Alice Boyd – View from the Window of Balcony House, Tynemouth

Alice Boyd (1825-1897, Scottish), View from the Window of Balcony House, Tynemouth, 1864

No matter how hard I tried to forget Alice Boyd’s painting “View from the Window of Balcony House, Tynemouth”, I simply cannot! There is something about it which makes me want to gaze at it almost daily, for weeks now… Is it the romantic dusky rosiness of the sky? The sea with all its mystery and its possibilities? The seashell on the windowsill? The view from one’s window is extremely important; it can add to the beauty of your everyday life or it can take away the beauty from it. Is there a more romantic view from the window than the view of the open sea? The sound of seawaves and the salty air coming in through the open window, carried by the wind, ahh… This painting isn’t just visual for me. While gazing at it I can smell, taste, and feel things. Tynemouth is a town in the North East of England and I can imagine the coldish weather. This certainly isn’t the sunny Mediterannean from Matisse’s paintings of rooms with opened windows. No, this is the gloomy and isolate north, a fertile ground for imagination. The painting shows a view from Alice’s window. The unbearably dreamy sky is flooding the background of the scene and its presence, although soft and light, is powerful enough that it sets a tone and a mood for the entire painting. As our eye descends from the realm of the sky to the earth we see the sea in the distance, a cliff with the ruins of a castle, and going to the right of the painting there are houses and roofs of the town. There is a tree with bare branches and even a couple passing, although only a part of them is visible. A seashell and a telescope on the windowsill are only details of the interior. I wonder what Alice could see through the telescope? The castle, the sea? Such scope for imagination there, it seems.

Alice Boyd is a sort of forgotten, or at least unexplored and unappreciated Pre-Raphaelite. She was born in 1823 in a wealthy Scottish family. Her father, Spencer Boyd, was the 12th Laird of Penkill, and his family had lived at Penkill Castle since the early 16th century. Sadly, he died when Alice was one year old. Death seemed to have followed Alice throughout her life; in 1858 her mother died too, and in 1865 her brother Spencer as well. After his death she became the 14th and the first female Laird of the Castle. A very important person in Alice’s life was the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet William Bell Scott. She first encountered Scott in 1858 in Newcastle-on-Tyne, where she was staying with her grandfather following the death of her mother. Alice became his pupil in 1859 and she moved to live with her brother Spencer in the Penkill Castle which she soon started transforming into a cultural mecca for the Pre-Raphaelite artists. Scott was married, but that didn’t stop him from falling in love with artistic Alice. He didn’t want to divorce and cause a scandal for himself and his wife, so the trio came up with an agreement; Alice would spend her winters in London with Scott and his wife, and the two would stay with Alice in Scotland in summers. Coming back to the point of the northern imagination, even Christina Rossetti wrote after staying at Penkill Castle; “Even Naples in imagination cannot efface the quiet fertile comeliness of Penkill in reality.” Not only Christina, but Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lawrence Alma-Tadema both came to the castle.