After apprenticing with a silversmith in 1791, John Varley began studying drawing with Joseph Charles Barrow by 1793, and he emulated the work of Thomas Girtin. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1798 and joined Dr. Thomas Monro’s informal academy at his residence about 1800. At Girtin’s death in 1802, Varley joined the Sketching Society that Girtin had founded, then led by John Sell Cotman. Varley became a founding member of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, established in 1804, and was a frequent exhibitor there. He encouraged his students to “Go to Nature for Everything,” though later he also promoted adapting nature to the requirements of the composition.1 He instructed amateur and professional artists of the next generation, including David Cox, John Linnell, and Peter De Wint. His influence as a teacher extended through his drawing manuals: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Drawing in Perspective (1815–20), Precepts of Landscape Drawing (1816–21), and A Treatise on the Principles of Landscape Design (c. 1818).
Before 1750, wild, rugged landscapes, such as mountain scenery, were considered unpleasing to the eye. However, when Edmund Burke published in 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, which remarked on the sublime ideals of fear, awe, and vastness in landscapes, attitudes shifted. The Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815) thwarted travel to continental Europe, and the mountains of North Wales became a popular place for sketching tours for British artists, first noted in the prints of Paul Sandby, who published a set of twelve aquatints of North Wales in 1776, followed by a view of South Wales in 1777.2
Varley made his first sketching tour to Wales either in 1798 or most likely 1799 with the landscape painter George Arnald and the drawing master Thomas Baynes, followed by subsequent trips in 1800 and 1802, when he traveled with his brother Cornelius. These trips would inform many of his exhibited works throughout his artistic career.3 However, the watercolors that he produced in the first decade of the 1800s are more compelling, portraying the awe-inspiring character of the mountains in Wales. Kaufmann has pointed out that Varley’s Welsh views are motivated by Girtin’s portrayals, as well as those of J. R. Cozens and “above all, of Richard Wilson whose Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle is the progenitor of these Welsh compositions” (fig. 37.1).4
The writings of the Welsh-born naturalist Thomas Pennant, in particular His Journey to Snowdon (1781) in the second of his two-volume A Tour in Wales (1784), became an important source for travelers and a standard among published tour accounts.5 Leigh’s Guide to Wales and Monmouthshire followed suit, observing that Wales “has frequently been called Switzerland in miniature, as it bears a very strong resemblance to that romantic country, in the beauty of its fertile vales, and the rude character of its lofty mountains. . . . North Wales is particularly distinguished for the grandeur of its mountain scenery.”6 As Kaufmann has noted, Varley’s route probably followed the standard tour, from the border town of Chirk to Llangollen, then to Capel Curig, Snowdon, and Bangor, back to Capel Curig, and then along to Llanberis and Caenarvon, then Beddgelert, Harlech, Barmouth, Dolgelly, Cader Idris, Tay-y-Llyn, and back to Dolgelly, Bala, and the border. The trip could have been made in reverse, but, as Leigh’s Guide to Wales and Monmouthshire states, this direction “exhibits the scenery in the most favourable manner.”7
Varley painted this view of Mount Snowdon on a number of occasions, looking northeast from the slope of Moel Hebog, close to the summit, across to Mount Snowdon, with the village of Beddgelert below.8 The size and quality of this 1812 watercolor is typical of the pictures he exhibited; he included it in the 1813 exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water Colors. He has described the scene with soft washes of blue, gray, and ochre and utilized his own aesthetic rules of a carefully balanced composition with a recession of planes—keeping the foreground in shadow, lighting the middle ground, and emphasizing the principal subject of the majestic mountain in the distance.9 —Dena M. Woodall
Notes
1. See A. T. Story, Life of John Linnell, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1892), 25, and Anne Lyles, “John Varley’s Early Work,” in Old Water-Colour Society’s Club, vol. 59, ed. Adrian Bury (London: Bankside Gallery, 1984), 18.
2. William Walker and William Angus, after Paul Sandby, Snowdon in Carnarvonshire, 1779, etching with aquatint and engraving. This view of Mount Snowdon is from Paul Sandby’s The Virtuosi’s Museum: Containing Select Views in England, Scotland and Ireland, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, the Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949 [49.65(1-108)].
3. See C. M. Kaufmann, John Varley (1778–1842) (London: B. T. Batsford, in association with Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984), 13.
4. Richard Wilson, Snowdon from Llyn Nantel, c. 1765–66, oil on canvas, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. See Kaufmann, John Varley (1778–1842), 20. Anne Lyles, likewise, made this comment: “In his early career, however, it is at times difficult to ascertain whether Varley is looking at Wilson at first hand or interpreting him through Girtin. . . . It was probably in copying Girtin’s watercolour [of Bala Lake], for example, that Varley first learned, via Wilson, the Claudean method of distributing light and shade which he was to define a few years later in his Treatise on the Principles of Landscape Design.” See Lyles, “John Varley’s Early Work,” 6–7.
5. The nine-hundred-page guidebook contained full-page engravings of landscapes to be seen on the journey made after watercolors by Welsh topographical artist Moses Griffith. See Peter Bishop, “Thomas Pennant (1726–98): The Journey to Snowdon and Its Influence on Artists Visiting North Wales,” British Art Journal 19, no. 3 (Winter 2018): 87–95. In Paul Sandby’s Twelve Views in North Wales (1776), he referred to “Pennant’s List” in making his print series and portrayed Mount Snowdon in the distance in plate VII. See Harlech Castle in Merioneth Shire with Snowdon at a Distance, 1776, aquatint and etching, and see also Llanberis Lake Castle dol Badern and the Great Mountain Snowdon, from Miscellaneous Welsh Views, 1776, aquatint and etching; see Ann V. Gunn, The Prints of Paul Sandby (1731–1809): A Catalogue Raisonné (London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2015), 228, cat. 220, and 283, cat. 307.
6. See Samuel Leigh, Leigh’s Guide to Wales and Monmouthshire: Containing Observations on the Mode of Travelling, Plans of Various Tours, Sketches of the Manners and Customs, Notices of Historical Events, A Description of Every Remarkable Place, and a Minute Account of the Wye, 2nd ed. (London: Levey, Robson, and Franklyn, 1833), v. No doubt, Varley would have also paid attention to Thomas Pennant’s Journey to Snowdon (1781), which was illustrated with etchings by Moses Griffith.
7. See Kaufmann, John Varley (1778–1842), 13, and Leigh, Leigh’s Guide to Wales and Monmouthshire, 29.
8. An 1804 landscape by Varley is recorded from the Agnes and Norman Lupton Collection. See John Varley, Snowdon from the Slopes of Moel Hebog, c. 1804, watercolor, Leeds Art Gallery, the Lupton Bequest [13.234/53]; see Adrian Bury, John Varley of the “Old Society” (Leigh-On-Sea, UK: F. Lewis, the Tithe House, 1946), pl. 14. Another view is Snowdon, c. 1800–1842, watercolor, Victoria and Albert Museum, London [P.52-1924], and one was on the art market in 2011 set from a higher vantage point; see John Varley, Snowdon from Moel Hebog with Beddgelert below, North Wales, no date, Christie’s, South Kensington, Old Master & Early British Drawing & Watercolours, December 8, 2011, lot 412.
9. “The foreground . . . shadow should be succeeded by a mass of light in the next distance, and that light succeeded by the middle tint of the distance”; See John Varley, “Principles of Light and Shade,” in A Treatise on the Principles of Landscape Design (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1821), no. 1, plate 1.
Mount Snowden from the Slopes of Moel Hebog, Beddgelert below
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Provenance[Spink & Son, Ltd, London, as of 1980s]; private collection, UK; [Guy Peppiatt, Ltd., London, 2015–2016]; purchased by the MFAH, 2016.Comparative Images
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