Rebecca, a watercolour; why does she look so very Victorian? Dyce was a Scotsman from Aberdeen who painted in the style of the German Nazarenes; some of his works are quite similar in feeling to those of the Pre-Raphaelites.
A Cottage Interior, etching.
Pegwell Bay, 1858. The figures in the foreground are Dyce's mother, two sisters and son. Two of the women seem to be looking for fossils. A haunting picture, somehow filled with melancholy; it always makes me think of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. Also has personal resonances; as a child, I went for a time to a boarding-school on the Kent chalk-coast which could hardly have changed since before the First World War, and this brings back memories of Sunday afternoon walks on the beach (not this one). And the smell of the cabbage-fields inland from the coast.
