Robert Sargent Austin

Three peasant women haul wood on their backs past a roadside shrine. Such images of poor rural workers, like The Wood Carriers, have been a staple of Western Art, ever since the Limbourg Brothers decorated their illuminated manuscripts with shepherds and farmers at the end of the Middle Ages. But this is no ordinary genre piece. With a few deft compositional touches, English Artist Robert Sargent Austin transforms what might have been a standard scene of rural life into a spiritual tone poem, giving deeper meaning to the theme of wood-carrying. The heavy-laden peasant women are not front and center in this engraving. What you see, first, is the rough-hewn, roadside crucifix, its sheltering roof oddly angled toward the viewer, as it thrusts spear-like into a white void. The bent and twisted torso of Christ on the Cross is echoed in the stooped forms of the wood carriers, reminding us that Jesus, also, carried a burden of wood on his shoulders just like these peasant women, who struggle toward the rocky summit of their daily Golgotha. Perhaps, they ponder the meaning of Christ’s words in Matthew 11:28-30 (KJV): “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

From The Holy Bible in the King James Version [KJV] (Thomas Nelson: 1976)