William Dyce

Published on Sunday 10 September 2006 10:10

Aberdeen Art Gallery

OPEN any book on Victorian art and you will find the name of William Dyce. Generally he will be in the chapter on the Pre-Raphaelites and more often than not described as a "follower" of that influential movement which so polarised the Victorian art world with its dictum of "truth to nature". But Dyce was more than a follower. He was a bold, independent trailblazer and now, in Dyce's home town of Aberdeen, a stunning bicentennial retrospective sets the record straight about this misunderstood artist, reminding us, in these days of the "Glasgow miracle", that not all worthwhile art in Scotland is generated from the Central Belt.

Dyce was born in Aberdeen in 1806 and trained as a doctor before reading for the church. However, in 1825, he decided to become an artist and entered the Royal Academy schools in London. His earliest work, of which little survives, owes much to Titian and Rembrandt, and this show provides a rare opportunity to see it at first hand. By the late 1820s Dyce was established in Edinburgh as the city's premier portraitist and heir to Raeburn, with a specific debt to Wilkie, as seen in his John Knox Dispensing The Sacrament.

But it was Italy that shaped his art. Travelling there throughout the 1820s and Thirties, he was enraptured by the work of the Quattrocento masters and it was in Rome that he encountered the work of the expatriate German Nazarene painters, his elders by a few years, and embraced their aim to emulate early Italian art. In particular, under the influence of one of their leaders, Friedrich Overbeck, Dyce began to emulate such old masters as Fra Angelico, Perugino and the pre-Michelangelesque Raphael.

Undoubtedly it was Dyce's affinity with the Nazarenes that gained him a place among the artists commissioned by Prince Albert to decorate the newly-built House of Lords in the 1840s. Apart from several studies for the Westminster frescoes, the closest finished work in the show to their ascetic style is an exquisite 1845 Madonna And Child, right, painted on plaster.

But, while Dyce's archaic manner might have appealed to the Prince Consort, it did not find critical favour. John Ruskin spoke out against it and it seems likely that it was Ruskin's enmity that precipitated Dyce's move from this style to an archetypal Pre-Raphaelitism. This is ironic for it had been Dyce who had been instrumental in making Ruskin the movement's champion, famously leading him by the arm towards Millais' seminal Christ In The House Of His Parents at the 1850 Royal Academy exhibition. Ruskin was captivated and the rest is history.

In this respect certainly, far from being a mere Pre-Raphaelite follower, Dyce was an early apologist for the movement. But more importantly, in stylistic terms too, as this exhibition proves, he presages the Pre-Raphaelite achievement by 20 years. As much is abundantly clear in the passages of landscape and natural detail in such paintings of the 1830s as Shirrapburn Loch, Westburn and Lamentation.

It is undeniable that images such as Christ As The Man Of Sorrows, painted in 1860, and Titian Preparing To Make His First Essay In Colouring, embrace central Pre-Raphaelite tenets. Yet for all their Ruskinian verisimilitude, they are not strictly Pre-Raphaelite. In the former, rather than the prescribed Middle Eastern setting, Dyce places Jesus in a specifically Highland wilderness. He is always breaking the rules and is refreshingly impossible to categorise. He was neither Pre-Raphaelite, nor Nazarene, nor can he be pigeonholed by genre. He combines landscape with religious painting, the historical with the contemporary and in his finest works employs his abundant intellect to create an experience best described as profoundly philosophical.

This does not, however, imply heaviness. This show is among other things, a wonderful opportunity to take in the sublime beauty and luminosity of Dyce's early works. In particular, the exquisite Madonna And Child, on loan from the Tate, is unique among British paintings of the period: a complex blend of the archaic Italian with French and German Romanticism.

Saying that, though, there is no doubt in my mind that Dyce's greatest work dates from the latter part of his career. Pegwell Bay, Kent - A Recollection Of October 5th 1858, completed four years before Dyce's death, is one of the most remarkable works in British art, and interestingly has much in common with Adam Elsheimer's moonlit scenes currently on view in Edinburgh. It is a pity that Pegwell Bay is not here, but hanging instead in the Tate, and we must content ourselves with a study.

But even here and in reproduction its importance is manifest. At first sight it is no more than an image of the artist's family at play on a beach. But look more closely. Notice the care with which Dyce addresses the rock formations and the presence in the sky of a comet and you begin to see its significance. This is not merely a 'true' landscape, but an excursion into moral philosophy. Like his contemporaneous painting of the great 17th-century philosopher-poet George Herbert, which concludes this unmissable show, it is a visual manifestation of Dyce's particular brand of Christian humanism. A means of reconciling scientific discovery with deep faith through demonstrating to his audience through art the place of mankind in the universe and the overwhelming mystery of nature.

Until November 11