William Dyce (1806 - 1864)

William Dyce was a liberal-minded artist in the late 1840s who recognised the Brotherhood's purpose and potential, and who adopted certain aspects of the group's style.

The son of a distinguished physician and academic, Dyce was born in Aberdeen and had gained a master's degree by the age of seventeen. He turned to painting after beginning to study medicine and then theology and entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1825 under the patronage of Sir Thomas Lawrence. On impulse, he gave up and went to Rome where he probably saw the German 'Nazarene' painters, as Brown was to do twenty years later.

Returning to Aberdeen in 1829, he pursued a wide range of interests, even winning a £30 prize for an essay on electro-magnetism, and established a reputation as a portrait painter in Edinburgh. In 1837, he returned to London as Superintendent of the new School of Design but resigned six years later in frustration at its bureaucracy and ineffectiveness.

He gained comissions for frescoes in the 1844 competition to decorate the Palace of Westminster. These led to the patronage of Prince Albert for whom he painted a fresco at Osborne House.

He used primed white canvases in true Pre-Raphaelite fashion and his painted landscapes were comparable in quality to Brown's.