paragraph on painting and photography
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Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858 ?1858–60 by William Dyce
Painting and Photography
IN FOCUS
Painting and Photography
CLARE A.P. WILLSDON
CONTENTS
Photography was one of the key inventions of the nineteenth century; an extraordinary new technique of prime importance both to art and to science, that promised to transform perceptions of the universe itself, from the stars in its skies to the shells on its shores, and its flora and fauna in all their diversity. Not least, the likeness of human beings and their haunts could now be captured with unprecedented ease and speed. Just a few weeks before the holiday at Ramsgate that inspired Dyce to paint Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858 ?1858–60 (Tate N01407), a correspondent to the Photographic News described the town as nothing less than ‘a paradise of photographers … It appears to be as much the custom for the ladies who are staying here to have their portraits taken as to take a bath’; photographers’ shops ‘abound’.1 While such use of the camera was essentially commercial, complementing Ramsgate’s donkey rides and other tourist delights, it is surely worth noting also that in September 1860, just a few months after Dyce exhibited Pegwell Bay, the photographer Arthur Henry Wall, writing in the same journal, recommended Pegwell as a place where his colleagues might seek the ‘picturesque’; what he called ‘not merely the form, but the very soul of nature, that spiritual beauty, which, although invisible to the coarse-minded, and uneducated, yet speaks audibly to each and to all’, and thereby makes the viewer ‘feel the present Deity’.2
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