Landscapes
The best of the few Welsh artists of the 16-18th centuries tended to move elsewhere to work, but in the 18th century the dominance of landscape art in English art bought them motives to stay at home, and bought an influx of artists from outside to paint Welsh scenery, which was "discovered" by artists rather earlier than later landscape hotspots like the English Lake District and the Scottish Highlands. The Welsh painter Richard Wilson (1714–1782) is arguably the first major British landscapist, but rather more notable for Italian scenes than Welsh ones, although he did paint several on visits from London.
Wilson's pupil Thomas Jones (1742–1803), has a rather higher status today than in his own time, but mainly for his city scenes painted in Italy, though his The Bard (1774, Cardiff) is a classic work showing the emerging combination of the Celtic Revival and Romanticism. He returned to live in Wales on inheriting the family estate, but largely stopped painting. For most visiting artists the main attraction was dramatic mountain scenery, in the new taste for the sublime partly stimulated by Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), though some earlier works were painted in Wales in this strain. Early works tended to see the Welsh mountains through the prism of the 17th century Italianate "wild" landscapes of Salvator Rosa and Gaspard Dughet.
By the 1770s a number of guide books had been published, including Joseph Cradock's Letters from Snowdon (1770) and An Account of Some of the Most Romantic Parts of North Wales (1777). Thomas Pennant wrote Tour in Wales (1778) and Journey to Snowdon (1781/1783) - though Welsh himself, Pennant had published a Tour in Scotland first, in 1769. The first of a series of British tours by another leading promoter of the picturesque, William Gilpin, was Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770, but not published until 1782. Paul Sandby made his first recorded visit to Wales in 1770, later (1773) touring south Wales with Sir Joseph Banks, resulting in the 1775 publication of XII Views in South Wales and a further 12 views the following year, part of a 48-plate series of aquatints of Welsh views commissioned by Banks. This was an early example of many print series and illustrated books on Wales, often as valuable in terms of income to the artists as original works.
What might fifty years earlier have been merely regarded as inconvenience in travel could now been seen as an exciting adventure worth making the subject of a painting, as in Julius Caesar Ibbetson's Phaeton in a Thunderstorm (1798, now Temple Newsam, Leeds) which shows a carriage struggling up a rough mountain road. It has a label on the back by the artist, recording that the incident occurred when he was travelling in Wales with the artist John "Warwick" Smith and the aristocrat Robert Fulke Greville. Ibbetson visited Wales often, and was also one of the first artists to record the Welsh Industrial Revolution, and scenes of Welsh life.
North Wales tended to be more visited; the young watercolourist John Sell Cotman embarked on his "first extended sketching tour" in 1800, starting from Bristol then following "a well-trodden path into the Wye Valley, through Brecknockshire to Llandovery and north to Aberystwyth. In Conway he joined a group of artists gathered around the amateur Sir George Beaumont" perhaps meeting Thomas Girtin there, and continuing to Caernarvon and Llangollen. A second trip followed in 1802; he continued to use motifs from his sketches throughout his career. Other artists often in Wales in this period included Francis Towne, the brothers Cornelius and John Varley and John's pupils Copley Fielding and David Cox (for whose lifelong attachment to Wales see below). Even the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson visited with Henry Wigstead, a colleague, and they published Remarks on a Tour to North and South Wales, in the Year 1797, an illustrated book.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars made continental travel impossible for long periods, increasing the visitors to Wales and other parts of Britain. The young J.M.W. Turner made his first extended tour to South and mid-Wales in 1792, followed by North Wales in 1794, and a seven-week tour of Wales in 1798. He also visited Yorkshire and Scotland in the 1790s, but was unable to visit Europe until after the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, when he reached the Alps; he did not visit Italy until 1819. Many of his key early works drew on his Welsh travels, although they were painted back in London. His "first large classicising watercolour, a Claudeian view of Caernarvon Castle at sunset" was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1799, along with an oil of the same subject, and the next year he showed another view of the castle, this time with small foreground figures of "a bard singing to his followers of the destruction of Welsh civilization by the invading armies of Edward I", another Claudeian formula that he was to repeat many times in major works for the rest of his career, and was arguably the first large "exhibition watercolour", reaching into the realm of history painting.
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