Alice Boyd

(British, 1823-1897)

The Thames from Cheyne Walk, probably a view from Belle Vue House unframed

Footnotes

Alice Boyd's reputation as an artist has historically been intrinsically linked with that of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet, William Bell Scott (1811-1890). Initially her tutor, Alice became Scott's muse and lover, and it could be said that her own talent as an artist has been subsumed into Scott's formidable talent as a teacher, artist, poet, critic, and a member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. In the Dictionary of Northumbrian Artists, she is described as an 'Amateur landscape and figure painter in oil and watercolour'.¹

Born in 1825 at Penkill Castle, Girvan, Ayrshire into an ancient Scottish family, Alice appears to have followed the path of many 'young ladies' of fashionable society. Ellen Creathorne Clayton suggests that Alice inherited her ability to draw from her mother who was in the habit of constantly sketching from nature. Alice was her mother's constant sketching companion and was considered by Clayton to have 'command over the means of expression, correct drawing and observation of characteristics.....'² and particularly fine at painting birds, beasts and nature, all of which are ably demonstrated in the painting of The Thames from Cheyne Walk.

The Thames from Cheyne Walk, probably a view from Belle Vue House is most likely to be the painting entitled, A Window at Chelsea described in Clayton's English Female Artists after a visit to Bell Scott and Alice's studio at Bellevue House, Chelsea: 'Miss Boyd paints English landscape well, as her large oil picture of Chelsea Reach shows. This she calls 'A Window at Chelsea' because it had as foreground an interior with various accessories. It has not yet been exhibited. She also painted The Thames in Winter and the Chapel of San Clemente, St. Marc's, Venice' (see lot 33).³ Ellen Clayton visited Bellevue House in November 1875 and came on the behest of William Bell Scott who had written requesting her to see Alice's work after he had heard about her forthcoming book. Alice was at Penkill and therefore missed the visit but was kept informed by Scott in a letter where he described Clayton as 'the most singular little chatterbox I ever met.' Scott goes on to say that she was 'delighted with everything and if I will only write what I think I should be said about you and your art she will be better pleased the longer it is.'⁴

The inference that Scott believed in Alice's ability as an artist and took active pleasure in promoting her is further demonstrated by his involvement in the publication of her book A Robin's Christmas Story published by Routledge. While Alice was at Penkill, Scott was involved with the publisher in October 1873 and wrote almost a year later in September 1874 to Alice saying he had picked up three copies of the book to take with him to Scotland.⁵

Alice met William Bell Scott in 1859 when he was forty-eight and head of Newcastle School of Design. Alice and her brother Spencer were living in Tyneside with their wealthy maternal grandfather, William Losh of Newcastle after the death of their mother in 1858. Their father had died in 1827, when both children were in infancy and when Spencer Boyd came of age and took up his mantle of 14th Laird of Penkill, he used money provided by his wealthy grandfather to renovate and modernise Penkill Castle. Although Scott was already married albeit unhappily to Letitia Margery Norquoy, there must have been an immediate attraction between Alice and the artist. From becoming Scott's pupil, she became his muse and modelled for Grace Darling rescuing shipwrecked mariners in the Wallington Hall murals of Northumbrian history begun in 1856 and commissioned by the Trevelyan family. Scott made his first visit to Penkill in 1860 where Spencer had added a great tower with a circular staircase and so the Pre-Raphaelite association with Penkill began and the strange but seemingly happy ménage a trois between Scott, Letitia and Alice commenced. The Scotts spent the summers at Penkill and Alice joined them in London in the winter firstly at Elgin Road, Notting Hill and later at 92 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, living in the same street as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

In 1865, Spencer Boyd died suddenly of heart failure and Alice became the 15th Laird of Penkill. She continued the renovation work at Penkill and added a great banqueting hall which doubled as a picture gallery. In the same year Scott began the tower staircase murals based on the Scottish theme, The King's Quair, a poem written by James I of Scotland. Pre-Raphaelite friends visited and posed as characters from the poem; Christina Rossetti as Lady Jane, Algernon Swinburn and William Rossetti as courtiers of Venus, Alice as Minerva, and Holman Hunt as a castle guard.

Alice converted part of the stable block at Penkill into an artist's studio (see The Studio at Penkill with Alice Boyd seated at an easel painting' Christies, The Property of Elton E Eckstrand, Girvan, Ayrshire, 15 December 1972, lot 172; also Steps to the Studio part of lot 33 in this sale) where she and Scott painted and sketched during the summer months. Under Scott's guidance, Alice's talent as an artist flourished and extended to painting the walls of the turret room at Penkill (referred to as Christina's room) with windswept branches and leaves on a bended tree and in the Laird's bedroom, where she painted the ceiling with vines over trellises with dragonflies and swallows in summer clouds.⁶

Scott's ambition and faith in Alice's ability was part of a reciprocal appreciation with each artist supporting the other's work. Collaborative projects included Alice's illustration of Scott's poem The Witches Ballad where four witches brightly dressed and gaily garlanded walk up a street with baskets on their heads containing domestic fowl (see Christies, 7 November 1997, lot 51, and previously Sotheby's, 15 July 2008, lot 23). She also illustrated Scott's poem, Taliessen the Bard (Christies, The property of Elton E Eckstrand, Girvan, Ayrshire, 15 December 1992, lot 151.). Ellen Clayton wrote effusively that 'The most important picture yet done by Miss Boyd represents Talieson the Bard hearing his deceased master's harp play as it hangs on the wall. This difficult and interesting subject has been poetically treated by the artist, who shows the spirit of the master himself touching the strings. This work was not very well placed at the Dudley, but received favourable attention from the critics.'⁷ Christina Rosetti engaged Alice to illustrate her nursery rhyme book Sing-Song (1872), but Alice's drawings were never used as Christina changed publishers from F. S. Ellis to Routledge who commission Arthur Hughes instead to be the illustrator.

Alice Boyd exhibited one of her most important paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1864, The Incantation of Hervor recovering the Famous Sword of Tirsing and later a watercolour of The Wild Huntsman. She exhibited two paintings at the Royal Academy, Winter on the Thames at Chelsea (1873) and A Scottish Glen (1880). In 1877, Bell Scott wrote a pamphlet criticising the Royal Academy and in consequence both artists began to send work to the Dudley Gallery in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly which became the vanguard of the Aesthetic movement. Alice, according to Marshall Hall in the Dictionary of Northumbrian Artists also exhibited her work in Newcastle at the Arts Association from 1878 and the Bewick Club from 1884. Alice's work was praised by Rosetti who wrote that he believed her 'to possess at least as much power in painting as any woman I know – even the best.'⁸

The present lot is a wistful and enigmatic painting, contrasting the interior colours, clutter and sleeping cat with the grey palette of winter on the Thames. It conveys an image of interior warmth and summer with the bleakness of the winter day outside. It was a theme Alice reworked on several occasions starting with her 1873, Winter on the Thames at Chelsea and seen in a sketch held at the Dick Institute, Ayrshire, (Accession number KIMMG PX/X30) Lindsay Wharfe from Bellevue House, Chelsea illustrating a similarly wintery view of the Thames waterway. The Thames by Moonlight (Christies, Penkill Castle, Girvan, Ayrshire sale, 15 December 1992, lot 146 the property of Elton E Eckstrand) is another variation of Lindsay Wharf in winter with the same tall, spindly, barren tree as seen in the present lot. The painting is also not Alice's first working of a view through a window; nearly ten years previously, she painted View from the Window of Balcony House, Tynemouth 1864 (Christie's, London, 17 June 2014, lot 28). Alice was presumably well versed in the symbolism of her Pre-Raphaelite artist friends and the painting plays with ideas of symbolic contradiction; the window is open to the greyness of winter cold, yet the blue and white striped awning is sheltering the window from a non-existent sun. The butterfly is captured against a pane of glass but could so easily join the freedom of the songbird, on the delicate spiral of a bare clematis branch. The flourishing pot of cyclamen on the table in the window and the Calla Lilies and pink Camellias framing the window suggest the products of a Victorian hot house in stark contrast to the desolate grey riverscape outside. Would a cat curl up and sleep so comfortably in the draft of an open window? The painting could be considered an allegory of Winter and Summer or perhaps more simply, Alice missed the tranquillity of summers at Penkill and the painting is a wistful reminder of painting by the Penkill stable studio with Bell Scott in the sun with the colour of the parading peacocks.

¹Marshall Hall, Dictionary of Northumbrian Artists, 1982.
² Ellen C Clayton, English Female Artists,London, 1876, Vol II, pp. 47-50.
³Clayton
⁴Letter written 30 November; The Letters of Pictor Ignotus, William Bell Scott's letters to Alice Boyd 1859-1884, pp. 311 & 316-7
⁵Ignotus
⁶Audrey Hickey, 'The Pre-Raphaelite Connection with Penkill', The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, Vol 1, No.2, Summer 1993, pp. 1-11.
⁷Clayton
⁸ L M Packer (ed), The Rosetti-Macmillan Letters, Cambridge, 1963

See also:
Don Skemer, William Bell Scott and the Pre-Raphaelite, Princeton University, William E Fredeman Collection of William Bell Scott, Scott Family and Alice Boyd.
Sara Grey, Dictionary of Women Artists, James Clarke & Co Ltd, 2009.