Dolbadern Castle and Llanberis Lake

Dolbadarn Castle and Llanberis Lake at the Cooper Gallery depicts the 13th-century castle built by Llewelyn the Great overlooking Llyn Padarn in Snowdonia. Wilson painted this iconic Welsh site that Turner would later make famous in his 1800 Royal Academy submission, establishing a lineage of Welsh landscape painting from Wilson through the Romantic era. Richard Wilson's Italian landscapes were the foundation on which his entire career was built. The years he spent in Rome in the 1750s, studying the work of Claude Lorrain and Gaspar Dughet in the landscape of the Roman campagna that had inspired them, gave him the compositional intelligence and tonal discipline that distinguished his mature work from the topographical painting that preceded him in British art. His Italian subjects — the Alban Hills, the volcanic lakes, the ruins of the campagna — were produced both for the British tourists who wanted souvenirs of their Grand Tour and for the collector market in London that was learning to value landscape painting as a serious genre.

The castle tower rises above the lake as a strong vertical element. Wilson captures the dramatic scale of the Snowdonian landscape with the lake providing reflective depth in the foreground.