A Grey Day, by Daniel Alexander Williamson (1823-1903). 1865. Watercolour on paper with scraping out. 7 11/16 x 11 1/8 inches (20.1 x 28.3 cm). Collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, accession no. WAG 85. Image courtesy of the Walker Art Gallery, via Art UK, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC).
A Grey Day shows Williamson working in a palette he frequently favoured, making extensive use of the colour purple, particularly in the background hills and sky. It is unusual in that it incorporates figures in the midground rather than being just a pure landscape. The painting is made up of what is basically a series of abstract horizontal bands of differing colours.
Christopher Newall has commented on Williamson's work in watercolours, which he began to use in the mid-1860s, and that was to be the predominant medium for his work for the next twenty years. His initial switch to primarily working in this medium was the result of an accident that prevented him from being able to paint outdoors for a time:
During the 1860s Williamson gradually eliminated detail from his landscapes. Watercolours such as A Grey Day represented the midpoint of his transition from Pre-Raphaelite minuteness to a new abstraction of the forms of nature. The artist experimented with different techniques to achieve more unified and atmospheric compositions. He informed the textures of his watercolours with the vibrant patterns of color, which he then allowed to merge on the damp sheets. This method of puddling colors was derived from the characteristic technique of Liverpudlian Pre-Raphaelite oil painting, in which brilliance of effect was achieved by allowing translucent colors to mingle over a white ground. [123]
Newall further commented: "In his watercolours of the 1860s, such as A Grey Day, he allowed strokes of bright color to become blurred and indefinite, fusing together and overlapping while still wet on the surface of the paper, and then further unified by a system of lines drawn through the moist pigment with the butt end of a brush" (58).
Bibliography
A Grey Day. Art UK. Web. 16 August 2024.
Staley, Allen. "The Liverpool School." Chapter 11 in The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. 138-49.
Wilcox, Scott and Christopher Newall. Victorian Landscape Watercolours. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1992, cat. 59.
Created 16 August 2024