Signed l.r.: Ethelbert White and inscribed with title and dated (on original label to reverse of canvas)

Oil on canvas, 45 by 40 cm

The present work coincides with White's election to membership of the London Group, an association of like-minded artists that had formed from the remnants of the earlier Camden Town Group. In the early 1910s White had been a committed modernist, forming friendships with Mark Gertler and C.R.W.Nevinson, the latter of whom he collaborated with on a major lost futurist work depicting Hampstead Heath Fair and exhibited with the Allied Artists in 1914. Sadly very little survives of White's work in the period before 1919. That which does presents him as a distinct figure in Avant-Garde British painting of the period with his own take on English rural working life. Potato Gathering was also reproduced by the artist as a watercolour in the following year. The subject of working class rural life is central to a social element that creeps into much of his best work. The composition, with two prominent working figures to the centre, anticipates one of his most successfull early paintings Early Spring of 1919 (Government Art Collection (acc.7361)), albeit painted a full three years earlier.