Museum Shefffield's Curator of Visual Art, Louisa Briggs on Sir William Rothenstein’s The Buffer Girls, 1919.

Arguably one of the most popular works currently on show in the Metalwork Collection at the Millennium Gallery is neither silver nor Old Sheffield Plate, but oil on canvas. Sir William Rothenstein’s (1872-1945) arresting painting of two buffer girls is often commented on by visitors to the gallery, who are captivated by both the glimpse into the city’s past and the evocative way the subjects are portrayed – when you look at the faces of the girls you get a vivid sense of who they were and what their personalities were like and can really imagine what their lives in the city might have been like.

The teenage girls in the picture are Maggie Herrick (later Mrs Athorne) on the right and Jane Gill (later Mrs Hallam), on the left, facing the front. They were paid five shillings for each half a day sitting for the portrait, a weeks pay as a buffer girl at the time. They both worked at Walker & Hall, makers of silver, electroplate, Britannia metal goods and cutlery, which was based inHoward Street.

Women were largely responsible for the buffing process, giving a final smooth surface to cutlery and other metal goods. Wheels of leather or cloth were fed with an abrasive mix of oil and sand, which was very dirty work. The neckerchiefs and headscarves worn by the buffer girls would help keep them clean, while the sleeves were short to prevent getting trapped in the machinery.

Sir William Rothenstein was a popular painter of the late 19^th/early 20^th century who was known for his portraits. Sitters ranged from celebrities of the day including Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein, T E Lawrence and Edward VIII, as well as members of the general public. Rothenstein painted two versions of this work. The second one is in Tatham Art Gallery in South Africa and is called Two Sheffield Buffer Girls.

Rothenstein talks about the difficulties he found in being in Steelworks in his memoirs: ‘I began two paintings in the Steelworks of a friend, Samuel Osborne… the noise and heat defeated me’.

The Buffer Girls is an unfinished work – the background is still quite sketchy and the hands and clothing of the women are incomplete. Rothenstein has paid great attention to their faces and manages to capture the personality and dignity of these two women who were working in a hard, dirty and dangerous environment. Rumour has it that the reason that the women’s headscarves and neckerchiefs are red is because their boyfriends were Sheffield United supporters, but how true this is we do not know!

Sir William Rothenstein was Professor of Civic Art at Sheffield University between 1917 and 1926 and Principle of the Royal College of Art in London from 1920-1935. He was a war artist on the Western Front in the First World War and for the Royal Air Force in the Second World War. Rothenstein had a strong connection to Sheffield, and was involved in designing the Education Settlement in Shipton Streetin 1918. Rothenstein’s son John was the first Director of Graves Gallery and we have 19 paintings and drawings by him in the collection.

It’s wonderful to have the The Buffer Girls in the city’s visual art collection and it’s particularly appropriate that such an iconicSheffield painting was painted by an artist who had such strong links with the city.

Image: Sir William Rothenstein, The Buffer Girls, 1919 (detail). Courtesy Bridgeman Art Library.

Oct 26 2011