Monday, November 30, 2015

WILLIAM DYCE, ARTIST


                                       

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.

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.

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.
Francesca da Rimini

King Lear and the Fool in a Storm


Welsh women knitting
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

Generosity from Westminster

                         

Descent of Venus from Osborne House
                                             
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.


Pegwell Bay, Kent

SMD
30.11.15
Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2015

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