Morecambe Bay from Warton Crag, by Daniel Alexander Williamson (1823-1903). 1862. Oil on board. 9 7/8 x 13 1/4 inches (25.1 x 33.5 cm). Collection: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, accession no. WAG 781. Image kindly made available via Art UK under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC).
Williamson exhibited this painting at the Liverpool Academy in 1862. In 1861 he had moved back to Lancashire from London, initially settling near Warton-in-Carnforth. Warton Crag, located nearby, was to provide subject matter for many of his paintings. In this picture he shows three sheep in the right foreground in close proximity to a series of meticulously rendered limestone carboniferous boulders. The midground is composed of orange-brown bracken, suggesting the season is autumn, and green shrubs with a row of coniferous trees behind them. In the distance is Morcambe Bay with an overcast sky overhead.
Christopher Newall felt this particular work had been influenced by William Holman Hunt: "For a period in the 1860s Williamson's work showed the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites with brilliant colours and a minute, although slightly thicker impasto technique. In this painting, the intense glowing colour, the detailed depiction of the sheep and the limestone rocks appear to be influenced by Holman Hunt's painting Strayed Sheep" (93).
Allen Staley was the first to make this connection, considering this picture to be
a pastiche of Holman Hunt's Strayed Sheep of a decade earlier. The subject is similar and the prismatic green and violet of the sea are based on Hunt's colours. The luminosity even surpasses Strayed Sheep, but, while Hunt's colour seems to be the result of attempting to gain greater naturalism, Williamson's appears to have brightness for brightness's sake. Compared to Strayed Sheep, Williamson's painting is relatively abstract. The trees in the distance are a vivid purple that cannot be explained naturalistically, and the other colours are heightened correspondingly. Similarly, Williamson's touch is Pre-Raphaelite in origin, but is employed to embroider a decorative filigree out of natural materials rather than to describe the natural world with minute precision. Drawing is relatively unimportant; the foreground rocks lack both linear detail and three-dimensional volume. [148]
Bibliography
Artists of Victorian England. Jacksonville, Florida: Cummer Gallery of Art, 1965, cat. 59, 13.
Milner, Frank. The Pre-Raphaelites: Pre-Raphaelite Paintings & Drawings in Merseyside Collections. Liverpool: The Bluecoat Press, 1998. 132-33.
Morecambe Bay from Warton Crag. Art UK. Web. 16 August 2024.
Newall, Christopher. Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Created 16 August 2024