Antique Collecting articles Wyllie Still Making Waves | Page 2

Figure 5 (above) J-Class yachts becalmed off Cowes, Isle of Wight, etching with aquatint,
signed, 6.75 x 13.5ins. Wyllie has added aquatint to this subject and achieved a nearphotographic degree of detail. Each vessel is clearly defined (many other artists might have
made a muddle of the group on the right) and the sea is faultlessly described. This is a more
technically complex etching than fig 2. It made £620 when sold at auction in September 2013.
Figure 6 (left). St. Paul’s: Barges on the South Bank at Bankside, grey washes, signed, 13.5 x
9.5ins. It was not practical to etch a plate in situ and this study appears to be a preparatory
work for a similar print. It shows how cleverly Wyllie worked with gradations of tone – he
‘thought’ like an etcher and drew like an illustrator. This is an affordable original, its lack of
colour notwithstanding. It made £740 at auction in September 2013.

Figure 7. Westminster to St. Paul’s from the top of Westminster Cathedral, etching, signed, 6.75 x
16.75ins. Not merely an extraordinary viewpoint but a technical triumph with remarkable atmosphere.
Wyllie’s panoramas of the city have a dependable popularity but this one was also pleasingly affordable.
It sold at auction for £285 in September 2013.

be the equivalent of about £25,000 today
and there are few (if any) marine painters
in their thirties in 2014 who could ever
consider such a market for their work in
the saleroom.
Artistic versatility
For every collector who thinks an
etching dull, monochromatic or
(incorrectly) judges it to be unworthy of
his attention because it is not a unique
work of art, there are many who regard
such a print as a perfect way to
appreciate an artist at an affordable
point of entry to the market. Wyllie’s
etchings were not a cynically massproduced substitute for his other
originals, but autonomous works of art
in their own right and it is possible to
find some signed examples for barely
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£100 at auction. Upon such a simple
base did Wyllie’s popularity establish
itself and, as many artists discover to
this day, a collector who begins with
the purchase of an etching will shortly
be tempted by a watercolour.
Unusually for an aspiring Royal
Academician, Wyllie was not always at
his best when working in oil. His
biographer and grandson, John Wyllie,
is clear on this: “It is for his
watercolours, etchings and drypoints,
rather than his oil paintings, that we
may expect Wyllie eventually to be
remembered.” Indeed, his early works in
that medium were judged to be
“leathery in tone and texture and heavy
in colour”. The demands of the market
soon sharpened his skills and Wyllie’s
mature oils are superbly atmospheric.

However, the spontaneity of work on
paper appealed to him more and, even
though the production of an etching
was a painstaking procedure, Wyllie
liked its ready transfer of an idea to an
image (fig 6). So enamoured of it was he
that he etched more than 300 plates in
his career and, as his proficiency
increased, he sought ever greater
technical complexity: it seems to be the
medium at which he felt most at ease. If
each copper plate yielded 75-100
saleable impressions, one may say that
Wyllie produced an awesome total of
25,000-30,000 etchings in his lifetime.
Still larger editions were possible from
steel plates supervised by publishers
such as The Art Union of London or
Robert Dunthorne. Perhaps surprisingly,
no catalogue raisonne has ever been
produced of Wyllie’s etched works. He
never dated his prints so a chronology is
vexatious but it may be noted that the
subtleties of his technique improved
measurably as he matured (compare fig
4 with fig 5).
His method
Wyllie’s watercolours reveal a similar
love of spontaneity. His half-brother,
Lionel Percy Smythe (1839-1918), was a
skilled figure painter but he worked
with a laboriously feathered technique.
Wyllie himself preferred to use the
medium almost as a photographer
would: the detail is accurate but
captured quickly and with remarkable
deftness of touch. It takes an artist of

exceptional ability to make something
as fleeting and evanescent as fog on the
Thames look simple to capture on paper
(see fig 7): Wyllie’ skill was not just to
do it but to see that it needed to be
done. A less audacious or less able artist
might have chosen to ignore the
complexity of the challenge altogether.
If Wyllie loved complexity of
technique, then he loved the
challenging viewpoint too. From his
floating studio, he was able to devise
subjects whilst bobbing on the water
but he favoured the high viewpoint
from dry land just as much for it
permitted him to capture a yet more
evocative panorama (see figs 7 and 8).
In addition, he could exercise his
compositional knowledge. His subjects
are neither timid H