Valley of the Mawddach with Cader Idris

Valley of the Mawddach with Cader Idris at the National Museum Cardiff is another version of Wilson’s signature Welsh mountain subject. Cader Idris, rising to 893 meters in Snowdonia, embodied for Wilson the grandeur of the Welsh landscape that he championed as worthy of the same artistic attention given to Italian mountains and lakes. Richard Wilson, the Welsh painter who studied in Italy in the 1750s and returned to transform British landscape painting, was among the most important artistic figures of eighteenth-century Britain despite dying in comparative poverty and neglect. His synthesis of the classical landscape tradition he had absorbed in Rome with the specific visual qualities of British scenery — the cooler light, the greener landscape, the atmospheric moisture of the northern climate — established a template for British landscape painting that Turner, Constable, and the watercolor tradition would develop and transform. His work was foundational precisely because it treated British scenery as worthy of the same serious formal attention that Claude had given to the Roman campagna.

The mountain dominates the composition from behind a sweeping river valley. Wilson’s atmospheric treatment of the summit, softened by cloud and distance, demonstrates his mastery of aerial perspective in mountain landscapes.