person of this man's meager means to have splashed out on a portrait, and if by strange chance he did, one would expect his portraitist to have taken liberties with his dress and surroundings in order to create a flattering image of prosperity. Here, rather than disguise the fact that his subject engages in manual labor, Hayman deliberately calls attention to it, placing him in a working landscape with a spud in his hand. This sharp tool, vaguely resembling a spade, was used for rooting or digging out weeds. Spuds often appear in portraiture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which genteel sitters, disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses, play out a romantic masquerade. Here, however, we are evidently meant to associate the implement (along with the man's clothing and his landscape setting) with actual agricultural labor. Nevertheless, a number of clues suggest that the painting may not be a portrait of an actual farmer, but a theatrical or emblematic representation of farmers generally. The man's aura of nobility is glossed by the beehive placed prominently in the left foreground of the painting. Of all the agricultural accessories that Hayman could have associated with this farmer, the fact that he chose a beehive indicates his intention of identifying the man with industry and productivity, virtues that are further emblematized by the spud held in his hand. Although rarely, if ever, represented in eighteenth-century British portraiture, beehives frequently appear in emblem books as embodiments of the common good that results from industry. There, and in English sermons, social commentary, and bee-keeping treatises, the productivity of honeybees and the disciplined organization of the beehive were commonly held up as models for human society. Often, a patriotic subtext underlies the analogy; E.F. Burney's watercolor drawing of a hive swarming with bees bears the inscription "Tis industry our state maintains." Interpreted in this way, Hayman's painting provides a variation on the traditional poetic and pictorial interpretation of the ploughman as a personification of virtuous industry. A much later pictorial equivalent is an 1801 engraving of a ploughman surrounded by the tools of his trade, which Valentine Green dedicated to the Board of Agriculture and inscribed, "Ye gen'rous Britons! venerate the plough!". There may also be a barbed subtext to Hayman's painting, for emblems and mottoes that incorporated the beehive were often meditations on the inequitable social system that allowed the idle to profit from the labor of the industrious. George Wither's A Collection of Emblemes (1635) contained one of the best known formulations of this truism, "Wee, bring the Hony to the Hive;/But, others, by our labours thrive." In this context, it is worth noting a second painting by Hayman, of comparable size and date, and also representing an unidentified man of the working class. The figures in both paintings are dressed almost identically in the same humble fashion, but whereas the Huntington farmer holds a spud, the other man carries a walking stick. The additional accoutrements of a hat and gloves indicate that he is touring the land, rather than working it. Behind him, in place of the farm buildings seen across the water in the Huntington painting, lies a derelict shed. Just as the beehive provides an emblem for the farmer in the Huntington painting, the gnarled trunk of a tree perhaps emblematizes the man in the other painting; it is literally dead wood, rotten within and gathering moss. The tidy stump in the foreground of the Huntington painting shows that a similar tree has been chopped down and cleared away to make room for the productive beehive. The moralizing function of this imagery is consistent with the ideology of labor detected in British landscape painting of this period. It is possible that these two small paintings were meant to function in tandem as pendants preaching a moral on idleness and industriousness. In the Huntington painting, the angled position of the man's body, the oblique turn of his head, and his lowered gaze all suggest that he is interacting in a narrative with persons beyond the scope of the picture frame. There is certainly an impersonal, theatrical quality to the painting that (together with the evidence analyzed above) seems to discount the possibility that it is a portrait. In the early 1740s Hayman had created moralizing genre paintings (The Good Family and The Bad Family) for the supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens, a scheme that also united rural subject matter with themes derived from the emblem tradition. Later in the decade he experimented with at least one other moralizing pair, The Good Man at the Hour of Death and The Bad Man at the Hour of Death. Whether or not the present painting was likewise devised as the better half of such a pair, its charming depiction of a farmer keeping "busy as a bee" was undoubtedly intended as an ennobling image of the patriotic virtue of industry.
