Dyce was one of the most learned and accomplished of British painters, one of the highest in aim, and most consistently selfrespecting in workmanship. His finest productions, the frescoes in the robing-room in the Houses of Parliament, did honor to the country and time which produced them. Generally, however, there is in Dyce's work more of earnestness, right conception, and grave, sensitive, but rather restricted powers of realization, than of authentic greatness. He has elevation, draughtsmanship, expression, and on occasion fine color; along with all these, a certain leaning on precedent, and castigated semi-conventionalized type of form and treatment, which bespeak rather the scholarly than the originating mind in art. The following are among his principal or most interesting works (oil pictures, unless otherwise stated). 1829: The Daughters of Jethro defended by Moses ; Puck. 1830: The Golden Age ; The Infant Hercules strangling the Serpents (now in the National Gallery, Edinburgh); Christ crowned with Thorns. 1835: A Dead Christ (large lunette altarpiece). 1836: The Descent of Venus, from Ben Jonson's Triumph of Love; The Judgment of Solomon, prize cartoon in tempera for tapestry (National Gallery, Edinburgh). 1837: Francesca da Rimini (National Gallery, Edinburgh). 1838, and again 1846: The Madonna and Child. 1839: Dunstan separating Edwy and Elgiva. 1844: Joash shooting the Arrow of Deliverance (the finest perhaps of the oil-paintings). 1850: The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel. 1851: King Lear and the Fool in the Storm. 1855: Christabel. 1857: Titian's first essay in Coloring. 1859: The Good Shepherd. 1860: St John bringing Home his Adopted Mother ; Pegwell Bay (a coastscene of remarkably minute detail, showing the painter's partial adhesion to the pre-Raphaelite movement). 1861: George Herbert at Bemerton.
Dyce executed some excellent cartoons for stained glass: that for the choristers window, Ely Cathedral, and that for a vast window at Ainwick in memory of a duke of Northumberland; the design of Paul rejected by the Jews, now at South Kensington, belongs to the latter. In fresco-painting his first work appears to have been the Consecration of Archbishop Parker, painted in Lambeth palace. In one of the Westminster Hall competitions for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, he displayed two heads from this composition; and it is related that the great German fresco painter Cornelius, who had come over to England to give advice, with a prospect of himself taking the chief direction of the pictorial scheme, told the prince consort frankly that the English ought not to be asking for him, when they had such a painter of their own as Mr Dyce. The cartoon by Dyce of the Baptism of Ethelbert was approved and commissioned for the House of Lords, and is the first of the works done there, 1846, in fresco. In 1848 he began his great frescoes in the Robing-room subjects from the legend of King Arthur, exhibiting chivalric virtue. The whole room was to have been finished in eight years; but ill-health and other vexations trammelled the artist, and the series remains uncompleted. The largest picture figures Hospitality, the admission of Sir Tristram into the fellowship of the Round Table. Then follow Religion, the Vision of Sir Galahad and his Companions; Generosity, Arthur unhorsed, and spared by the Victor; Courtesy, Sir Tristram harping to la Belle Yseult; Mercy, Sir Gawaine's Vow. The frescoes of sacred subjects in All Saints church, Margaret Street, London; of Comus, in the summer-house of Buckingham Palace; and of Neptune and Britannia, at Osborne House, are also by this painter.
Dyce was an elegant scholar in more ways than one. In 1828 he obtained the Blackwell prize at Aberdeen for an essay on animal magnetism. In 1843-1844 he published an edition of the Book of Common Prayer, with a dissertation on Gregorian music, and its adaptation to English words. He founded the Motett Society, for revival of ancient church-music, was a fine organist, and composed a non nobis which has appropriately been sung at Royal Academy banquets. His last considerable writing relating to his own art was published in 1853, The National Gallery: its Formation and Management.
See Redgrave's Dictionary of Artists (1878), and Dictionary of National Biography. (W. M. R.)
Source: Entry on the artist in the 1911 Edition Encyclopedia.