Westmorland Hills, Cumbria [Westmorland Hills – Effect Before Rain], by Daniel Alexander Williamson (1823-1903). Oil on panel. 9 1/16 x 15 3/16 inches (23 x 38.5 cm). Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead. On loan from a private collection. Accession no. BIKGM:L207. Image reproduced here for the purpose of non-commercial research, courtesy of Williamson Art Gallery and Museum via Art UK.
When this small oil was exhibited at the exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion in Liverpool in 2016 Christopher Newall noted its Pre-Raphaelite influences: "In 1860 Williamson settled in Wharton-in-Carnforth, North Lancashire, and painted a group of small landscapes with intense jewel-like colour, deeply indebted to Pre-Raphaelitism with its intense fidelity to nature. This undated work could date from around that period" (91). This painting is also known as Westmorland Hills – Effect Before Rain showing that Williamson intended it to show the atmospheric effects in the sky he observed just prior to the onset of rain. The hills are splendid in colour and painted in the purplish-blue hues beloved by Williamson.
Harry Marillier had these comments about Williamson's Pre-Raphaelite landscapes of the early 1860s: "He executed a number of small works in the most approved manner of that school, chiefly realistic studies of limestone boulders, with sheep hardly to be detected against the grey stones, brilliant colouring added to the picture in the form of gorse, heather, and distant hills of as intense a blue as was ever conceived by Mr Holman Hunt" (237-38).
Although the subject is ostensibly the Westmorland Hills of North Lancashire seen in the middle ground, the painting is dominated by the series of large limestone boulders seen in the foreground. Such large limestone rocky outcrops also figure prominently in other paintings by Williamson from this period, such as The Startled Rabbit and Morecambe Bay from Warton Crag, both of 1862. The rocks and the surrounding vegetation are treated in extreme detail with Pre-Raphaelite precision. A young man in a blue smock in the left foreground is gathering dead bracken to bind into a bale. Dried bracken had many uses in the nineteenth century. It was used for animal litter, for thatch, and as mulch. After burning the ash was used in soap manufacture and glass making.
Bibliography
19th Century and British Impressionist Art. London: Bonhams (31 March 2021): lot 28.
Marillier, Harry C. The Liverpool School of Painters. London: John Murray, 1904. 237-240.
Newall, Christopher. Pre-Raphaelites Beauty and Rebellion. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Westmorland Hills, Cumbria [Westmorland Hills – Effect Before Rain]. Art UK. Web. 16 August 2024.
Created 16 August 2024