3-028-773 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Turner Medal Prize Landscape of the Royal Academy, 1870. Engraving of a painting. 'The young painter, Mr. Wyllie...has given unmistakable indications of an original gift in art...And these indications have appeared at an unusually early age. He has only just attained eighteen years...The prize picture, entitled "The Sea-Beach After a Storm - Time, Dawn," beyond question represents a scene and an effect witnessed by the artist himself. The...colouring...is limited almost entirely to greys - a slatey hue predominating. The execution...[shows] a tendency to haste and dash, which...must be carefully watched in so young a painter, lest it should degenerate into...slovenliness...The recent elemental strife is plainly enough traceable in that pale, sad, watery sky...in that great bank of swollen and distorted storm-cloud, slowly and sullenly retiring before the altering conditions of the atmosphere, evinced by the few thin lines of vapour...in that still agitated and discoloured sea, spending itself in futile sheets of foam along the sands...in that dismal testimony to the ruthless anger of the storm, the wreck in the offing, and from which the nearer vessel has only escaped, not wholly scathless, by lying at anchor with close-reefed sails'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.