Allen Staley, 'William Dyce and Outdoor Naturalism', Burlington Magazine, 1963, pp. 474-75; Marcia Pointon, William Dyce 1806-1864, Oxford, 1979, p. 191, illustrated as pl. 57; William Dyce and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, exhibition catalogue, Aberdeen Art Gallery, 2006, p. 168; Sotheby's, Pictures from the Collection of Sir David and Lady Scott, 2008, pp. 54-55.
Provenance
The artist's studio sale, Christie's, London, 5 May 1865, lot 93 (bought Agnew for £157 10s); James Broughton Dugdale (1855-1927), of Wroxall Abbey, Warwickshire; His sale, Christie's, London, 24 June 1927, lot 131 (bought Agnew for 5 guineas); R. F. Goldschmidt, his sale, Christie's, London, 26 June 1941, lot 25; Christie's, London, 2-3 April 1969, lot 47 (bought McNichol for 400 guineas); Mrs Charlotte Frank, from whom purchased by Sir David Scott , 18 June 1969 for £590
Notes
Dyce seems to have first visited the island of Arran on the west coast of Scotland in 1856, but it was the stay that he made there in the summer of 1859 that was the most productive. The village of Glen Rosa and the valley and burn of the same name that lead down to Brodick Bay are on the east side of the island. The two known watercolours, the present drawing which shows the burn itself and the mountainous interior, and that which is entitled Goat Fell, Isle of Arran (Victoria & Albert Museum, London) which shows essentially the same view towards the north-west but with a different effect of light and a more cursory treatment of the foreground, are meditations on the landscape forms. The present drawing which includes the charming figure of a shepherdess and flock, was perhaps intended for sale although it in fact remained in the artist's possession until his death. Neither of these works was specifically a sketch or study for the more ambitious oil landscape that Dyce painted on the island, known as A Scene in Arran (Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums), which appears to be a view close to the mouth of the river Rosa. William Dyce only occasionally painted pure landscapes, doing so for the most part while on holiday. It was probably the case that in 1859, when he made the present watercolour in Scotland, he did so as a means of recuperation from the strain of work on the frescoes for the Queen's Robing Room at the Palace of Westminster which he had previously been engaged on. The watercolour is a beautiful and representative example of his careful observation of natural subjects, and conveys the sense of delight that the artist felt to find himself in the open landscape of his native country. Dyce was born in Aberdeen. He trained briefly at the Royal Academy Schools in London, and then while still a young man made two visits to Rome, where he made contact with the group of German Catholic artists who had become established there and who were known as the Nazarenes. Back in Scotland, he set up as a portraitist, at the same time interesting himself in art education. In 1837 he moved to London and was appointed Superintendent of the newly established School of Design, a post he held until 1843. From 1844 onwards and until his death twenty years later, much of his time was occupied with fresco decorations for the Palace of Westminster, of which his mural subject Religion: The Vision of Sir Galahad and his Company is among the best known. A man of profound Christian faith and with a belief in the edifying and instructive power of art, he also produced easel paintings of Biblical subjects as well as historical and genre subjects. Although Dyce was more than a decade older than the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was formed in the autumn of 1848, he was looked upon as a friend by the younger and to his perception radically inclined members of the group. It was Dyce who in 1850 persuaded Ruskin to look seriously at the works which the Pre-Raphaelites were exhibiting, leading to his crucial intervention on their behalf with letters to The Times and the publication of his important pamphlet Pre-Raphaelitism (1851). While Dyce's figure subjects can hardly be characterised as Pre-Raphaelite in terms of style or intellectual purpose, his landscapes can legitimately be seen as a product of that movement and in that context. The most complex and didactically layered of these is Pegwell Bay, Kent - A Recollection of October 5th 1858 (Tate). Furthermore, Dyce was deeply interested in geology and the physical characteristics that distinguish different types of landscape, a fascination which he shared with Ruskin and other followers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the later 1850s such as John Brett and John William Inchbold. He must certainly have read volume four of Ruskin's Modern Painters, which was published in 1857 with the by-line 'Of mountain beauty', and it is clear from works such as the present that he had absorbed the Ruskinian principle that the landscape painter must understand the physical characteristics and geographical mechanisms of the topography with which he was faced to make his representations of it useful and of worth. The glaciated landscape of Arran made a great impression upon Dyce in 1859. A year after his visit there, in a letter to his brother-in-law Robert Dundas Cay, he considered the differences between the mountain landscapes of Scotland and north Wales, generally concluding that the Welsh was the wilder and more rugged, and more clearly revealing of its geological history. He made an exception, however, for Glen Rosa, which was 'the only place I have seen in Scotland which reminds me of the very wild parts of North Wales'. In the present drawing Dyce has looked carefully at the mountainous interior of the island, the granite and gabbro rock formations of which had been smoothed and softened by glacial action, although Goat Fell stands forth as a jutting pyramidal peak. The painter has also observed the Triassic sandstones of the foreground, a bar of which is seen on the right side, and the loose shales through which the burn has cut its course and which show as an exposed cliff-face on its banks.
