| n |
 |
| Public Domain |
William Dyce shows us eternity in his beautiful Victorian painting of a popular Kentish beach scene
Pegwell
Bay is a shallow inlet located at the estuary of the River Stour in
the British county of Kent, between the seaside towns of Ramsgate and
Sandwich. William Dyce captured its haunting beauty in this wonderful
painting, almost entirely executed in brown tones with touches of
orange, pink and red. Since it has a beach environment, the warm,
human colours chosen suit the individual setting.
A
Universal Sport
The
figures are small but significant, very much in the foreground of the
painting and clearly defined, factors which make them important. In
addition, the activity taking place is the universal sport of
"collecting" - fossils or shells, in this case. Dyce's work
fits in both the landscape and genre categories of painting in the
sense of "a depiction of everyday life". It seems to me
this painting may have come into being for sentimental reasons, maybe
as a fragment of a memory that the artist wished to preserve.
The setting of the painting
is the foil for the activity of these figures. While the ambers and
browns are warm colours, the red cloak of one of the figures stands
out against the other, softer hues, giving the painting almost a 3D
effect. Nobody wears blue - that would have upset the colour balance
as well as the effects of the painting in this true-to-life mode of
representation. The muted lightness of Dyce's shallow, ebbing tide
and the sky suggests that perhaps the sun has recently sunk into the
horizon or, maybe, it is waiting to appear with the onset of dawn.
Detachment
and a Sense of the Eternal
When
viewing the painting, we might want to feel as though we are a part
of the little group collecting their trophies, but, somehow, we are
detached through being "higher". Its composition is
interesting in the way the cliffs almost cut the landscape into a top
and bottom half. It's as though they protect the human figures, while
the jutting promontory leads the eye out to sea and far places.
Pegwell
Bay conveys a sense of the eternal; these layers of cliffs suggest a
long, long timespan while the comet expresses the vastness of the
universe. The preoccupations of the figures are dwarfed by the age
and by the space of creation. This is not a painting to reassure or
suggest any sense of certainty. The only possible sense of
tranquillity in this painting is that of the surrounding universe,
while the human involvement shows no ability to affect the unfolding
of time.
Sources:
-
Dyce, William, Pegwell Bay: A Recollection of October 5th 1858.
-
Gombrich, E.H. Art & Illusion, A study in the psychology of pictorial representation, Phaidon Press, 1960.
Copyright
Janet
Cameron
No comments:
Post a Comment