Wyllie Etching

TG sends me a lovely etching of Scarborough Harbor in England circa 1920 at 13”x5” and asks if I know the artist. I do; the artist is a maritime painter of Britain’s ships, ports, and rivers in the late 19th early 20th century, William Lionel Wyllie (1851-1931), who was known for his oils, etchings, and watercolors. By 1907, Wyllie was a leading maritime artist. His etchings are delicate and atmospheric. I bought an etching of his for my son, an image of Clydebank in Scotland, a port, along with Scarborough, which was one of the leading shipbuilding locations in the world in the 19th century. My son Laughlin’s great-great-grandfather was a shipbuilder in the Clydebank shipyard.

I discovered that between 1785-1810, 209 ships were built at Scarborough Harbor, with a tonnage of 35,683 tons. Fifteen huge ships a year were launched, using cradles on an inclined plane at low tide. At this time, 1,500 seamen, 500 of whom were working for the East India Company, belonged to the port. The exports were corn, butter, hams, bacon, and salt fish, while the imports were coal, lumber, hemp, flax, iron, brandy, and wine. In 1849 a company was formed to repair huge ships there, and a floating dock, which can be seen in the etching, was built that was capable of taking ships up to 300 tons.

Wyllie fell in love with the sea, ships, and boats at an early age, and, as he came from a family of artists, painted what he loved. At 15 years old he was enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools in London with famous teachers John Everett Millais, Frederic Leighton, and Edwin Henry Landseer. In 1869 at age 18 his first painting was admitted into the Royal Academy. In that year he also won the prestigious Turner Gold Medal with his landscape Dawn After a Storm. His favorite artist was marine and landscape artist and innovator J. M. W. Turner, about whom he authored a book in 1905, hence Wyllie’s lifelong interest in atmosphere and water.

He loved boats and the sea, and not only sketched and painted boats but owned many and designed a few; he was commodore of many a British yacht club. His first boat was Ladybird, which was essentially a floating studio on which he invited fellow painters on expeditions up the River Thames from 1880-1885. These resultant watercolors of the River Thames showed life in many wharves and in many harbors. The subject matter was vast: In the 1880s London was the premier port and the largest center of commerce in the British Empire. Because Wyllie needed funds to support his travels on shipping and cruise vessels, he painted ships’ portraits for sea captains.

In the 1880s he worked for the magazine Graphic as a documentarian illustrator, work different from an artist’s work. As an illustrator, he had to get all the details right, including no imaginative flights of fancy, and he had to render all work in black and white. This use of monochrome, after his long career previously as a watercolorist, changed the way he saw, and he began to etch in 1883. Drypoint engraving, which uses a diamond pointed needle on a metal plate, calls for a reversed image to be created on the metal, which is then inked and pressed, as we see in Scarborough Harbor. Commercial printwork comprised much of his career for 50 years thereafter. He also etched – and whereas etching is mainly a chemical process, engraving is a physical process. (With an etching, the image is created on a wax-coated metal plate with a burr; once the metal is chemically bathed, the lines of the image appear.) 

He etched images of the River Thames, London ports, Scottish and Yorkshire ports, yachting, the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy, WWI vessels, sea battles, and images of a new pastime – cruising – for the very wealthy.

In 1914 Wyllie was commissioned by the Royal Navy to document WWI on the sea: He painted accurate battle scenes from firsthand observations. His son Roger was on the front as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, sending him images. 

As the final salvo of his long career, he painted a 42-foot panorama of the Battle of Trafalgar 1805 between the British Navy and the French and Spanish Navies, unveiled at the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth by King George V in 1930. Wyllie died in 1931 and was given full naval honors. His body was rowed up Portsmouth Harbor in a Naval cutter past battle ships with the colors dipped. GH’s etching is worth $300.