William Dyce 1806-1864

Pegwell Bay is a shallow inlet in the English Channel coast at the estuary of the River Stour between Ramsgate and Sandwich in Kent. Situated in the bay is a large nature reserve, known for its migrating waders and wildfowl, with a complete series of seashore habitats including extensive mudflats and saltmarsh. The public can access this nature reserve via Pegwell Bay Country Park, which is located off the A256 Ramsgate to Dover road. TheTamshee: enjoyed reading this Telegraph Article by Richard Dorment. Extract of Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
William Dyce's Pegwell Bay, Kent – A Recollection of October 5th 1858. The picture shows the artist's family at the seashore late on a chilly autumn afternoon. Typical Victorians, they are hunting for fossilised bones or shells in an area of England, which, as the eroded chalk cliffs behind them testify, had been covered by the sea during the Cretaceous period. The painting is about time. Look closely and you see Donati's comet streaking across the soft evening sky, an astronomical event that would not recur for another 2,000 years. And there is a third timescale in the picture – the span of a human life, which is so terribly brief when, as here, it is measured against geological or astronomical time. Light fades, the day ends, a year passes, the little boy will grow up, the adults will die – and all this is but a drop in the ocean of time. I always think of Dyce's masterpiece as the most melancholy image in all of British art.