William Lionel Wyllie (5 July 1851 – 6 April 1931), also known as W. L. Wyllie, was a prolific English painter of maritime themes in both oils and watercolours. He has been described as "the most distinguished marine artist of his day." His work is in the Tate, the Royal Academy, the Imperial War Museum, the National Maritime Museum, the National Museum of the Royal Navy, and many other institutions around the world.
Wyllie was born on 5 July 1851 at 67 Albany Street, Camden Town, London, the elder son of William Morrison Wyllie (1820–1895), a prosperous minor-genre painter living in London and Wimereux, France, by his wife Katherine Benham (1813–1872), a singer. Before marrying W.M. Wyllie, she had had three children by Percy Clinton Sydney Smythe, 6th Viscount Strangford.
Most of Wyllie's early summers were spent in France with his parents. He began to draw from an early age, and his natural talent was encouraged by his father and by Lionel Smythe, his step brother. He was given a thorough artistic education; first at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, and then in 1866, aged 15, at the Royal Academy Schools. At the Royal Academy he studied under Edwin Henry Landseer, John Everett Millais and Frederic Leighton, among others. He further demonstrated his precocious talent when he won the Turner Gold Medal in 1869 at the age of eighteen with Dawn after a Storm. His other early love affair, which he shared with his younger brother and fellow artist Charles William Wyllie, was sailing.
From the early 1870s Wyllie worked as an illustrator of maritime subjects for The Graphic. In 1875, the academy rejected two of his works, and in anger he declared his intention to give up art for a career at sea. Over the course of several sailing cruises as far afield as Europe he laid the foundations for a lifelong love of the sea and of maritime subjects.
Wyllie was a prolific exhibitor, with paintings and etchings shown at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, the Grosvenor Gallery, the New English Art Club, the Society of British Artists, the Dowdeswell Galleries and the Fine Art Society.
Wyllie became a member of the Society of British Artists in 1875, and of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1882. In 1887 he became a member of the New English Art Club. In 1889 he was made an associate of the Royal Academy, and in 1907 he was elected as a full member. In 1903 he became a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers.
In 1920 he painted a mural for the Royal Exchange, London Blocking of Zeebrugge Waterway, St George’s Day, 23rd April 1918.
Wyllie campaigned vigorously for the restoration of HMS Victory as a founder member of the Society for Nautical Research, and in 1930 his 42-foot (13 m) panorama of the Battle of Trafalgar was unveiled by King George V. The painting is seen by about 100,000 people every year where it still hangs in the Royal Naval Museum within the Historic Dockyard at Portsmouth