William Lionel Wyllie
England, b.1851, d.1931
The Sloping Deck
- 1871
- Oil on canvas
- Presented by the family of James Jamieson 1932
- 240 x 300 x 30mm
- 70/33
Tags: decks (uncovered spaces), despair, lighthouses, people (agents), seas, seascapes, ships, shipwrecks, storms
A ship founders on rocks in the midst of a storm; those aboard clamber to the bowsprit’s highest point. Vigorous brushwork and a churning sea add to the sense of terror and uncertainty. Artist William Wyllie was a lifelong sailor and a leading marine painter of his generation, and painted The Sloping Deck when he was just twenty.
(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)
Exhibition History
![Andreas Cellarius Hypothesis Ptolemaica Sive Communis Planetarum Motus Per Eccentricos Et Epicyclos Demonstrans [The Ptolemaic Hypothesis or Common Representation Demonstrating the Planetary Motions through Eccentrics and Epicycles] 1661. Hand-coloured engraving. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, William A. Sutton bequest, 2000](/media/cache/05/97/05970cdff0f6b3264062d69bf2aa90f5.jpg)
Related
Commentary
Reading the Swell
The art of the sea has always been the art of vastness—without edges and with potential for infinite extension. It is this immensity that has invaded the Reading the Swell exhibition; finding its way through the automatic doors when no one is looking and quietly expanding the walls. Like sailors, artists have laid soundings in this uncharted vastness. Reading the Swell is a small and pointed selection of those soundings that see fit to make sense of the sea.
Notes
The sloping deck by William Wyllie
This article first appeared as 'Painting makes up for size in drama' in The Press on 4 April 2016.
Notes
The Sloping Deck
Although one of the smallest oil paintings in the permanent collection William Wyllie's The Sloping Deck is a powerful and terrifying image of a ship being wrecked on rocks.