Charles Shannon Hazelwood was a British artist best known for his portraiture. This painter shows the two figures of a reaper and sower walking through an agricultural landscape, the young man in red (the sower) is taking handfuls of corn from his bag, whilst the morbid figure of the reaper dressed in black, clutches his arm, his face oppressively close to the sower. Painted in 1915, the subject- a young man stalked by the figure of death, is perhaps a response to the loss of young life during World War One which had commenced the year before. A smaller half-size version of the same theme is in the Usher Gallery, Lincoln (LCNUG 1927.1930).
For a related study of two heads, initialled, titled and dated, see: ‘Charles Shannon’ (Ernest Benn; 1924), pl.33.
