Charles William Wyllie

Captain and Mrs Muirhead of Vancouver, from whom purchased privately in the mid-1950s by Dr. and Mrs. Malcolm Ebert Howe of Point Grey, Vancouver and thence by descent to the present owner

Royal Academy, 1911, no.216

Original canvas. A craquelure pattern across the surface. There are some localised areas of paint loss to the central girl's hair and the drapery below her left arm. The varnish is dirty and the work should respond well to cleaning. Under ultraviolet light it is difficult to read the work conclusively but there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a simple gilt frame.
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Charles William Wyllie was the younger brother of William Lionel Wyllie and, like his sibling his paintings often have a coastal setting. However, unlike his brother, Charles moved away from straightforward representations of the British coastline and developed an interest in painting allegorical and mythological subjects beside the sea. He favoured compositions with a crowd of young women or water-nymphs dancing or running through the foreground and the ocean in the background. The present picture is therefore a very typical example, showing girls bedecked with flowers and a boy playing Pan-pipes dancing through a seaside meadow, capturing a wonderful sense of joyous movement.

In 1911 when On the Way to the Festival was exhibited at the Royal Academy, Wyllie was living at Elm Tree Road in St John's Wood, close to the studios of several painters of Neo-classical subjects - including the greatest exponent Lawrence Alma-Tadema who died only a year later. Close-by was the studio of Arthur Wardle, who combined his specialism in painting wild animals with Classical subjects in A Dryad also exhibited in 1911. Another resident of St John's Wood, Herbert Draper had exhibited Ulysses and the Sirens (Ferens Art Gallery, Hull) in 1909 and Flying Fish (sold in these rooms 12 November 1992, lot 183) in 1910, both of which depict mythological subjects with nautical settings. The first decade of the twentieth century saw the last phase of the Neo-classical movement, before it was eclipsed by war.