This moody evening view across the Tyne responds to an industrial city northeast of London. St. Nicholas Cathedral emerges from the haze at left as flames from factory chimneys create multiple points of light. Boyce joined London’s Old Water-Colour Society, formally the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, in 1865 and there showed a variation of this subject, attracting the attention of the Athenaeum. A reviewer noted that, "Among the recently elected members of this Society, by far the most original artist in landscape is Mr. Boyce, who treats with such perfect solemnity, beauty, richness and truth of colouring, some of the most commonplace themes . . . a distant view of a manufacturing town interests us in its million lives and fortunes; its . . . glowing sky looks full of prophecy."
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Title:Newcastle at Night from the Rabbit Banks, Gateshead
Artist:George Price Boyce (British, London 1826–1897 London)
Date:1864
Medium:Watercolor heightened with gouache (bodycolor) and reductive techniques
Dimensions:Sheet: 4 in. × 8 3/16 in. (10.1 × 20.8 cm)
Classification:Drawings
Credit Line:Ian Woodner Family Collection Fund, 2019
Accession Number:2019.98
Signature: On recto, at lower right: "G. P. BOYCE 64"
Inscription: On verso in graphite: "Newcastle at night from the Rabbit Banks Gateshead / GPBoyce 1864"
On old backing board: "Mrs. Hueffer / The Lodge / Campden Hill Road"
Probably Ford Madox Brown (British, born France); Catherine Madox Brown Hueffer (British), and thence by descent; The Maas Gallery Ltd. (British), in 1998; Christopher Cone (British); his sale; Sotheby's, London, May 22, 2014, lot 124; Vendor: Guy Peppiatt Fine Art Ltd
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "British Vision, 1700–1900: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints," December 7, 2023–March 5, 2024.
"The Society of Painters in Watercolours: The Sixty-First Exhibition." The Art Journal. Virtue & Co., Vol. iV, June 1865, pp. 173-75 [larger version of this composition with a sleeping male figure in foreground], "...shows subtle sense of colour".
"Fine Arts: Society of Painters in Watercolours." Athenaeum. April 29, 1865, p. 594 [larger version of composition], "Mr. Boyce...treats with such perfect solemnity, beauty, richness and truth of colouring, some of the most commonplace themes. A plain green field with him becomes like a king's robe; a distant view of a manufacturing town interests us in its million lives and fortunes, and grows poetic in the intense force of its painting; its subtle colouring seems pathetic, and a glowing sky looks full of prophecy...".
Old Water Colour Society Annual Exhibition Catalogue.. Summer 1865, cat. no. 128 a [larger version of this composition with a sleeping male figure in the foreground].
"Exhibition of the Society of Painters in Watercolours." Pall Mall Gazette. April 28, 1865, p. 11 [larger version of composition], "George Boyce, the painter who paints just what he sees before him, philosophically allowing his pictures to be ugly or uninteresting if the scenes on which he seems to chance are void of beauty, has sent some very careful landscapes. Newcastle, with a red light on its houses, the Inn at Pangburne, a copse near Abinger, and a view of gardens at Ghizeh, are among the subjects which he represents.".
William Michael Rossetti The Rossetti Papers, 1862–1870. 1903, pp. 28–9.
Christopher Newall, Judy Egerton George Price Boyce. Exh. cat., Tate Gallery, 24 June-16 August. 1987, no. 42, p. 56 [mentions a larger version of this composition shown at the Old Watercolour Society exhibition, summer 1865, no. 128].
The Maas Gallery Ltd. British Pictures, 1840-1940. Dealer catalogue. 4 November-18 December, 1998, cat. no. 21, p. 17.
Allen Staley The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001 (third edition), pp. 141–47 [general discussion of the artist].
Sotheby's, London A Green and Pleasant Land: Two Centuries of British Landscape Painting [from the Collection of Christopher Cone]. [Sale catalogue]. May 22, 2014, lot. 125, p. 42.
British Drawings and Watercolours. dealer catalogue. Guy Peppiatt Fine Art Ltd, 2018, cat. no. 70.
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