Before the year 1851 had run it's course it would herald the death of one great artist and the birth of another. In the upstairs front bedroom of a small house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, the British Artist, Joseph Mallard William Turner. R.A., took, with the words, 'The sun is God', his last breath, ending 76 years of life on earth for a man who had striven to commit his vision of the power of the sun and the elemental forces onto canvas.
It has since been profered that the mantle of that remarkable artist was to settle on a child born nearby during that same year. William Lionel Wyllie, born at 67, Albany Street, Regent's Park, was to become one of Britain's most loved and respected marine artists, feted and praised by the Royal Family and Thames Watermen alike.
Few marine artists have related more subjectively to their vision of the sea than Wyllie. Turner was his hero, and in his volume of work output, W.L. was 
secnd only to him. In a book about the life and work of Turner that W.L. was commissioned to write in 1905 for the 'British Artists Series' he wrote,
...'.I have tried to describe the masterpieces of Turner as they appear to a fellow painter travelling, however remotely, along the same road',
W.L spent many hours in the basement of the National Gallery sorting through the work and sketchbooks that Turner had bequeathed to the Nation, and described how he had endeavoured to put the scraps of information that he had found about the shy artist's life into some form of order,
'The task was not an easy one, but night after night as I went slowly through the trials and triumphs of Turner, the uncouth old wizard, with his rough manners and tender heart, somehow became more and more real to me, until at last he seemed a friend that I had known all my life.'
That W.L. Wyllie was one of the greatest and most prolific artists of the Victorian era has never been in doubt. The pictorial content of W.L'.s work differed from Turner's in that his was the work of a popular pictorialist and did not display any of the mystery or symbolism evident in the work of Turner. Possibly the nearest that W.L. got to the style of his hero was his large oil, ' The Phantom Ship'.
The geographical location and work of the people surrounding W.L. deeply influenced his subject material, and to many people, his signature on an oil, water-colour or etching is a proof stamp that the work is of impeccable technical accuracy.
In the foreword to a book about the life & work of W.L. Wyllie, the late Sir Hugh Casson, PPRA wrote,
"I first met W.L.Wyllie when I was a schoolboy and he was in the last years of his life. To me he seemed the perfect man living the perfect life. I was passionate about boats but here was somebody lucky beyond belief who seemed to live entirely on behalf of (and only) for boats. He designed them, cared for them, sailed them and above all he never ceased to draw and paint them in every size and shape and in all weathers. He drew them as a seaman would....accurately, affectionately and above all with that deep practical understanding of the fact born of experience, that seamanship is fun but it is also serious, for a human life can often depend upon the curve of a hull or the angle of a cleat. And as if all this were not enough, he lived with his family in the most perfect house in the world, Tower House, with its toes in the water and great warships sliding past the window so close it seemed you could hand a biscuit to the captain on the bridge."
The years 1851 to 1879 were Wyllie's most influential period. The winter months between childhood and marriage were spent in London, and the summer months at Wimereux where the family lived in an old Napoleon guard house overlooking the shore of the Pas de Calais on the coast of Northern France. It was during the months spent at Wimereux that W.L. began to develop his love for the sea, and the folk who made their living from it, producing highly developed and sensitive work with atmospheric moonlit landscape studies of seascapes, shipwrecks and coastal views.
Between the years of 1880 to 1906, the focus of his interest moved to London. After their marriage the Wyllie's went to live on the banks of the Medway estuary near Rochester in Kent, then an area of pastoral beauty and W.L. concentrated on painting the shipping and barges on the Medway and the Thames. With the close proximity of Chatham Dockyard he inevitably developed links with the Royal Navy. In London he contacted the merchant shipping companies that were to be so important to him in his later years at Portsmouth.
1906 to 1931 were years of artistic consolidation as opposed to creative inventiveness. W.L. continued painting his beloved London River views, but his main subject matter became Naval. He continued sailing and above all, painting, up to the last few hours of his life.
