RICHARD MARTIN

GALLERY • FRAMING  • RESTORATION

19-23 Stoke Road
Gosport
Hampshire
PO12 1LS

Tel: 02392 520642

info@richardmartingallery.co.uk

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The Richard Martin Gallery have thirty years experience of buying and selling
works by William Lionel Wyllie.

Please do contact us for an appraisal should you have a item by Wyllie that you are considering selling.

William Lionel Wyllie RA (1851-1931)

William Lionel Wyllie is regarded as Britain’s premier marine artist of the later Victorian and early twentieth-century era. His was a full life and his large output stands testament to a highly driven and motivated artist, highly proficient in both oil and watercolour although perhaps best known for etchings of stunning atmospheric detail.

He was an enthusiastic student of the sea and a keen sailor himself, reflected in the accuracy with which he depicted the various vessels in his work be they long retired men-of-war from the age of Nelson, his favourite Thames barges, or later the vessels of the Grand Fleet during World War One. This accuracy was combined with a lightness of touch, the ability to capture the beauty and wildness of the sea and the light upon it that suggested the inspiration of Turner, the artist whom Wyllie held in highest regard.

After his marriage Wyllie lived for many years on the Medway in Kent and became the foremost chronicler of the shipping of the lower Thames and Medway during the 1880s and 1890s. He converted the hull of his yawl, Ladybird, into a floating studio and would often spend weeks aboard on voyages to France or the Dutch canals.

He moved to Tower House in Old Portsmouth in 1906, which still stands prominently next to the Round Tower at the entrance to the harbour, and his grandson John writes in his excellent monograph that during a storm the ‘South-Westerly gales blew the waves green over the windows on the ground floor and sent spray up three stories to drum on the windows upstairs’. John even remembers Wyllie in the studio painting barefoot with his trousers rolled-up, the raging sea just feet away.

Wyllie was a prolific printmaker and his etchings are notable by their vivid contrast of deeply-bitten blacks and bright whites. He would later use drypoint more and more, his technique being so good it is sometimes indistinguishable from his etching. Most of his etchings were published by his friend, the art dealer Robert Dunthorne, and those that we sell are all original signed etchings from the plates worked by Wyllie.

They record a busy maritime nation which at the time commanded a vast global empire, the vessels ever changing as sail continued to give way to steam, when docksides were still a forest of masts and lives at sea were often hard, although the fruits of industry can also be observed in the pleasure craft and racing yachts.