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Sir Charles Morgan at the Castleton ploughing match

MULLOCK, James Flewitt (James Flewitt Mullock was born in Newport in 1818. His father Richard Mullock (1784-1865) had moved to Newport from Cheshire in 1808. Proprietor of the Llantarnam Potteries and a china and glass dealer, Richard Mullock was long-serving Alderman and Mayor of the town in 1842, and held many other public offices. Nothing is known of his eldest son's artistic training but he exhibited a (lost) painting A Prize Ox of Tredegar at an exhibition in the Newport Mechanics Institute in 1841. Research by Newport Museum and Art Gallery in the 1980s identified some fifty works (catalogued in Wilson, 1993) by or attributed to James Mullock. These comprise animal and sporting paintings (all c 1840-50), portraits (mostly of the 1850s), and some topographical and genre works. In 1854, he was appointed Clerk to the newly-formed Newport and St Woolos Burial Board, and he married in 1857. Thereafter his output as an artist declined, although he is listed in directories as the town's sole teacher of art from 1868 to 1877. He was active in the town's cultural life in the 1880s, and a number of works of this later period also survive. Coming from a comfortable middle class background, Mullock was not an artisan painter, but he never appears to have exhibited outside his native town. He was clearly familiar with contemporary sporting art and his work can be compared with that of John Fernely (1782-1860), Jacques-Laurent Agasse (1767-1849), James Ward (1769-1859), John Frederick Herring (1795-1864) and Richard Ansdell (1815-1885).)

Central to Mullock's early career was the annual Tredegar Cattle Show, established by Sir Charles Morgan (1760-1846) of Tredegar in 1819. As well as leasing land for iron and coal extraction, Morgan was a scientific agricultural improver, interested in stock breeding, soil treatment, drainage and new implements and machinery. He was President of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. Half a dozen of Mullock's paintings of prize-winning cattle, generally set in a landscape and accompanied by their owners, survive, and early portraits and sporting pictures mostly represent people associated with the Show. He was toasted at the dinner which celebrated the 1851 Show as the 'artist, by whose skill many of the finest beasts exhibited at the Tredegar Cattle Show were perpetually on the glowing canvas...' (Monmouthshire Merlin, 19 December 1851).

This painting is unsigned, but is one of his most ambitious works. It depicts the first Castleton Ploughing Match, which took place in Cae Shop Field, Castleton, in January 1845. This is described at length in the Monmouthshire Merlin 8 January 1845. There were several hundred spectators, some included here, and the elderly and infirm Sir Charles Morgan, the Castleton Ploughing Club's principal supplier, came to watch for an hour. Though set in an immediately recognisable landscape, with the Gwent levels and the Bristol Channel in the background, the picture is probably a composed record of the event, rather than an accurate portrayal of it. More work is needed to establish the identity of the man with Morgan (possibly a Mr Lewis) and the ploughman that he gestures towards. It is nevertheless unique as an image of agrarian improvement in early nineteenth-century Wales, and a fascinating depiction of the hinterland of Newport prior to its industrialisation. Ploughing scenes are rare in sporting art. Thomas Weaver painted a match between teams belonging to Lord Bradford, Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn and others in 1813, and Mullock's contemprary Richard Ansdell painted the Groundslow Ploughing Match in 1840.