Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 6).djvu/162

Age 7. From a Daguerreotype by W. J. Benham.	Age 30. From a Photo. by Mrs W. L. Wyllie.
Present Day. From a Photo. by Mrs. W. L. Wyllie.

R. William Lionel Wyllie is the son of Mr. W. M. Wyllie, the artist, and became a Royal Academy student at the age of fourteen. From the first his inclination was for drawing ships and seas, which he has been doing ever since, with a success which is familiar to every lover of art. At seventeen his first Academy picture appeared, and shortly afterwards he won the Turner Medal, awarded to him for a picture of a wreck. In 1876 his picture, "Tracking in Holland," was hung on the line; but the pictures which chiefly sent up his reputation were "Our River," in the Academy of 1882, and the still finer "Toil, Glitter, Grime, and Wealth on a Flowing Tide," which was bought for the Chantrey collection, of which it is one of the best works. In 1889 Mr. Wyllie was elected an A.R.A., an honour which his bold, fresh, effective work had thoroughly earned. He has literally lived with boats, and long before he was twenty he had learned to sketch from the deck of a yawl. To this habit of working on a level with the water, instead of seeing it from above, or merely from the shore, his work owes much of its originality and firmness.