William Dyce
born Sept. 19, 1806, Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scot.
died Feb. 14, 1864, London
Scottish painter and pioneer of state art education in Great
Britain.
Dyce studied at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, and the Royal
Academy schools, London. One of the first British students of early
Italian Renaissance painting, he visited Italy in 1825 and 1827–28,
meeting in Rome a group of young German painters, the Nazarenes. He
exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, being elected associate of
the Royal Academy in 1844 and academician in 1848. In 1830–37 in
Edinburgh he made portraits for a livelihood. But his Italian
studies led him to anticipate the English Pre-Raphaelites in the
quest for a primitivist simplicity and repose in his painting that
harked back to the art of 14th- and 15th-centuryItaly.
At the time of his death Dyce was engaged in painting a series of
frescoes for the Houses of Parliament, of which remain the “Baptism
of Ethelbert” in the House of Lords (1846) and the “King Arthur”
series (1848; unfinished) in the queen's robing room.