The pen was mightier than the brush

Of the making of books about the Pre-Raphaelites, it appears, there is no end. Like the Bloomsberries, most of the PRB are more interesting to read about than the study of their work would suggest: a few towering talents stalk the mountaintops, while many lesser ones lurk in valleys and foothills.

George Boyce was one of those lesser talents — a watercolourist of some small fame among his colleagues (although he was 52 before he was elected to full membership of the Old Water-Colour Society). His friend Henry Tanworth Wells had more worldly recognition, if not the esteem of the avant-garde: as a portraitist he painted the great, the good, the socially eminent or the just plain rich. The two men were also connected through a third painter, Boyce’s sister Joanna. She too had some contemporary success, exhibiting a few pictures at the Royal Academy. But much of her work has remained in private collections, and, apart from a sketchbook in the British Museum, is not available to the general public.

All the more welcome, therefore, is Sue Bradbury’s retelling of the trio’s story. William Boyce’s diaries, heavily abridged, have long been published, giving his thoughts on painting, and, more interestingly, his many artistic friendships (until Rossetti’s late decline, they were close, sharing views on art and women — and possibly even sharing the women). These are now supplemented by the hundreds of letters the three exchanged.

Boyce and Wells met in 1849, at Betws-y-Coed, in Wales, where students clustered around the landscape painter David Cox. In 1853 Boyce’s father, usually described as a silversmith, but in reality a successful pawnbroker, died, and his grown children came into handsome inheritances, which ensured that Boyce could travel and socialise without any need to earn a living by his art.