Welsh Romance

The rugged beauty of north Wales has attracted a gallery of artists and poets. We find the castles and landscapes that inspired them

- Laura Silverman

Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, described north Wales as “full of horror”. The region was remote; the landscape wild and rugged. Yet within decades, artists and writers thronged to get there. The painter JMW Turner went five times at the end of the 18th century; the poet William Wordsworth slogged up Snowdon one summer. North Wales was the ideal setting for the Romantic movement: the trend of the day.

The Romantics glorified nature and the past. They sought to experience the “sublime” (a sense of fear and awe) and depict the “picturesque” (composed scenes with unruly elements). Wordsworth argued that poetry should begin as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. Emotion was vital. With its grandeur and mystery, north Wales encapsulated Romantic ideas. Artistic and literary types traipsed up Snowdon, the country’s highest mountain, traversing the smaller peaks of Aran Fawddwy and Cader Idris. They ogled Caernarfon Castle, a medieval fortress, and gazed at Dolbadarn Castle and Conwy Castle. At every pace, they contemplated Creation and destruction, enrapt by wonder.

Who first saw the potential of Wales? Was it Turner or Wordsworth? Or was it a now half-forgotten figure? Turner might be the more wellknown artist, but without Richard Wilson who knows what he would have created?

Wilson was born in 1714 in the village of Penegoes, now in Powys, north Wales. The son of a clergyman, he started out painting portraits, but switched to landscapes during a trip to Italy in the 1750s. Back home, Wilson received commissions from English and Welsh landowners wanting their estates painted in the Italian style to remind them of their Grand Tours of Europe. Wilson toured Wales and saw it in a new way. Others had seen the country as inhospitable; Wilson pictured grand views.