Not your average vacation picture: Dyce’s family in a scientifically-observed landscape, timestamped with a comet.
William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858, 1858–60, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 88.9 cm (Tate Britain, London). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
0:00:06.7 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re at Tate Britain looking at one of the most important, and one of my favorite, Victorian paintings by William Dyce, Pegwell Bay – a Recollection of October 5th 1858.
0:00:19.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: Pegwell Bay is on the southeast coast of England, and on the coast are these amazing white cliffs of chalk.
0:00:27.7 Dr. Beth Harris: And this was a place where people went on holiday. It was near Ramsgate Sands, another favorite place where Victorians went on holiday.
0:00:36.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: This is the end of the day. The sun has set. The light is changing. You can feel the air is starting to cool. You can hear the water. The tide is out, and the seafloor, seaweed, shells, rocks are all now exposed.
0:00:52.1 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s the last season of the year. It feels like autumn to me when I look at the figures bundled up. On the far right, we see a male figure from behind, likely the artist himself, who seems to be carrying artist’s equipment.
0:01:06.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: He’s looking at the cliffs. He seems to be studying the landscape that he will paint.
0:01:11.4 Dr. Beth Harris: The next figure that we see moving right to left in the foreground is the artist’s wife. Beside that, her two sisters, and on the left foreground, we see one of the artist’s sons. Where we might expect sociability, we have a feeling of alienation.
0:01:27.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: You get that not only from the separation of the four figures in the foreground, plus the artist off to the right, but of the small groups of other people, all isolated in this vast open space.
0:01:39.8 Dr. Beth Harris: You could say, well, what is Dyce looking at here? Cliffs. But it’s those very rocks that were beginning to speak in the 19th century, to speak of the age of the earth, to speak of the passage of time, of erosion.
0:01:57.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: Dyce’s family is out collecting seashells, the former homes of sea creatures. And so there’s this corollary between the recent sea life that’s being collected and the ancient sea life preserved in the fossils within the cliffs. And so there is this relationship between the present and a very distant past, at a time when culture is paying more and more attention to the sciences, specifically the science of geology and the science of astronomy.
0:02:28.2 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s one reason Dyce draws our attention in the title to the date. A comet is visible in the sky. This is Donati’s Comet. The appearance of the comet was of wide interest to the Victorian public.
0:02:42.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: So here we have this family, the artist, and in the background, the figures are going about their daily activities as these celestial and terrestrial processes unfold, sometimes noticed, sometimes not, but with no regard for human activity.
0:02:59.1 Dr. Beth Harris: And the figures, occupied as they are in collecting the seashells, have a sense of being frozen in time. Art historians have speculated that this painting shows Dyce’s interest in early photography. So this amazing moment in the 1850s where decades of scientific development are being brought to the public, where photography is brand new, and within a year or so, Darwin will publish The Origin of Species.
0:03:29.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: The feeling of the canvas is melancholy. It’s quiet. It feels empty. The figures are apart from each other.
0:03:36.7 Dr. Beth Harris: The colors are somber, these browns and oranges with just touches of blue. The way the rocks and the water alternate to bring our eye back to this horizon of clouds and the sun that’s set.
0:03:50.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: I think contributing to the melancholy is the sense that the people here are coming for a few minutes, perhaps for a few hours, and then they leave. Whereas the tides roll in and roll out for eons. The cliffs are here for millions of years. The heavens even longer. There is this contrast that’s being constructed between the transience of human life and the grandeur, the almost unspeakable vastness of the world beyond ourselves.
0:04:18.5 Dr. Beth Harris: We also have Dyce rendering the figures with careful attention to detail so that our eye goes back and forth between the figures and the landscape. The landscape and the sky have an enormity to them.
0:04:31.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: Especially as we look at the figures in the middle ground who are tiny in comparison to the vastness of the panorama. And it does raise this question, with the increasing dominance of science, of man’s understanding of the natural processes of the world and of the heavens, what are we left with? Where does that leave mankind?
0:04:54.0 Dr. Beth Harris: In a way, without a tether. And I think that’s the way that these figures read to me, untethered from one another and untethered even from the earth itself. Just a few years after the painting, Matthew Arnold wrote about “The Sea of Faith” that was once, quote, “at the full and round the earth’s shore.” And then Arnold continued, “but now I only hear its melancholy, long withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night wind.” There’s a remarkable confluence between Dyce’s painting and Arnold’s poem.
0:05:28.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: I find this painting so interesting because it is reshaping the meanings that landscape can hold, in a sense making landscape a modern genre.
0:05:38.6 Dr. Beth Harris: He’s painted not so much a view of Pegwell Bay as, he reminds us, a recollection of a day in October of 1858. And so what we have here is the painting of a memory. And in that way, invests the landscape with human meaning, despite the fact that the cliffs and the sea and the sky with its comet seem to ignore the human figures within it.
Comet (detail), William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858, c. 1858–60, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 88.9 cm (Tate, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A comet in the sky
William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th, 1858 captures an historical moment with remarkable clarity. The painting shows the artist’s wife, his wife’s two sisters, and his son on a lonely stretch of beach at Pegwell Bay, near Ramsgate on the south coast of England. The day is particularly important as one can see Donati’s Comet in the sky. Discovered by Giovanni Donati on June 2, 1858, it was one of the brightest comets to appear during the 19th century. The comet had reached its perihelion, or the point where it is closest to the sun, just a few days prior to the date recorded in the painting.
William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858, c. 1858–60, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 88.9 cm (Tate, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Pre-Raphaelite attention to detail
What is most incredible about the painting, however, is the minute attention to detail. A true Pre-Raphaelite in his approach, Dyce illustrated the intense “truth to nature” that characterizes much of the art of the period. This attention to detail had been championed by the critic John Ruskin in the first volume of his famous Modern Painters, published in 1843. In it, Ruskin advised artists to,
go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.
Many young artists of the day, including John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, were influenced by Ruskin’s ideas and worked to bring as much naturalistic detail as possible into their paintings.
Dyce’s son at left, and his wife’s two sisters (detail), William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858, c. 1858–60, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 88.9 cm (Tate, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Art and science
The observations of nature exhibited by artists like Dyce were also present in another Victorian preoccupation, science, and in particular, the burgeoning study of geology. Charles Lyell had published his Principles of Geology in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, and the entire scientific community was interested in the controversial attempt to reconcile the implications of geological time with the Bible.
Landscape (detail), William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858, c. 1858–60, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 88.9 cm (Tate, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A little more than a year after the day captured in Dyce’s painting, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin was published, opening a floodgate of debate over the issue of religion versus scientific observation. The geologically unstable cliffs along much of England’s south coast were (and still are) a paradise for those in search of fossils, including the famous fossil hunter Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, who is credited with the discovery of the first plesiosaur skeleton. The preserved remnants of geological time evident in places like Pegwell Bay provided the Victorians with much to think about.
Figures collecting shells (detail), William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858, c. 1858–60, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 88.9 cm (Tate, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The light
In Dyce’s painting the angled light of the late afternoon setting sun emphasizes the striations in the towering cliffs above the shore. The detail delineates every variation in the rock. Pools of water, algae covered rocks and stretches of sand exposed by the low tide create opportunity for discovery at every turn. The figures are also extremely detailed. Two of the women in the foreground have their attention focused on collecting the shells left by the receding water, while the other woman and the child stare off in the distance.
William Dyce was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. After studying at the Royal Academy Schools in London and in Rome, Dyce became well known for his paintings, and between 1837 and 1843 was Superintendent of the Government School of Design. He later won a competition to complete fresco paintings for the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament, a project that occupied him almost until his death. However, Dyce was also interested in intellectual and scientific pursuits, for example, writing a prize-winning essay on electro-magnetism in 1830.
Foreground with figures (detail), William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858, c. 1858–60, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 88.9 cm (Tate, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, Kent is a painting that evokes many time-honored themes. The variety of ages in the figures may represent the passage of time, while the setting sun and the autumnal chill in the air serve as a reminder of death. However, this lonely stretch of beach is also a metaphor for many of the new issues that concerned the Victorians, such as the implications of scientific discovery. It is an image as timeless as the tide itself.
