Art & Ideas 1700-1800
Paul Sandby lived during a time of changing ideas and fashions. Landscape paintings first appeared in the late 16th century. They celebrated the patron, his home, his gardens and his status. In the early 18th century engravers, such as Nathaniel and Samuel Buck, developed a new documentary style of landscape art.
In 1725 Daniel Defoe in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain described Wales as 'barbarous' and 'inhospitable'. A generation later, the ideas of thinkers such as Edmund Burke changed how people saw the natural world.
Abbey of Llan Egwerst or Valle Crucis and Castle Dinas Bran, Paul Sandby
© Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru - National Library of Wales
Beauty could be found in primitive, wild and remote landscapes. The sublime was the experience of fear and horror in the face of the power and vastness of nature. The overgrown, the ruined, the wild and unordered were seen as picturesque. The beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque all could be found in North Wales, with its ancient ruins and dramatic mountains.
Pont y Pair over the River Conway, Paul Sandby, 1776.
© Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru - National Library of Wales
Unlike previous paintings of Wales only seen by the aristocracy, Sandby's XII Views of North Wales was accessible to a middle class keen to learn and to travel. In 1778 Thomas Pennant provided an ideal guidebook with A Tour in Wales, while Reverend Gilpin offered detailed advice on how to judge the perfect landscape. The tourist could satisfy all his artistic sensibilities with just one visit to North Wales.
The new ideas did not just alter the travel plans of the English. Landscape art changed too. The classical landscape with all its codes and rules gave way to the picturesque and later to the ideals of the Romantic Movement, where the imagination of the individual mattered.
Sandby's aquatints pioneered a more naturalistic style in British landscape art. The publication of XII Views in North Wales in 1776 focused artists' attention on Wales as a destination for inspiration. One such inspired artist, William Turner, travelled to Wales five times in the 1790s evolving as an artist and interpreter of the Welsh landscape in paintings we still wonder at today.
The Local View
The Welsh people were onlookers in these fashionable metropolitan debates. Their mountains provided summer pastures and had been the protectors of Wales, its people and culture.
Although the locals prospered from the tourists, many were bewildered by the behaviour of the seekers of the picturesque. The educated elites of Wales scorned the ignorance of the English and their willingness to buy poor reproductions of the same old prints of Snowdon.
Art & Ideas, 1700 - 1800
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