Lot Essay
The landscapes Boyce painted in the Thames Valley in the late 1850s and early 1860s are generally regarded as his greatest artistic achievement.The present drawing epitomises the character and quality of these pictures, which, true to his Pre-Raphelite principles, are at once sternly realistic and intensely poetic. It is typical that he chooses to represent a particular time of day (see the inscription on the back) and selects a superficially unpromising subject; no-one knew better than Boyce the truth of Constable's dictum that 'it is the business of a painter not to contend with nature . . . but to make something out of nothing, in attempting which he must almost of necessity become poetical'. The watercolour also contains some of his favourite motifs: an old red-brick, red-tiled cottage, a screen of rustling trees, a fence and some sluggish water - all studied long and hard as if the artist was seeking to extract from them the last vestige of significance. Typical again is the feeling of surpressed animation conveyed by the deployment of living creatures - the ducks on the pond, the cats on the fence, and the figures 'cut off' as they make their way along the road beyond. There are interesting parallels here with the early watercolours and pen-and-ink drawings of Boyce's freind D.G. Rossetti, who often introduced figures of this kind to create a sense of heightened reality.