Wyke Bayliss was born on 21 October 1835 at Madeley in Shropshire. His unusual first name derived from his mother Anne’s maiden name. His brother William Wyke Bayliss became a vicar and his sister Elizabeth Anne Bayliss, married a vicar, whilst a second sister, Mary died as a teenager. Bayliss’ family included a number of luminaries. His second cousin was Sir William Maddock Bayliss and his great uncle was Thomas Turner, founder of the Caughley porcelain factory, a major figure in the development of the Willow pattern. Bayliss owned a portrait of Turner by Sir Joshua Reynolds, as well as a number of further family portraits by Lemuel Francis Abbott. His father, the Reverend John Cox Bayliss was a railway engineer, who taught military and mathematical drawing and was also an artist known for his work Views of Shropshire published in 1839. He gave his younger son artistic training after he demonstrated aptitude for drawing at an early age. The family moved from Madeley to London, thus granting Bayliss the opportunity to immerse himself in the burgeoning art scene of the early Victorian period. As a young student at the RA and the School of Design at Somerset House, he became affiliated with the Pre-Raphaelites, and counted amongst his friends John Millais, Frederic Leighton, William Holman Hunt and Edward Burne-Jones. While distant from the Pre-Raphaelites in subject and technique, his paintings often reflect the juxtaposition of detail and colour that characterise much of Millais’ and Leighton’s work. A painter of architectural subjects, Bayliss specialised in the depiction of cathedral interiors and was a prolific writer on art and aesthetics. He almost exclusively painted interiors of British and European churches and cathedrals, and was known in the late Victorian era as an academic authority on art. From the start of his career, Bayliss’ main interest was in depicting architecture, finding ‘infinite charm’ in the ‘infinite variety of the aspect of a Cathedral interior’. His artistic contemporary and sometime friend James McNeill Whistler mockingly referred to him as ‘Bayliss the Middlesex Michel Angelo’. Frederick Wedmore stated in the foreword to Bayliss’s autobiography ‘On reflection it will be seen that Wyke Bayliss had his speciality pretty well to himself. He was the inventor of his own genre - as well as his own method’. Bayliss published a number of books of art critique, including accounts of changing depictions of Jesus Christ through the ages and a volume of poems. In about 1888, Theodore Roussel gave Whistler an unflattering drawing of Bayliss in exchange for the picture A House with a Veranda and steps leading down to a Garden. In a critical 1889 review of Bayliss’s book The Enchanted Island, Oscar Wilde offered the opinion: ‘Mr Wyke Bayliss is as much Mr Whistler’s superior as a writer as he is his inferior as a painter and an artist.’ Bayliss was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1865, and succeeded Whistler as president in 1887, when Whistler and his followers split from the society. Bayliss had initially supported Whistler’s nomination to the committee, but soon led the majority, who disagreed with the latter’s radical plans, and as president, he restored the running of that body to traditional lines. He was nevertheless notably supportive of some innovations, such as defending the status of women as professional artists and advocating the inclusion of ‘the new and strange’ in RBA exhibitions. He held that post until his death. Wilde would write: ‘As for the matter of Mr Bayliss’s discourses, his views on art must be admitted to be very commonplace and old-fashioned. What is the use of telling artists that they should try and paint Nature as she really is? What Nature really is, is a question for metaphysics not for art. Art deals with appearances, and the eye of the man who looks at Nature, the vision, in fact, of the artist, is far more important to us than what he looks at.’ Bayliss was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1870, to the Royal West of England Academy in 1904 and was knighted by his sovereign in 1897. Bayliss married Elise Letitia Broad in 1858. They lived at Clapham Park in London, where he died on 5 April 1906. He was buried at Streatham Cemetery, his funeral being attended by many artists including Alfred East and wreaths were sent by, among others, Lawrence Alma-Tadema. His autobiography, Olives: the Reminiscences of a President, was posthumously published that same year.