Darwin’s Wake Splashed Artists, Too
NEW HAVEN | The artist stands in the distance, gazing up at the striated chalk cliffs on the coast of Kent, England. His family is gathering shells in the shallow tidal pools of Pegwell Bay that, with the receding waters, have a look of barren desolation. The sky is an unearthly yellow from the glowering late light of an autumn sun. Above, Donati’s Comet leaves a trail that would not be seen for another two millenniums.
This painting, by William Dyce, “Pegwell Bay, Kent — A Recollection of October 5th, 1858,” and executed soon after that date, is not the kind of work you might expect to see in an exhibition titled “Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts.” And Dyce, who is described as a “deeply devout High Church Anglican,” would hardly have been enamored of the challenge to the clerical interpretation of the Creation that Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was to make in 1859, just as this canvas was being painted.
But it is a measure of the achievement of this remarkable exhibition, at the Yale Center for British Art here, that this work is seen differently, as we look at it through Darwinian eyes — as is nearly everything in the show. The cliffs and comet and shells allude to the lumbering processes of the ancient earth against which daily experience — the ebb of tides, the attentions of a distracted child in the painting’s foreground, the recollections of the artist himself — plays itself out.
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This painting, by William Dyce, “Pegwell Bay, Kent — A Recollection of October 5th, 1858,” and executed soon after that date, is not the kind of work you might expect to see in an exhibition titled “Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts.” And Dyce, who is described as a “deeply devout High Church Anglican,” would hardly have been enamored of the challenge to the clerical interpretation of the Creation that Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was to make in 1859, just as this canvas was being painted.
But it is a measure of the achievement of this remarkable exhibition, at the Yale Center for British Art here, that this work is seen differently, as we look at it through Darwinian eyes — as is nearly everything in the show. The cliffs and comet and shells allude to the lumbering processes of the ancient earth against which daily experience — the ebb of tides, the attentions of a distracted child in the painting’s foreground, the recollections of the artist himself — plays itself out.