William Dyce
British
(1806-1864)
Click Image to Enlarge
Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Study of a Distant Range of Mountains, 1860
Watercolors over pencil
22.9 x 35.1 cm
WA 1943.87


Perhaps no other artist in nineteenth century Britain (aside from John Ruskin, with whom he quarreled often) can claim such a wide breadth of interests and activities as William Dyce. Born in 1806 to a lecturer of medicine at Marischal College in Aberdeen, Scotland, Dyce discovered art in his late teenage years and in pursuing it defied familial expectations to take Anglican orders at Oxford.  After being encouraged by the Sir Thomas Lawrence, Dyce entered the Royal Academy in 1825.  However within a few months he left for Rome in his first of many unexpected and independent moves he would make throughout his career.  An educationalist, artistic and scientific theorist, scholar, designer, painter, and musicologist, he worked in multiple graphic and literary mediums with much of his work inspired by a strong Anglo-Catholic belief in public service.  Called the ‘British Nazarene’, and listed as a precursor and follower of the Pre-Raphaelites, Dyce criticized both groups, yet shared many affinities with them.  Jon Whiteley has noted that part of William Dyce’s appeal is that he “paints a thousand strokes and never bores you”.  Certainly this is true of the 1860 work Study of a Distant Range of Mountains.  Made four years before the artist’s death in 1864 it is a wonderful example of Dyce’s style and offers a profundity in its possible meanings.

After years of contention over family supplements to his precarious livelihood, by 1860 Dyce had finally achieved financial stability.  Having helped to start the fresco revival in England in the early 1840s he had enjoyed multiple on-going public commissions.  Though fully occupied with these projects Dyce still painted small easel works, usually commissioned by family members, occasionally using his family vacations to execute sketches and preparatory works for them.  Study of a Distant Range of Mountains was made while the Dyce family was on vacation in Wales, a popular destination at the time for landscapists, professional and amateur.  The center-right mountain peak depicted is Tryfan, Snowdonia (elevation 3002 ft.) and is one of two renderings Dyce completed of this site, which he found ‘very fearful to look at’[i]

The low vanishing point of the drawing belies the size of these fearful mountains and only through gradual recognition of the vast distance represented does the viewer realize their immensity.  This disconcerting effect of manipulating geographical distance had been employed before by Dyce, notably in his most celebrated work Pegwell Bay (1859) where it was used, as it is here, to heighten the solitary drama of nature.  Dyce believed in the moral and theological implications of landscape and wished it to reflect moral sentiments rather than flatter the senses.[ii]  In keeping with those aims Study of a Distant Range of Mountains compositionally embeds the mountains and hills to impart a message of mortality. 

The foreground is unusually worked for Dyce with copious amounts of pigment repeatedly added to multiple washes.  Explicit brushwork and scratched shrubbery illustrate both the tools of the artist and the barest ecological minutia in a way that most of his other drawings do not.  Previous landscapes by Dyce had used gradual build up of tones that lessened the evidence of the artist’s hand while highlighting intricate detail.  The change here may be due to the psychological agitation that the mountains produced in him, also suggested by the intrusion of the mountains throughout the picture making their presence overwhelming.  Lushness saturates the fertile green hills that gently roll into one another above a dark pool.  But within the warm tones of the grass colder tones of gray seep in from the mountains, pulling the foreground and background together, slowing the recognition of the distance between them.

The mountains themselves are rendered in a more controlled manner with exacting brushwork in contrast to the hills of the foreground.  The sky is done in minimal, diluted wash that augments the opposition between ethereal and solidity.  Dyce preferred Welsh mountains for the splits and sharp angles produced by the slate rock in comparison with the crumbling disintegration of mountains in Scotland.[iii]  This was due to the stark presence of time that such conditions revealed.  For Dyce the jagged rocks demonstrated the thesis of revolutionary geologist Charles Lyell’s Elements of Geology (1838) that the greatest geological changes were gradual and ongoing rather than sudden[iv].  Though the slate rocks of the Welsh mountains were certainly more dramatic than the consistent crumbling of Scottish mountains, such cuts documented the process of their formation.  Illustrating of the erosion of time combined with the mountain’s intrusion into the shrubbery lets the berth between the plants’ and the mountain’s temporality symbolizes the fleeting mortality of man in relation to the divine. 

Supporting such a reading is the unfinished area at the bottom of the paper, which allies the work to the scientific inquiry of Ruskin’s nature drawings[v].  Dyce’s second view of Snowdonia had been completely finished, as had almost all his previous watercolor landscapes, which makes this feature a deliberate change from his normal pictorial solutions. Dyce had read Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1833-1860) in which geology and science were advocated for the basis of landscape painting as a method to achieve awareness of the divine.  Study of a Distant Range of Mountains’s incomplete foreground heightens the aspect of study, which is central to both geology and science.   But more important to Dyce was the belief of Ruskin in a “moral landscape” that

although…no definite religious sentiment mingled with it, there is a continual perception of Sanctity in the whole of nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest;- an instinctive awe, mixed with delight; an indefinable thrill, such as we sometimes imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit.[vi]

Thus the unfinished foreground fulfills the empirical demands of science, while combining the needs of a “moral landscape” to magnifying the presence of the divine.

But like all great intellectuals, William Dyce was continually modifying his beliefs. He had condemned sensualist painting as immoral but painted a work based on the life of the greatest sensualist painter in Titian Preparing for his First essay in Color only three years earlier.  And the unique effects that the mountains held over him, while near the end of his life, provide a temptation to imagine the fragile mortality symbolized as that of the artist.  However these are probably wrong paths to pursue.  Dyce’s most consistent concern lay in instruction, of educating rather than ruminating.  Sitting in that field in Whales it was the viewer and the concern for his or her mortality in relation to God that most occupied his mind.


[i] Quoted in Marcia Pointon, William Dyce a Critical Biography pp.174

[ii] Lindsay Errington, William Dyce’s Views on Christian Art pp.491

[iii] D.P. XL, W. Dyce to R.D. Cay, 20 Oct. 1860

[iv] Marcia Pointon, William Dyce: A Critical Biography pp.172

[v] David B. Brown, The Pre-Raphaelites in Oxford pp.145

[vi] John Ruskin, Modern Painters vol. III pp.365


Gregory Tentler

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