ABSTRACT
“Wild Wales” has long been a site for mostly artistic interpretation by outsiders. The country, as if unpopulated, was a land to be discovered, to be looked at anew. In the mid-eighteenth century, artistic perceptions of the Welsh landscape were shaped by readings informed by theories of the sublime and the picturesque. Still, before Constable and Turner turned their attention to Wales, it was a native Welsh artist, Richard Wilson, who, for the first time, shed light on the picturesque potential of Wales which, until then, had probably been deemed too bleak and wild. Wilson was hailed the father of British landscape painting by Ruskin after he travelled extensively in Italy in the 1750s, but in the 1760s he started painting the wild landscapes of Snowdonia, and marvelling at the epic scale of the mountains and at the wilderness. This is when he painted Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idris (Exh. 1774) (see Figure I.1), which was bought by his new patron, major Welsh landowner William Vaughan, a nationalist and defender of Celtic culture. One small figure in the foreground can, however, be seen holding a Claude glass to look at a landscape which was mistakenly construed as volcanic, something which encouraged Wilson to associate it with the volcanic landscape of the Roman hills. Would you say that you are still able to identify similar external shaping forces at work in Welsh contemporary art?
