Near the Duddon, Cumbria, by Daniel Alexander Williamson (1823-1903). 1864. Oil on panel. 8 1/2 x 14 inches (21.5 x 35.5 cm). Collection of Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead, accession no. BIKGM:1360. Image reproduced here for the purpose of non-commercial research, courtesy of Williamson Art Gallery and Museum via Art UK.
By 1864 Williamson was living in the village of Broughton-in-Furness in Cumbria that was close to the mouth of the Duddon River. The scene portrayed in this painting might be a tributary of the Duddon, possibly the river Lickle, or a pool of standing water in the Duddon valley. Certainly Williamson is known to have explored the Duddon valley in the southern Lake District in the 1860s in company with his friend and fellow painter William Lindsay Windus. Windus's The Baa Lamb: View on a Tributary of the River Duddon, painted this same year of 1864, shows a tributary of the Duddon in its midground.
Christopher Newall has described the view that Williamson chose for his painting:
The view is over an expanse of water, fringed with bushes on the far side, and with an alder on the right, the branches of which brush the water's surface. The way in which Williamson has intended the foreground of the composition to be understood to be very near to the vantage point is indicated by the scale of the group of mallards on the left and the robin perched on the right. At the centre of the composition is a longer view, with mottled yellows and greens of birch trees on the hillside, and beyond the purple crest of a heather clad fell. [Pre-Raphaelite Vision, 231]
Newall also goes on to explain how this painting anticipates, at least in part, the looser manner of his later career after the mid-1860s when he was abandoning precise detail and moving towards a more expressive and intuitive use of colour:
Near the Duddon combines meticulous detail in the foliage and stems of the tree on the right side, with a much softer and more impressionistic effect in the middle distance and the surface of the water. Then it returns to a more precise representation of the forms of trees and fell in the upper part of the composition. These varying degrees of sharpness of focus effectively simulate the very processes of sight as the eye casts over a landscape which consists of such a variety of textures and range of colour, and which is spread within such a complex depth of field. By the second half of the 1860s Williamson gave up meticulous detail in favour of a sketching technique in which colour is allowed to fuse and coalesce. [Pre-Raphaelite Vision, 231]
Allen Staley was the first to note that this work is intermediate between Williamson's early Pre-Raphaelite style and his later more impressionistic approach:
Near the Duddon is signed and dated 1864 and is of considerable interest because it seems to contain two different and conflicting styles. On the right, in the immediate foreground, foliage is painted with leaf-by-leaf Pre-Raphaelite detail. In the background, the distant hills are comparable to the outcrop in Arnside Knot of the previous year. They are precisely outlined and strongly coloured in rusty autumnal purples. The rest of the painting is vague. It shows a stream with ducks in the foreground, but the stream and its surroundings are painted in a thin washy blur of greens and oranges. There is no detail except in the foliage on the right, and it is impossible to tell where the water ends and the shore begins…. The effect is not quite successful; clarity and ambiguity seem too closely juxtaposed. The picture is a transitional work, and the departure from Pre-Raphaelite elaboration in a substantial part of it heralds the redirection of Williamson's art. [Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 149]
Bibliography
Near the Duddon, Cumbria. Art UK. Web. 16 August 2024.
Newall, Christopher. Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. 100.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Staley, Allen and Christopher Newall. Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, cat. 139.
Created 16 August 2024