2 results
8 - George Price Boyce: A Unique Vision
- Edited by Katie J. T. Herrington, University of York
-
- Book:
- Victorian Artists and their World 1844-1861
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 May 2024, pp 259-282
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
AT BINSEY, NEAR OXFORD (Plate 8.1) is a scene bathed in the soft sunlight of a warm September. It picks out the top edges of a wooden post and rail fence, the sunflowers beyond, the roofline of a barn; it illuminates the grass at our feet, turning it yellow against the deeper green of the shadows cast by the trees. The composition is more complex than it first appears. As we look into the watercolour, we notice that there is a further, picket, fence behind the post and rail, and beyond the barn, a stone farmhouse with red brick chimneys. The thatched roof of the local pub, the Perch, is just visible on the right. Pollarded willow trees create a lacy screen against the sky. They are joined by an apple tree, ripe with fruit. As we trace its slanting trunk, we notice a mother and her baby, sitting peacefully on the soft grass. Guinea fowl peck about on the left, small birds sit in the willow branches, pigeons perch on the roofs and around a dovecote, and more birds splash in a birdbath. The contrasts between sunlight and shade are perfect; the scene vibrates with life and interest. Painted in September 1862, At Binsey, near Oxford is a classic statement of the Pre-Raphaelite love for the English countryside. George Price Boyce submitted this beautiful watercolour to the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1863, and it was rejected.
The qualities of this work and its fate at the Royal Academy are typical, both of Boyce's unique artistic vision and of the difficulties he encountered in his career. Sympathetic contemporaries appreciated his poetic feeling, his fidelity to truth, his choice of ‘uncomposed’ and ‘subjectless’ landscapes, his fondness for the contrasting textures and colours of old buildings. By depicting shallow spaces, full of quirky details, he gives the viewer a sense of intimacy. Years of painstaking study in the open air enabled him to create authentic tonal values and effects of sunlight, the kind of achievement we now admire so much in the works of the Impressionists.
2 - A Breath of Fresh Air: Constable and the Coast
- Edited by Matthew Ingleby, Queen Mary University of London, Matthew P. M Kerr, University of Southampton
-
- Book:
- Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 01 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 16 July 2018, pp 51-68
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Constable is usually thought of as a painter of inland countryside: he is famous for his depictions of canal scenes and meadows, enlivened by country labourers and animals. In contrast, his coastal paintings might be considered as a somewhat peripheral part of his output. Yet, as Anne Lyles has recently pointed out, ‘coastal and marine subjects form an important part … of his full range as a landscape painter’, and it could be argued that they are central to his concerns with light, atmosphere and weather. There were many reasons why Constable was keen on coastal scenery. The coast was an excellent place to study the clouds and the sky, and the movement of waves and wind. It played a key role in the development of his mastery of what he called the ‘chiaroscuro of nature’: those evanescent effects that gave life, contrast and dynamic movement to landscape painting. In addition, coastal scenes engaged many of his deepest beliefs and emotions. In the long nineteenth century, the coast had a threefold significance. Firstly, as the edge of the land and site of frequent shipwrecks, it symbolised birth, death and immortality. Secondly, as boundary of the nation, it needed to be well protected against enemy invasion, which was a very real threat in the early 1800s and haunted the national consciousness for the rest of the century. Thirdly, the coast was a location where invalids, especially consumptives, hoped to be restored to health – a place of fresh breezes, a source of easy breathing and life-giving fecundity.
Constable's sketch Hove Beach (Figure 2.1), with its solitary figure on the beach, gazing out to sea, is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting The Monk by the Sea (1809). Constable was almost certainly unaware of the Friedrich work, but the paintings may have a common origin in English poetry. The German poet Heinrich von Kleist wrote that Friedrich's painting seemed to be dreaming Young's Night Thoughts, and that part of the attraction of gazing at the sea from the shore consisted in the idea that the human soul has come from there and must return. Edward Young's long poem, Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742–5), repeatedly uses the ocean as a metaphor for eternal life. Young imagines the human soul waiting to embark across the sea of death, beyond which there are ‘worlds unknown’.
![](/core/cambridge-core/public/images/lazy-loader.gif)