Wensleydale, by Daniel Alexander Williamson (1823-1903). 1887. Oil on board. 22 3/4 x 32 1/4 inches (57.7 x 82 cm). Collection: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, accession no. WAG 1344. Image courtesy of Walker Art Gallery via Art UK under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC).
This is one of Williamson's late works in oil where he has totally abandoned his earlier Pre-Raphaelite precision for a hazy, more impressionistic approach. Not surprisingly, as he developed a looser style of painting, his canvases increased in size. Harry Marillier has reported that, after Williamson had stopped doing oil paintings in favour of watercolour for a period of twenty years, when he started doing them again "he found it more difficult to manage than if he had never worked in it before" (238).
Allen Staley did not view this change in his style favourably:
"After 1864 Williamson gave up painting in oil for some twenty years. His later oils are totally unlike those of the early 1860s, all tending to be misty visions. Although for an admirer like Smith [James Smith] they constituted Williamson's best work, they are nebulous to the point of being vacuous. In the intervening years Williamson worked entirely in watercolor. A large number of these are in Liverpool, and several are dated 1865. None of them has any similarity to his paintings of the previous years…. Without Pre-Raphaelite discipline, Williamsons later work bogged down in a hazy dream world, which seems slack and empty compared to the taut richness of his best pictures. The Pre-Raphaelite influence alone does not explain the high quality of Williamson's work of the early 1860s. But, whatever it was that made Williamson a poetic artist during the years he lived at Wharton-in-Carnforth, as soon as he abandoned Pre-Raphaelitism his art rapidly deteriorated. [149]
The painting appears to show an early autumn morning in Wensleydale, a valley situated in North Yorkshire. The river seen in the left foreground is the Ure. The river valley is portrayed surrounded by trees in a misty atmosphere and with a densely clouded sky. The landscape practically dissolves in the mist. Sheep are seen grazing in the right foreground. The hills in the middle ground are part of the North Pennine chain. In this particular work Williamson seems much more influenced by J. M. W. Turner and certainly not by the Pre-Raphaelites.
Bibliography
Marillier, Harry C. The Liverpool School of Painters. London: John Murray, 1904.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Wensleydale. Art UK. Web. 16 August 2024.
Created 16 August 2024