Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting, by William Dyce (1806-1864). 1860. Oil on board. 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 inches (35.5 x 50.5 cm). Collection of the National Museum Cardiff, accession no. NMW A 29527. Image courtesy of Sotheby's, London.
In the late summer and early fall of 1860 Dyce spent six weeks with his family on holiday in North Wales where he spent time sketching landscape subjects. It is uncertain whether Dyce began this painting at that time and it is more likely he painted the detailed landscape later that year in his studio following his return to London based on sketches, and possibly even photographs, as Christopher Newall has suggested (120). Related landscape studies are in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Hamburg Kunsthalle. Staley felt that Dyce undertook his late landscape studies "primarily as a diversion from his preoccupation of the 1850s, painting frescoes in the Queen's Robing Room of the Palace of Westminster" (Staley, Romantic Art, 273). Another obvious reason for painting such works was that these late landscapes proved financially successful and helped defray the costs of his vacations. After Dyce returned home from Wales he wrote his brother-in-law Robert Dundas Cay on 20 October 1860: "These trips for change of air always pay. I made £400 by my trip to Ramsgate two years ago and £620 by my last year's trip to Arran, and I hope to make an equally good thing out of the Welsh excursion" (qtd. in Staley 273). It was hoped that such a painting might appeal to a collector with an affection for the Welsh mountain landscapes and its people.
The painting features two Welsh women knitting in a wilderness setting, the older woman sitting on a rock while the younger woman stands. The view in the background appears to look towards Snowdon, which may be the mountain seen in the extreme distance in the centre of the composition. Both women are concentrating on their work rather than chatting and are clad in elaborate traditional Welsh peasant costumes. The distinctive tall beaver hat over a frilled white cap worn by the younger woman would only have been worn on special occasions at this time period, however (Newall 120). The website for the National Museum Cardiff points out: "Both are knitting stockings from scavenged scraps of wool, even though this was an occupation for the home, and one that had largely disappeared by 1860. It is full of contrived contrasts – between age and beauty, and between transitory humans and ancient geological formations – while the sickle moon suggests the cyclical progression of the universe. However, the different elements within the painting were based on careful observation."
The Painting as a Representation of the Irrevocable Progress of Time
Marcia Pointon had been the first to believe that Dyce's Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting was actually a comment on the inescapable progress of time making "no concession to nostalgia, memory, or affection, that is those elements that man uses as a weapon against time … Welsh Landscape is harsh in colour and lacks any sort of pastoral lyricism or subjective evocation of mood. It is as severe a statement as one might expect to find in a painting which draws on the tradition of naturalistic landscape and genre." Pointon goes on to point out that the activity of the two women knitting suggests "the inexorable progress of time. The woman on the right is young and beautiful while the face of the woman on the left is wrinkled and sunken with extreme old age. Yet her age is as nothing compared to the age of the rocks on which she is seated. Above the two Welsh women a sickle moon suggests the cyclical routine of the universe beyond man's control" (174).
The meticulous treatment of the rocky outcrop in the foreground is reminiscent of Dyce's treatment of other geological formations in his landscape compositions of this time period. This coincides with Dyce's scientific interest in geology that he shared with John Ruskin. Dyce had gained knowledge of the subject from reading textbooks, such as Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, first published in three volumes from 1830 to 1833; Lyell's theories were widely accepted by the 1850s. In the letter to Cay, quoted from above, Dyce writes about his fondness for the rugged Welsh landscape:
The only place I have seen in Scotland which reminds me of the very wild parts of North Wales is Glen Rosa in Arran, but there are a hundred such places in Wales … and the mountains are generally more rugged, stony and precipitous, more awful and terrible looking than anything I know of in Scotland…. One great cause of the beauty of the Welsh mountains is, I think, to be found in their geological formation. In Scotland the granite mountains, by the process of disintegration become rounded and their asperities smoothed down… but in Wales, the material being slate rock, it does not crumble like granite into dust or sand but splits and tumbles down in huge flakes which leaves the peaks from which they have fallen as sharp and angular as if they never been acted upon by the atmosphere at all. [qtd. in Pointon 173]
Bibliography
Newall, Christopher. A Great British Collection. The Pictures Collected by Sir David and Lady Scott. London: Sotheby's (November 19, 2008: lot 68, 118-21.
Pictures from the Collection of Sir David and Lady Scott. London: Sotheby's, 2008. 56-57.
Pointon, Marcia. William Dyce 1806-1864, A Critical Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, 173-74 & 194.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973.
_____. Romantic Art in Britain. Paintings and Drawings 1760-1860. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1868, cat. 191, 273.
_____. "William Dyce and Outdoor Naturalism." Burlington Magazine CV, No. 728 (November 1963): 474-75.
Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting. National Museum, Cardiff. Web. 21 December 2024.
Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting. Sotheby's. Web. 21 December 2024.
Created 21 December 2024