Brittan Willis

Brittan Willis painted quiet English country scenes in watercolor. One sheet shows two sturdy oxen ploughing a field in 1865, the animals’ hooves kicking up little clouds of earth while a hedgerow and distant church spire frame the scene. Willis’s work belongs to the mid-19th-century watercolor tradition when artists favored small, detailed studies of rural labor. Their brush catches not just the animals but the damp scent of turned soil and the weight of the yoke. To see more of this kind of close-up field work, tap Oxen ploughing.