Autumn landscape with a colliery

Boyce here responds to the visual character of a site in northeastern England. In 1864 the artist met Isaac Lowthian Bell, an ironmaster who built an industrial empire in County Durham. Bell bought drawings from Boyce and encouraged the artist to look for the peculiar beauties of a landscape that was being changed by industrialization. Boyce stayed with Bell several times after 1866 and painted in the vicinity. This intriguing composition includes a colliery and pit village, probably within the Durham coalfield. Distant mining operations are carefully described but presented within a landscape that seems serene and largely unaffected. In the foreground, boys pick berries while a woman and dog relax on the grass. Russets, greens and purple-browns weave a visual tapestry from bands of autumnal vegetation and partly overgrown slag heaps. Boyce’s early training as an architect allowed him to accurately describe the colliery while his Pre-Raphaelite sensibility encouraged him to celebrate the surrounding natural beauty.