Man of Sorrows (or The Man of Sorrows) by William Dyce (1806-1864). c. 1859-60. Oil on Millboard. 131/2 x 191/2 inches (34.3 x 49.5 cm). Collection of National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, accession no. NG 2410. Image reproduced here for the purpose of non-commercial research courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland.
Dyce was interested in geology, and Tim Barringer feels that, as in Pegwell Bay, the artist "deployed a rocky landscape to suggest challenges to a Christian interpretation of creation presented by the new, scientific understanding of geological time" (113). Dyce has, however, painted the figure of Jesus, withdrawn from the world and engaged in spiritual preparation for his coming trials, with evident sympathy.
As often pointed out, the wilderness here is that of the Scottish Highlands rather than than that of the Holy Land. Born in Aberdeen, Dyce may have wanted to make it easier for people to relate to Jesus by depicting him in a familiar British context. It should also be remembered that the painting is one of a pair: it is the New Testament complement to Dyce's David in the Wilderness, showing how Jesus's suffering, as recorded in the fourth chapters of both Matthew and Luke, was prefigured by David's in 1 Samuel, ch.23. This too has a markedly Scottish flavour.
Also noteworthy, as the gallery's own comment points out, is the influence of the Nazarenes, with whose work Dyce was familiar, and with whom he certainly had an affinity. Lionel Lambourne explains this affinity well — "their Christian primitivism appealed to his Scottish pietism" (45). — George P. Landow and Jacqueline Banerjee.
William Dyce and the Tractarian Movement
Dyce exhibited this painting at the Royal Academy in 1860, no. 144, and then a year later at the Liverpool Academy. When it was shown in London it was accompanied in the catalogue by these lines from John Keble's "The Christian Year," this extract coming from the poem "Ash Wednesday." Ash Wednesday marks the first day of Lent and is a holy day for fasting and prayer.
As, when upon His drooping head,
His Father's light was pour'd from heaven,
What time, unsheltered and unfed,
Far in the wild His steps were driven,
High thoughts were with Him in that hour,
Untold, unspeakable on earth.
Dyce had met Keble, one of the leaders of the Tractarians, in 1848, and Emily Hope Thomson feels this painting exemplifies Dyce's allegiance to the principles of the Tractarian Movement:
In using Keble's poetry to accompany the painting Dyce not only affirmed his concurrence with the views of the Tractarian Movement, but also gave further insights into the episode of Christ's life that he was illustrating. Dyce's late landscapes illustrating episodes from the life of Christ are unique in Victorian painting as they depict images of Christ not in the Holy land but in contemporary Scottish and Welsh landscapes. Barringer felt the radical gesture of depicting Christ in a recognizable British landscape may have been the result of Dyce's knowledge of fifteenth-century Italian art where the life of Christ was routinely located in contemporary settings. [114]
Marcia Pointon, however, feels that the choice of placing Christ in a desolate Scottish landscape was deliberate and not an attempt to echo the conceptions of early Italian Renaissance painters which portrayed Biblical scenes as occurring in their native country: "William's deliberate presentation of biblical characters as very human and existing in a physical environment described in concrete detail is essential to his theological interpretation of a subject and is not a means of invoking the ethos of an earlier style of art" (162).
Keble's poem, taken together with Dyce's title, confirms that the subject of this picture is the Temptation of Christ, the forty days and forty nights he spent fasting and in prayer in the wilderness. This episode is found in the fourth chapters of the gospels of both Matthew and Luke and follows Jesus's baptism by John the Baptist. When The Man of Sorrows was shown in Liverpool in 1861 it was accompanied not by Keble's poem, or by the text from Matthew, but by the verses from Luke, Chapter IV, 1-4: "And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God." Dyce's painting is an effective and sympathetic representation of the figure of Christ as a "man of sorrows" as he prays in isolation preparing to resist the temptations offered him by the devil. Tim Barringer felt Dyce's narrative emphasised the spiritual over the physical and associated Christ with passive suffering rather than active agency (113-14).
Dyce may indeed have wanted to make it easier for people to relate to Jesus by depicting him in the Scottish Highlands, rather than Judea in the Holy Land. Unlike many of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape painters who were only concerned in treating geological formations with Pre-Raphaelite detail and precision, Dyce's interest in geology was linked to his deep religious beliefs. As Mary Bennet has pointed out: "His use of landscape can be seen as expressive of the immensity of geological time and the isolation of man, and links his scientific and artistic interests with his religious beliefs" (56). Malcolm Warner felt that in the contemporary context "the survival of Christ in a rocky waste could be seen as a symbol of Christianity surviving an age in which geology seemed to be threatening the authority of the Bible" (186). It should be remembered too that the painting is one of a pair: it is the New Testament complement to Dyce's David in the Wilderness, showing how Jesus's suffering was prefigured by David's in 1 Samuel, 23, which also has a markedly Scottish flavour in its treatment of landscape. Warner is another critic who has pointed out that these two pictures were likely painted as pendants, and share the same typological symbolism: "Since David was considered a kind of forerunner of Christ as well as literally an ancestor, and since the figure in David as a Youth is positioned towards the right and looks in that direction, they relate satisfyingly together both thematically and compositionally" (187).
It is interesting to note that Jason Rosenfeld saw this painting as not only influenced by paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but, in turn, influenced Millais's slightly later work: "Dyce's small biblical landscapes of this period represent a shift in style from more broadly painted natural scenes, with little figures, to works in which the characters play a larger role and the details have a Pre-Raphaelite intensity.… The symbolic naturalism in his religious pictures of this period subsequently bounced back to influence a Pre-Raphaelite: Millais and his scenes for Dalziel's Bible Gallery with their exquisite backgrounds based on Highland scenery" (147). Rosenfeld was actually referring to Millais' illustrations for The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ published by Routledge in London in 1864 with wood engravings after Millais by the Dalziel Brothers.
Contemporary Reviews of the Picture
When Dyce's painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860 it did not draw as much attention as his other two submissions that year, St. John leading home his adopted mother and Pegwell Bay. The critic of The Art Journal, however, praised the effort required by Dyce to achieve the "truth to nature" in the landscape:
It will be understood that the Saviour is here represented in the wilderness. A due examination of the work inspires emotions of envy of the exhaustless patience which, day after day, has been exerted on this composition till its final accomplishment. It is of small size: our Lord is placed towards the left, seated on a rock, with his head, bent forward in a pose profoundly contemplative. There is no effort at brilliancy; the robes of the figure are blue and red, and the rest of the scene is broad and sober. The conditions of the figure having been determined, the painting of it, with all its energy of finish, was a trifle in comparison with the landscape in which it is circumstanced, every visible blade of herbage, and every idle pebble, being duly registered. But the wilderness is not a wilderness of the Holy Land; it is a Scottish waste, such as there are many at the bases of the "slopes" in the shires of Inverness and Aberdeen. Mr. Dyce paints locally with a truth that is loud in pronouncing the whereabouts. [164-65]
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum admired the way the work was painted but wondered why the background was not true to the Holy Land:
No Royal Academician will hold a better place this year than Mr. Dyce, whose three pictures, taken with those he has recently produced, indicate a transitional state of mind. At one time, an ardent follower of the German School, he painted in their conventional and monotonous manner; – gradually creeping out of this (for he is too robust to be trammelled long) he passed to the elaborate representation of detail and study of Nature herself, and for her own sake. The benefit of such a system told upon his works last year, in extreme minuteness and care of execution. Persevering, he has got to a love of colour – the gift of Nature to her loyal votaries – and now again, the result is visible in increased vigour of that quality, as well as in tone and power of rendering human expressions per se. Mr. Dyce is rapidly becoming a realistic artist, – such a one, indeed, that the growing strength of his convictions will soon lead him, when painting a Scriptural subject again, to go to the East, and to do so under all possible advantages. Take The Man of Sorrows (No. 122), representing Christ in the Wilderness: – here is the Redeemer, retreated away from men, single and alone, – not in an Eastern wilderness, but an English waste, with English herbage and wild flowers about, under an English sky. It is true that the omnipresence of the typical idea may be well conveyed by thus treating it, but the individuality of the Saviour is lost thereby; and this, we believe, all people will agree in thinking the most valuable motive, which should be preserved in preference to any other. The picture is completely realistic in all respects, – the costume, although of the conventional "drapery" order, is painted from nature, has the reflections and shadows of fact, the grey lights from the sky upon it, and is faithfully drawn from the model. The background is loyal to the rendering of every leaf, grass-blade or twig, and the sky is full of softened light, as a northern sky is. But why – with all this literalness – not be completely loyal, and paint Christ himself in the land where he really lived? is the question we have to ask. Great is the merit of the work throughout, and the figure of the Saviour excellently designed, – but we must quarrel with the face, which looks "cross" rather than sorrowful (a remnant of German asceticism), and the hands are much too large. [653]
The nature of the landscape was a problem for other critics, too: the Illustrated London News found it both out of keeping and disconcerting: "Mr. Dyce's Man of Sorrows (122) cannot but command respect and admiration for the dignified pathos, the grandeur, and purity of soul depicted in the Saviour; but the surrounding broken landscape is too modern and too English for the spot intended, and the picture, through this defect, must be pronounced out of keeping" (458). The critic of The Saturday Review had another complaint, lamenting that the small size of the composition limited its readability from a distance: The Man of Sorrows (122) is upon too small a scale to be very effective in an Academy exhibition. When seen from a little distance, nothing is discernible except the landscape and the brilliant drapery of the Saviour's figure; and it is only upon a very close inspection that the expression of the countenance can be discovered" (678).
Related Material
- David in the Wilderness
- Pre-Raphaelitism in the High Church: William Dyce's The Man of Sorrows
- Unwilling Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century, by Lionel Gossman (Victorian Web book)
- "Art in a Time of Revolution: Avant-Gardes, Christ, and the End of an Era" (includes another discussion of the painting)
Bibliography
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Bennett, Mary. Artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Circle. The First Generation. London: Lund Humphries, 1988.
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_____. The Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016, 40.
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Rosenfeld, Jason. Pre-Raphaelites Victorian Avant-Garde. London: Tate Publishing, 2012, cat. 108, 147.
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Thomson, Emily Hope. William Dyce and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision. Ed. Jennifer Melville. Aberdeen: Aberdeen City Council, 2006, cat. 49, 174-75.
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Created 27 May 2007
Last modified 20 December 2024