Home is Where the Art Is

Around the time that Richard Wilson (1713–1782) painted this view of Cader Idris, one of Snowdonia’s great peaks, Wales was enjoying a relative tourist boom. The British taste for the picturesque was at its height, and domestic travel was developing into a popular pastime for those with the financial means. Wilson, who was born in Penegoes, just south of today’s national park, had travelled on a Grand Tour of Europe, during which he sketched idealised views of the Italian landscape. Back home, he found less conventional but equally dramatic inspiration, choosing to apply his skills to depicting the rugged ridge of Cader Idris falling steeply into the shadowy lake of Llyn-y- Cau. Other pioneering poets and artists would follow in his footsteps, including William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and J.M.W.Turner.

Around 150 years later, in 1910, James Dickson Innes (1887–1914) first set eyes on Snowdonia’s only twin-peaked mountain, Arenig Fawr. It would become an obsession for the rest of his short life. He invited his friends to join him, artists Derwent Lees (1885–1931) and fellow Welshman Augustus John (1878–1961), who saw in this part of rural North Wales ‘the reflection of some miraculous promised land’. Living high in the mountains, they roamed from sunrise to sunset, recording their surroundings in heightened, almost hallucinatory, colours. For Innes, who had caught tuberculosis in 1908, nights spent sleeping out on the moors led to a rapid decline in health and he died in 1914, aged just 27. ‘He was never happier than when painting in this area’, John wrote. And Innes’s paintings of Arenig Fawr are a testament to the astounding passion, beauty and inspiration to be gleaned from landscapes close to home.

Paintings and sketches by Richard Wilson are on display as part of the Walk Through British Art and Travellers in Italy from Grand Tourists to Turner at Tate Britain.