Design for the reverse of the Turner medal, 1858

William Dyce RA (1806 - 1864)

RA Collection: Art

This is Dyce's finished design for the reverse of the Royal Academy Turner medal. The artist primed the cream paper with grey paint and drew the outline in black and white chalk over pencil. The dark outlines and subtle shading indicate his understanding of the low-relief medium in which the finished medal would be executed.

The prize for landscape painting in memory of J. M. W. Turner was established by the Academy in 1857, following the terms of the artist's will. The sculptor E. H. Baily was originally chosen to make the medal but Council did not approve the model he produced. At this point William Dyce seems to have taken the initiative to put forward an alternative design for a medallion drawing of the head of Turner. This being apparently accepted, all Academicians were then invited to produce a design for the reverse of the medal with the suggestion that it should be a 'composition having reference to the purpose of the premium'. However, only one drawing was received and Mulready, Dyce and Maclise were subsequently invited to submit designs. After a meeting of the General Assembly to choose the artist by ballot, Maclise's design was selected and was struck by Leonard Wyon in 1859 (see 08/2805, 08/2788 and 05/5097). The Academy collection also includes Maclise's designs for both sides (see 08/2805, 08/2788). Mulready's designs are untraced but one of his sketches possibly relating to the project is contained in one of the Jupp volumes (03/3987).

In this design, Dyce chose to represent a scene from Dante's Divine Comedy (Purgatory xxvii) showing the Biblical figures Leah and Rachel. The former gathers flowers while the other gazes into a mirror and the accompanying inscription from Dante translates as 'Sight pleases her and active working me'. Marcia Pointon, in her monograph on Dyce (1979), interprets this as a comment on the dualism of artistic life: 'The eyes of Rachel are her thoughts, her ideas, and these she contemplates in the mirror as the ideas, in the Platonic sense, of God. Thus Leah and Rachel together present the sensuous and the spiritual, the active and the contemplative. A harmonious balance of these properties William regarded, evidently, as a necessity for the artist' .

Although Dyce's design alludes to the qualities required by a landscape painter in metaphorical terms, the image itself is dominated by the human figure. The landscape setting is minimal and the two women are clearly intended as the main focus. As Pointon notes, they are depicted in the tradition of Titian's 'Sacred and Profane Love' with Rachel as a nude figure and Leah draped. Maclise also incorporated a human figure in his winning design but made the relevance to Turner much clearer by depicting a young artist contemplating a Mediterranean landscape. He alluded to the higher import of landscape painting by including Apollo and his chariot in the sunset and three graces looking down on the scene from above. The connection with Turner is ostensibly negligible in Dyce's design but Lindsay Errington has convincingly argued that the artist intended the image to be read as 'a deliberately chosen visual illustration to Ruskin's own memorial to Turner in Volume III of Modern Painters'. Errington points out that Ruskin, in the section on medieval landscape, discussed Dante's work and, in particular, the stanza describing Rachel and Leah (see references). However, the Royal Academy Council probably considered this version too 'solemn and esoteric' (Pointon) in comparison with the 'light-hearted and more effective' design by Maclise.

Related objects:

There is a study for this design in the Fitzwilliam Museum (Inv. no. 925) given by the same person, Sir Alec Martin, but in 1918. A tracing by Dyce which possibly relates to this design is in the British Museum (Inv. no. 1976,0619.28.2).