Dalkey Island

Elizabeth Murray · September 1843

Medium

Brush and brown wash highlighted with white gouache, over graphite, on tan wove paper

Original size

17.6 × 25.4 cm (6 15/16 × 10 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Dalkey Island captures the quiet drama of the Irish coast with the fleeting, documentary precision that defined Elizabeth Murray's career as one of the nineteenth century's most widely-travelled women artists. Murray worked primarily in watercolour and wash during an era when respectable women rarely ventured beyond the grand tour circuit, yet she spent years sketching across Morocco, Spain, the Canary Islands, and the British Isles. In this September 1843 study, her use of brown wash over graphite, lifted with white gouache on tan paper, gives the scene a warm, atmospheric depth that reads almost like a tonal painting — every highlight a deliberate choice rather than an accident of light. The tan paper acts as a built-in midtone, letting Murray push simultaneously toward shadow and brightness from a single ground, a technique that rewards close looking. Murray later published "Sixteen Years of an Artist's Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canaries" (1859), an illustrated account of her travels that reached audiences well beyond the art world and established her as a serious, independent voice in an era that rarely afforded women that status. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Murray's tonal restraint and soft coastal atmosphere onto canvas, preserving the considered quietness that makes this small study so enduring.