The painting is famous; the man who created it is considerably less so..
Thomas Marie Madawaska Hemy was an accomplished Victorian artist whose extraordinary life began aboard a sailing ship and included years at sea before he established a substantial career painting maritime, historical and sporting subjects. Contemporary newspapers described him as a “distinguished artist” and a “celebrated sea painter”, while his work encompassed shipwrecks, rescues, naval battles, Rugby and Association football. The Sunderland picture was therefore not an isolated excursion into sporting art, but part of a much broader career devoted particularly to movement, human endeavour and moments of intense action.
Thomas Marie Madawaska Hemy and the Painting of Sunderland AFC
Among the historical treasures associated with Sunderland AFC, few can rival Thomas Hemy’s magnificent painting of the club’s match against Aston Villa at Newcastle Road in January 1895. More than 130 years later, the enormous canvas remains an extraordinary visual record of Victorian football, capturing not only the players but the spectators, surroundings and atmosphere of a game played when Sunderland were one of the dominant forces in English football.
The painting is famous. The man who created it is considerably less so.
Thomas Marie Madawaska Hemy was an accomplished Victorian artist whose remarkable life began aboard a sailing ship and included several youthful years at sea before he established a substantial career painting maritime, historical and sporting subjects. Contemporary newspapers described him as a “distinguished artist” and a “celebrated sea painter”, while his subjects included shipwrecks, rescues, naval battles, Rugby and Association football.
His Sunderland masterpiece was therefore not the unlikely diversion of a marine artist who suddenly decided to paint a football match. Hemy was already an experienced sporting painter and, the more that is discovered about his career, the more naturally the Sunderland painting fits within it.
Born at Sea
Hemy was born in 1852 aboard the Madawaska while his family was travelling from Britain to Australia. His remarkable middle name, Madawaska, commemorated the vessel aboard which he entered the world.
There has been some confusion over the precise location of his birth, with a place resembling “Murtar Var Rocks” appearing in later accounts. This seems very likely to be a corruption of the Martim Vaz Islands and Rocks, a remote group far out in the South Atlantic to the east of Brazil.
The family’s Australian adventure was comparatively brief and they subsequently returned to North-East England. Thomas grew up in a remarkably talented household. His father, Henry Hemy, was an accomplished musician, while several members of the family became artists. The most celebrated was eventually Thomas’s brother Charles Napier Hemy, who became an important marine painter and was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1898.
Thomas, however, had a considerable career of his own.
His relationship with the sea was much more than artistic. At around fourteen he ran away to sea and spent several formative years as a sailor. In his later autobiography, Deep Sea Days, Hemy recalled presenting himself aboard the barque Standish at North Shields and being put to work with coal. He returned filthy but delighted, regarding himself as:
“a real sailor, doing man’s work.”
Contemporary accounts subsequently described Hemy as having sailed the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. When he eventually returned seriously to art, therefore, he possessed something particularly valuable for a marine painter: practical experience of the world he was depicting.
Hemy studied art in Newcastle and subsequently in Antwerp under the Belgian painter Charles Verlat. He developed a considerable reputation for marine subjects, particularly pictures involving danger, rescue and human action. Among the works for which he became known were The Loss of the Birkenhead and And Every Soul Was Saved, the latter inspired by the dramatic rescue associated with the emigrant steamer Danmark. A contemporary newspaper records that And Every Soul Was Saved was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1890.
His reputation was sufficiently established for The Tablet, writing in 1898, to identify him simply as “Mr. Thomas Hemy, the painter of the ‘Loss of the Birkenhead.’”
Readers were evidently expected to know both the picture and the artist.
Hemy the Football Painter
Hemy was by no means exclusively a marine artist. He had painted football before his association with Sunderland, with an early work entitled Goal! among his known sporting pictures. He also produced Rugby and public-school sporting subjects.
Particularly important evidence of his reputation appeared in the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette on 7 January 1895, just five days after the Sunderland and Aston Villa match which would become the subject of his masterpiece.
The newspaper described Hemy as a distinguished artist and, despite his Newcastle connections, “practically a Sunderland man by sympathy.” More significantly, it stated that he had already:
“scored fame as a football painter.”
The Echo reported that Hemy had recently completed a Rugby picture commissioned by Mawson, Swan and Morgan for publication and had undertaken similar sporting work for a New Bond Street firm, with subjects drawn from the great public schools.
At precisely this time Hemy was also working upon an ambitious representation of the famous naval engagement between HMS Shannon and the American frigate Chesapeake in 1813. The Echo described how Hemy selected the crucial stage of the battle, observing that the artist:
“fixes the action in the crucial moment.”
It is a wonderfully perceptive description of Hemy’s art. Again and again during his career he was attracted to the instant when an event reached its climax. Football offered him precisely the same opportunity.
Sunderland 4 Aston Villa 4
On Wednesday 2 January 1895, Sunderland met Aston Villa at Newcastle Road in one of the most eagerly anticipated fixtures of the season.
These were two of the giants of Victorian football. Aston Villa were the reigning League champions, while Sunderland had won the championship in 1891/92 and 1892/93 and were again challenging for the title. Sunderland had already defeated Villa earlier in the season, but the Birmingham club had recovered strongly and arrived on Wearside as formidable opposition.
Villa reached Sunderland the previous day. On the Wednesday the weather was fine, although a strong north-easterly wind blew across Newcastle Road and there was a sprinkling of snow upon the pitch. Approximately 12,000 spectatorsattended.
There had been changes to the Sunderland side. Meehan returned at right-back, Johnstone moved to left-half and Auld dropped out. Sunderland won the toss and elected to use the wind before Aston Villa’s John Devey kicked off.
Villa took the lead after approximately fifteen minutes, but what followed developed into a tremendous contest between two of the finest teams in England. The goals continued until the sides had shared eight of them, the match ending Sunderland 4 Aston Villa 4. Contemporary opinion regarded the draw as a fair reflection of an extraordinary game.
Sunderland subsequently went on to win the 1894/95 Football League Championship, their third championship in four seasons.
Thomas Hemy was commissioned to paint the champions.
Remarkably, contemporary newspaper reports allow us to follow the creation of the resulting masterpiece through much of 1895.
“He Will Paint the Picture of the Year”
The match had been played on 2 January. More than five months later Hemy was still working upon his picture.
On 17 June 1895, the Athletic News reported:
“Mr. T. H. Hemy, a North-country artist, I am told, is painting a picture of the League champions.”
The incorrect middle initial was simply a newspaper error. The artist was Thomas Hemy.
The correspondent knew that Aston Villa would provide Sunderland’s opposition in the picture but apparently did not yet know which meeting between the clubs Hemy intended to depict. He joked that the artist should certainly avoid Sunderland’s FA Cup semi-final defeat by Villa at Blackburn and suggested instead Sunderland’s emphatic victory over Villa at Perry Barr.
Then came a much more important statement:
“the picture’s Sunderland’s, and having to pay the artist they have a right to nominate the subject.”
Written while Hemy was actually creating the painting, this is particularly important. Sunderland AFC were not simply the eventual owners of an existing Hemy picture. The contemporary report makes clear that Sunderland were paying the artist to produce it.
The ambitions for the finished work extended beyond Wearside. The Athletic News also reported that the picture was intended to tour the provinces when completed.
The correspondent ended with an extraordinary prediction:
“If Mr. Hemy does justice to himself and to them, he will paint the picture of the year.”
Hemy certainly wasn’t rushing his work.
The match had been played in January and the painting was demonstrably still under construction in June. It was not until September 1895 that the Scottish Referee, in its Newcastle and Sunderland Gossip column, announced:
“The oil painting depicting a football match between Sunderland and Aston Villa, or the ‘fight for the championship,’ has just been completed.”
Almost nine months separated the match from the announcement that Hemy’s painting was finished. That does not mean that he spent every day of those nine months working on the canvas, but the chronology demonstrates the scale of the undertaking: the subject was the January match, the painting was still being worked upon in June and it was announced as newly completed only in September.
The Scottish Referee also revealed one of the most extraordinary features of Hemy’s work. There were nearly forty portraits of players and spectators incorporated into the composition. The footballers were not simply anonymous sporting figures arranged around a ball; Hemy was attempting to create recognisable individuals within a huge action scene. The referee, J. Fox of Sheffield, was also represented.
The completed picture was then to be placed on public exhibition in Newcastle.
Hemy had created something considerably more ambitious than an illustration of a football match. It was simultaneously a sporting action painting, a huge collective portrait and an extraordinary visual record of Newcastle Road and Victorian football culture.
The Painting and its Names
Hemy’s masterpiece subsequently became known under more than one title, most notably A Corner Kick and The Last Minute – Now or Never. The contemporary Scottish Referee description of Sunderland and Aston Villa’s “fight for the championship” provides another evocative phrase associated with it, although that appears to have been a journalistic description rather than necessarily a formal title.
What makes the painting so striking is Hemy’s decision to portray football in the middle of the action. This isn’t a formal team portrait transferred to canvas. Players converge upon the ball, bodies twist and strain, while the spectators and surroundings unmistakably place the scene within the world of late-Victorian professional football.
The sheer ambition of the work should not be underestimated. Hemy was combining nearly forty individual portraits within a single sporting composition while simultaneously attempting to convey movement, physical effort and the atmosphere of a crowded football ground.
The Myth About Hemy’s Hands and the Pugilists
Over the years a bizarre piece of folklore has attached itself to the painting. It claims that Hemy could not paint hands, that this supposedly explains why some of the footballers appear with clenched fists and, in some versions of the tale, that Hemy painted them this way because he was accustomed to painting pugilists.
The whole story is rubbish. Hemy’s surviving paintings show perfectly clearly that he could paint hands, while portraying pugilists was not some characteristic feature of the documented artistic career of a man known for marine disasters, naval actions, historical scenes, sailors, Rugby players and footballers. The clenched hands of some of the players require no mythical explanation: Hemy was painting footballers running, jumping, challenging and exerting themselves during a match.
The story effectively invents a problem that never existed and then invents another story to explain it. Hemy could paint hands; his own paintings prove that. There is no reason to allow an entertaining piece of football folklore to become confused with the history of either the artist or his Sunderland masterpiece.
The picture itself has frequently been described as the oldest painting of an Association football match in the world. At the very least, it stands among the earliest and most important surviving large-scale representations of the Association game and provides an exceptional visual record of football during the final years of the nineteenth century.
From Prize Draw to Public House
The subsequent history of Hemy’s painting is almost as remarkable as its creation.
In June 1898, the Sporting Mirror reported that Sunderland officials had purchased the painting together with Hemy’s supplementary proofs and intended to use them in a prize drawing for the benefit of club funds. The report contained several obvious errors, referring to the artist as “Tom Henry”, describing the game as a cup tie and dating it incorrectly to 1894, but the information concerning the proposed prize drawing is nevertheless significant.
Two years later the picture was discussed at Sunderland AFC’s annual meeting at the Grand Hotel, Bridge Street, on 11 July 1900.
The club’s accounts showed expenditure exceeding revenue by approximately £247, and during the subsequent discussion the Hemy painting was raised. It emerged that the picture had indeed been raffled but, remarkably, nobody had established a claim to it.
One of the most important surviving pieces of Victorian football art was consequently sitting in storage at the premises of a Sunderland furniture dealer.
Club chairman J. P. Henderson suggested that the picture might be presented to the Borough Art Gallery or perhaps placed in the Town Hall. No final decision appears to have been reached.
An extraordinary surviving postcard supplies another piece of the story. It shows Hemy’s enormous painting hanging prominently in the upstairs restaurant or grill room of The Bells, 14 Bridge Street, close to Wearmouth Bridge. The establishment was operated by Jas. Henderson & Sons, connecting it with the family of Sunderland chairman J. P. Henderson.
How the painting moved from storage to The Bells, and precisely who owned it during this period, remain unanswered questions.
At some subsequent point it came into the possession of Sunderland businessman and club director Samuel Wilson. Precisely how Wilson acquired the painting is also unknown.
What happened afterwards is certain.
A photograph of the painting hanging at Roker Park shows a plaque beneath it carrying the inscription:
“Presented to Sunderland AFC by Samuel Wilson Esq., September 4 1930.”
Thirty-five years after Hemy completed his masterpiece, the painting was securely back with Sunderland AFC.
Roker Park and the Stadium of Light
The Hemy became a familiar feature of Roker Park, hanging above the reception area and becoming part of the physical fabric and history of the football club.
Much later it was loaned to Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery, where it remained from around 1990 and underwent conservation work. Following Sunderland’s departure from Roker Park and the opening of the Stadium of Light, the club announced on 15 September 1997 that Hemy’s famous painting was returning to its football home.
There it remains, protected behind glass in the main foyer of the Stadium of Light.
Its journey is extraordinary. A painting commissioned during Sunderland’s great Victorian championship era had been raffled without apparently finding its winner, stored at a furniture dealer, displayed in a Bridge Street public house, disappeared into a period of uncertain ownership, returned to the club through Samuel Wilson, hung at Roker Park, spent time in Sunderland Museum and finally arrived at the Stadium of Light.
That it survived at all is fortunate. That it remains associated with the football club for which it was originally created is even more remarkable.
More Than Sunderland’s Football Painter
Hemy’s career continued for decades after completing the Sunderland picture.
In 1905 he finished an enormous representation of The Battle of Copenhagen. The Exeter and Plymouth Gazettedescribed him as “the celebrated sea painter” and reported that the canvas covered more than ninety square feet. Once again Hemy selected the dramatic instant, portraying Nelson at the famous moment when he placed the telescope to his blind eye and declared that he could not see the signal ordering him to discontinue firing.
Another revealing glimpse of Hemy’s reputation came in 1906. The Shipping World and Herald of Commerce reported that inferior paintings were being fraudulently signed with the names of distinguished artists, including both Thomas and Charles Napier Hemy. Thomas was described as a well-known artist who had attained distinction as a marine painter.
His name, in other words, had acquired sufficient commercial value to be worth forging.
In 1912, the Guernsey Evening Press and Star discussed another Hemy work, Discipline, depicting the loss of the transport Abercrombie Robinson in Table Bay in 1842. The newspaper described the picture as a companion to The Wreck of the Birkenhead, the pair illustrating what it termed British “pluck and grit”. Hemy was also publishing a fine engraving of Discipline.
The article provides another intriguing clue to his biography by indicating that Hemy had previously lived in Guernsey, a period of his life which deserves further investigation.
By this stage Charles Napier Hemy was perhaps the better-known of the two brothers within the British artistic establishment, particularly following his election as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1898. It would nevertheless be entirely wrong to regard Thomas merely as the lesser-known brother of Charles.
Indeed, when The Tablet reported Charles’s Royal Academy honour in 1898, it identified him partly as the brother of Thomas Hemy, painter of The Loss of the Birkenhead.
Thomas Hemy plainly possessed a considerable contemporary reputation of his own.
“He Fixes the Action in the Crucial Moment”
Looking across Hemy’s documented work, one characteristic repeatedly emerges.
And Every Soul Was Saved dealt with rescue from maritime catastrophe. The Loss of the Birkenhead concerned human behaviour amid disaster. His Shannon and Chesapeake composition depicted the critical stage of a naval engagement. The Battle of Copenhagen selected Nelson’s famous moment of defiance, while Discipline again portrayed men confronting disaster at sea.
The Sunderland Daily Echo perhaps described Hemy’s artistic instinct best when discussing his Shannon and Chesapeakework in January 1895:
“He fixes the action in the crucial moment.”
That observation helps us understand his sporting work just as much as his marine paintings.
Football offered Hemy movement, physical effort, uncertainty and human reaction compressed into a matter of seconds. His Sunderland painting does exactly what he repeatedly attempted elsewhere: it takes a fleeting instant of intense activity and makes it permanent.
Seen within the context of his career, therefore, there was nothing particularly unusual about a celebrated marine painter producing one of Victorian football’s greatest paintings. Hemy’s recurring subject was human beings in action at the decisive moment, whether that moment occurred on the deck of a stricken ship, between two fighting warships or on the football field at Newcastle Road.
Thomas Hemy’s Legacy
Thomas Marie Madawaska Hemy eventually settled at Ryde on the Isle of Wight and died in 1937. Even after more than a century, there are parts of his life and career still waiting to be properly reconstructed. His period in Guernsey deserves further investigation, his complete exhibition history can be established more fully, several of his important paintings remain to be traced, and the ownership of the Sunderland canvas between its appearance at The Bells and its eventual possession by Samuel Wilson remains tantalisingly incomplete.
What can already be reconstructed is an extraordinary life.
Hemy was born aboard the Madawaska in 1852, went to sea himself as a boy, returned to art and received serious professional training. He painted shipwrecks, rescues, naval battles and sport, exhibited important works and was described during his lifetime as a distinguished and celebrated artist.
Then, in 1895, Sunderland AFC provided him with one of his greatest subjects.
The chronology is particularly revealing. The match took place on 2 January. Five days later the Sunderland Daily Echowas describing Hemy as an artist who had already “scored fame as a football painter”. On 17 June, the Athletic Newsreported him at work upon the Sunderland commission, explicitly stating that the club were paying him and revealing plans for the completed picture to tour the provinces. Only in September did the Scottish Referee announce that the painting had “just been completed”, containing nearly forty portraits of players and spectators.
Its subsequent survival was anything but inevitable. The picture passed through a prize drawing whose winner apparently never claimed it, storage at a furniture dealer, display in a Sunderland public house and a period of uncertain ownership before Samuel Wilson presented it to Sunderland AFC in 1930. It survived Roker Park, underwent conservation and eventually found its way to the Stadium of Light.
When Thomas Hemy was born aboard the Madawaska in 1852, modern Association football did not exist. By 1895 the game had become important enough for the English League champions to pay an established professional artist to immortalise them on a monumental canvas.
Newcastle Road has disappeared. The players and spectators Hemy painted have long since gone. Much of the industrial landscape surrounding the ground has vanished, and even Roker Park, where the painting subsequently hung, has itself passed into history.
Hemy’s canvas survives them all.
While the picture was still on his easel in June 1895, the Athletic News predicted that if Thomas Hemy did justice to himself and Sunderland AFC:
“he will paint the picture of the year.”
More than 130 years later, they considerably underestimated what he was creating.
