I was told I was talented when I applied to Falmouth School of Art and that I should consider skipping the course and proceeding directly to degree level.

Dyer’s dislike for Westminster was chronicled in his Journal of Escapes evidenced by the 1714 entry “Ran from school and my father on a box of the ear being given me strolled for three or four days – found at Windsor. As a result Dyer retained such interests and translated his studies into verbal landscape art and saved quotes from John Milton’s Paradise Lost in his commonplace book. iv.

Although Dyer’s popularity was short lived after Grongar Hill William Wordsworth and John Gray praised John Dyer’s imagination and style as having “more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number but rough and injudicious. His unsuccessful works include Ruins of Rome The Fleece Country Walk An Epistle To A Friend In Town To Aurelia and The Enquiry. ”.