Rose Wylie

This painting is a good example of the round[1]about ways Rose Wylie sometimes discovers her motifs. During a magazine photoshoot, she had a conversation with a Belgian photographer named Daniel about the origin of his name. In the Book of Daniel in the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible, Daniel interprets the dream of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II. In the dream, the king saw a large statue with a head of gold, a chest and arms of silver, a belly and loins of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of clay and iron. When a stone hit the statue’s toes, it toppled, and the wind blew away the debris. Then, the stone that destroyed the statue grew into a mountain that covered the whole earth. God revealed what this meant to Daniel in a dream.

Since Wylie is not concerned with faithfully re[1]producing events, she shows the gold, bronze, iron, and clay, but not the silver. Instead, she emphasizes the discrepancy between the tiny, sleeping king in the bottom left corner and the large apparition.

As in her other paintings, Wylie uses writing to unify the composition. As viewers, we naturally concentrate on the meaning of the words, but for the artist, their role as elements within the pictorial composition is far more important. When explaining her use of text and image, she notes, for example, that writing is much easier than painting a specific facial expression.