My cherished home-town of Aberdeen in the North-East of
Scotland is the birth-place of several artistic figures – James Gibbs, the
Hanoverian architect, Annie Lennox, the contemporary singer-songwriter of Eurhythmics
fame – and I here celebrate the widely accomplished Victorian painter William
Dyce.
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| Maria Summerhayes as Dyce's Beatrice |
William Dyce (1806
– 64) was the son of an eminent local physician who lectured in medicine at
Aberdeen University. A bright pupil, William won a university prize in 1828 for
an essay on animal magnetism. Expected to enter the medical profession, he was
instead attracted to the graphic arts. He studied at the Royal Academy schools
and in the 1820s made two lengthy visits to Rome and fell under the historic
spell of the Early Florentine School. Returning to Edinburgh, he earned a
living as a portrait painter although his range was much wider.
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| William Dyce |
In 1837 Dyce took an appointment at the Government School of
Design (much later The Royal College of Art). He became an important art
administrator and studied the teaching systems on the continent, especially in
Germany. He is credited with the South Kensington schools system which held
sway for many years. His own painting advanced and he was well recognised as
one of the leading painters in Britain. His subjects were widely spread: many
were biblical, reflecting the spirit of the mid-Victorian age: others were
genre paintings of theatrical scenes, of working people and some fine
landscapes.
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| Francesca da Rimini |
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| King Lear and the Fool in a Storm |
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| Welsh women knitting |
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| A Scottish Boatman |
One of Dyce’s models was Maria Summerhayes who posed as Beatrice (see above). Maria was by night
a lady of the town and was one of Mr Gladstone’s “rescue cases”. With
astonishing indifference to the reputational danger he ran, Gladstone from 1850
– 71 went out on nocturnal expeditions from Downing Street (he was for years
Chancellor of the Exchequer and four times Prime Minister) to try to reform the
many “fallen women” he met on the nearby streets. Gladstone was highly moral
but these ladies became some kind of erotic obsession; he introduced the
attractive Maria to Dyce; while there was no evidence she mended her ways, she
did marry.
From 1845 onwards Dyce was enlisted to help decorate the
Houses of Parliament, rebuilt after the destructive fire in 1834. Dyce was
recognised as an authority on fresco painting. He spent years on decorating the
Robing Room in the House of Lords with scenes from Arthurian legend, at the
time an obscure subject but later popularised by Tennyson in his Idylls of the King
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| Generosity from Westminster |
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| Descent of Venus from Osborne House |
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| The Knights of the Round Table leaving Arthur's Palace |
Many of Dyce’s frescos have deteriorated and are no longer
enjoyable and he did not complete his Westminster commission, dying at work in
1864. He was buried at High Anglican St Leonard’s, Streatham, whose new chancel
he designed. He is commemorated there with an elaborate brass tablet.
Dyce is a little difficult to place artistically. His
Italianate style places him on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelites who almost post-dated him. He is sometimes described as a Scottish realist and there are
certainly echoes of Courbet in his paintings of working people.
He was a polymath in that he included a dissertation on
Gregorian chant in a book he wrote about the Book of Common Prayer; he founded
the Motet Society to foster late-medieval music: he was himself a fine organist
and he composed a Non Nobis Domine, sometimes
still sung in thanksgiving at Royal Academy banquets.
Although his later life was spent in London, Aberdeen Art
Gallery has about 50 of his works. He was a man of profound culture – the Tate
holds what some think his finest painting, Pegwell
Bay, Kent, a landscape which rivals the easel of Turner.
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| Pegwell Bay, Kent SMD 30.11.15 Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2015 |
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