Whitlingham, Norfolk

Frederick Sandys, 1829–1904

1860

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

A wide landscape painting depicts a river scene at sunset with boats on the water and a castle-like structure on a hill. The sky is a vibrant gradient of yellow, orange, and blue, with scattered clouds. Whitlingham lies on the south bank of the river Yare in East Anglia, approximately three miles southeast of Frederick Sandys’s hometown of Norwich. The view looks upstream from Whitlingham toward Norwich at dusk. Sandys had been acquainted with the Pre-Raphaelites since 1857, and the elegiac mood in this picture shares affinities with the similarly melancholy paintings by John Everett Millais from the late 1850s, such as his Autumn Leaves (1856) and The Vale of Rest (1858–59), in which the waning daylight functions as a memento mori. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund