8 - George Price Boyce: A Unique Vision

Summary

AT BINSEY, NEAR OXFORD (Plate 8.1) is a scene bathed in the soft sunlight of a warm September. It picks out the top edges of a wooden post and rail fence, the sunflowers beyond, the roofline of a barn; it illuminates the grass at our feet, turning it yellow against the deeper green of the shadows cast by the trees. The composition is more complex than it first appears. As we look into the watercolour, we notice that there is a further, picket, fence behind the post and rail, and beyond the barn, a stone farmhouse with red brick chimneys. The thatched roof of the local pub, the Perch, is just visible on the right. Pollarded willow trees create a lacy screen against the sky. They are joined by an apple tree, ripe with fruit. As we trace its slanting trunk, we notice a mother and her baby, sitting peacefully on the soft grass. Guinea fowl peck about on the left, small birds sit in the willow branches, pigeons perch on the roofs and around a dovecote, and more birds splash in a birdbath. The contrasts between sunlight and shade are perfect; the scene vibrates with life and interest. Painted in September 1862, At Binsey, near Oxford is a classic statement of the Pre-Raphaelite love for the English countryside. George Price Boyce submitted this beautiful watercolour to the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1863, and it was rejected.

The qualities of this work and its fate at the Royal Academy are typical, both of Boyce's unique artistic vision and of the difficulties he encountered in his career. Sympathetic contemporaries appreciated his poetic feeling, his fidelity to truth, his choice of ‘uncomposed’ and ‘subjectless’ landscapes, his fondness for the contrasting textures and colours of old buildings. By depicting shallow spaces, full of quirky details, he gives the viewer a sense of intimacy. Years of painstaking study in the open air enabled him to create authentic tonal values and effects of sunlight, the kind of achievement we now admire so much in the works of the Impressionists.