An Important Question was Edwin Harris’s submission to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1884. It is essentially the same subject as A Nautical Question, a smaller watercolour painted the previous year by Harris’s friend and co-pioneer of the Newlyn colony, Walter Langley. In Langley’s painting the old fisherman is repairing a net whereas Harris has his retired fisherman repairing a sail. Both paintings are set in a courtyard and in both a young boy, possibly the same model, holds forth a model boat posing a question to the distracted fisherman. The historic detail in Harris’s painting is particularly interesting. The fisherman is sowing a bolt rope into the distinctive red sail of a Newlyn fishing lugger. The bolt rope was sewn into the edges of the sail to reinforce it. The sail was first furled around the rope. The fisherman sits on a traditional sail maker’s bench. We see fids of various sizes slotted into the tool rack at the end of the bench. Fids were cone-shaped pieces of a hardwood such as lignum vitae, designed to open up holes in the sail cloth or splice ropes together.

An Important Question is a fine example of Harris’s en plein-air realism in Newlyn. As Roger Langley comments in ‘Edwin Harris. An Introduction to His Life and Art’; ‘Trained in Antwerp and having spent time in Brittany, Harris was imbued with the spirit of Bastien Lepage, pursuing the French style of rural realism using the characteristic square brush, and often painting ‘en plein air’.’