SO WROTE JOANNA MARY Boyce's obituarist, Alexander Gilchrist. Boyce's artworks confirm that, in her attention to the ‘spirit’ as opposed to the ‘letter’ of early Pre-Raphaelite painting, she saw through the detail to the bigger picture. Indeed, her innate intellectual and creative independence made her more than a ‘young Pre-Raphaelite’. Pioneering scholarship by Pamela Gerrish Nunn successfully reinserted Boyce into art historical conscience in the 1980s and furthered her reputation in the 1990s by giving focus to her connections with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. My reassessment examines the breadth of Boyce's pursuit of her own individual style, which was not fully realised until shortly before her premature death. Indeed, by exploring diverse visual allusions to early Pre-Raphaelite paintings and intersections between Pre-Raphaelitism and emerging Aestheticism in her work, as well as her knowledge of traditional teachings of the British and French academies of art, contemporary French juste milieu style of painting, British and French social realism and historic Venetian painting, it is possible to appreciate her engagement with diverse sources within but also beyond Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Boyce's oeuvre is critical to our understanding of British art movements from the 1850s to early 1860s. In particular, her work reveals the genealogy of a shift towards Aesthetic art in a period when the intersection of separate categories in painting, Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism, became fraught. Indeed, Boyce became one of the earliest, and purest, Aesthetes. Her position in a varied milieu of artists – today associated with Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, academic art and social realism, for instance – can only be appreciated in the light of her immersion in the mid-nineteenth-century British art world as a social scene in which men, and women, networked and came to know one another's art work.