Hilly Landscape, North Wales

Hilly Landscape, North Wales, undated and in the Harris Museum in Preston, represents the category of Cox's landscapes that present upland Welsh scenery in a broadly atmospheric manner without a specific topographic subject. The hilly landscapes of Snowdonia and the surrounding uplands offered Cox a more dramatic terrain than the flat Midlands and river valleys of his early career, and the emotional register of his Welsh hill paintings is correspondingly more elevated — closer to the Romantic sublime. The Harris Museum in Preston holds a significant collection of Victorian British art, the museum's late nineteenth-century foundation having coincided with the peak collecting years for this type of landscape painting. Cox's North Welsh hill subjects were particularly valued by collectors who associated the mountains with the poetic grandeur celebrated by Wordsworth, Byron, and other Romantic writers active in Cox's own lifetime.

Upland landscape allowed Cox to exploit the full tonal range from dark foreground valley to brilliant sky, with the hills providing the middle-ground transition. His handling of moorland and hill subjects shows a preference for horizontal brushwork in the landscape with freer, more directional marks in the sky, creating complementary textural relationships across the picture plane.