: Portraiture & Landscape

Sisley and south Wales

Within the Museum's art collections is a view of the south Wales coast painted by Alfred Sisley - La falaise a Penarth, le soir, marée basse ('The cliff at Penarth, the evening, low tide'). Sisley's coastal views of 1897 are the only pictures of Wales ever painted by a leading Impressionist.

The first Impressionist exhibition

Born in Paris in 1839 to British parents, Alfred Sisley became a leading member of the circle of young painters who stood in opposition to the traditional art taught at the French Académie. In 1874, this group mounted the show that has gone down in history as the 'First Impressionist Exhibition'. Sisley participated in three of the next seven shows organized by the Impressionists between 1876 and 1886.

He never enjoyed the success of his friends Monet, Renoir and Pissarro and in 1882 he withdrew to the small town of Moret-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau, where he worked for the rest of his career, dying there in 1899.

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Sisley paints south Wales

In the summer of 1897, Sisley visited south Wales, staying at 4 Clive Place, Penarth and on 5 August he married Eugenié Lescouezec at Cardiff Town Hall.

Sisley found Penarth stimulating. On 16 July he wrote "I have been here for a week ... The countryside is very pretty and the Roads with the big ships sailing into and out of Cardiff, is superb ... I don't know how long I shall stay at Penarth. I am very comfortable here, 'in lodgings' with some very decent folk. The climate is very mild, and has indeed been too hot these last few days, especially now as I write. I hope to make good use of what I see around me and to return to Moret in October, or thereabouts".

Sisley's 19 or so oil paintings of Penarth and Langland Bay near Swansea (where he stayed from 15 August until his return to Moret on 1 October) are his only sea pieces and show the energy and excitement of a new discovery. The Penarth seascapes are more atmospheric than the Langland views, which capture the intense heat and light of the Gower Peninsula.

Six Penarth views have so far been identified. One shows a tree at the cliff's edge with shipping and Penarth Pier in the background. Two show the view northwards up the Bristol Channel and three show the view southwards looking along the cliff's edge towards Lavernock. La falaise a Penarth is one of these southward looking views.

The evening light rakes sharply from the west, casting a mauvish shadow from the steep cliff over the beach below. It depicts low tide, with the rocks of Ranny Point and Lavernock Point clearly visible.

On 4 October 1897 an article in the French paper Le Journal observed: "The Impressionist master has brought back from Penarth and Langland Bay a series of admirable sea pieces, in which the strange flavour of that landscape, little frequented by painters, is rendered with an art that is as captivating as it is personal."

Sisley's vision marks a fundamental change in the interpretation of the Welsh landscape, replacing the Romantic outlook of Turner and his successors. He and his fellow Impressionists blazed a trail for the next generation, led by the native Welsh artists Augustus John and James Dickson Innes.

Samuel Palmer ranks among the most important British landscape painters of the Romantic Period. The first of his paintings to enter the collections of Amgueddfa Cymru is a landscape titled The Rising of the Lark.

The Rising of the Lark

by Samuel Palmer.
Acquired 1990; Gift; Sidney Leigh through the National Art Collections Fund

Samuel Palmer (1805–51)

Samuel Palmer was the son of a London bookseller. His early work was profoundly influenced by the visionary poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827), whom Palmer met in 1824.

Palmer settled in the village of Shoreham in Kent. He created a symbolic language, using his pictures to celebrate the rural fruitfulness and pastoral simplicity of the world before the industrial revolution.

Palmer’s later work is more conventional and naturalistic. He travelled to Wales and other parts of Britain in the early 1830s, but no place inspired him as much as Shoreham.

Following his marriage to Hannah, the daughter of the artist John Linnell (1792—1882), his painting became increasingly geared to the requirements of the art market.

Inspired by a poem

The Rising of the Lark is inspired by lines from L’Allegro by the poet John Milton (1608–74), a favourite of the artist:

Through the rising sun and the joyful song of the lark, Palmer suggests a new beginning. The shepherd opening the gate through which the lamb will pass into the broad landscape may symbolise the stirrings of new life.

Palmer based this oil painting on a detailed drawing dating from his later time in Shoreham. His son Alfred Herbert Palmer wrote about the picture in his biography, The Life of Samuel Palmer. He suggests that it was painted soon after his father’s return from Italy in 1839.

The Romantic Period

This painting belongs to the Romantic period. At this time many artists, musicians and writers aimed to recapture a rural lifestyle which they felt was being lost to industrialisation.

Over the past few years, the Museum has been examining a number of paintings in the collections by Richard Wilson. Modern scientific equipment can reveal hidden details about the structure and materials used in these paintings. The results provide a fascinating insight into the artist's working methods and have led to discovering the origin of some of the more doubtful paintings from Wilson's work.

Infra-Red Light

Infra-red light has been used to see whether the paintings have subsequently been altered or painted over by the artist. Infra-red light can penetrate all but the deepest blue pigments to reveal any dark tones overlying a light coloured ground. It has been discovered that there are underdrawings in both the oil sketch of Dolbadarn Castle (NMW A 5203) and the large finished painting of the same subject (NMW A 72). In the oil sketch, the underdrawing includes a bridge across the river in the distance and a fence in the right foreground. Neither of these features were used in the final sketch. Furthermore in the large painted version Mount Snowdon is included in the background and the distant riverside buildings are moved further to the left. His ability to rework his designs brings variety to the many versions he painted of the same subjects and helps explain how he gives his English and Welsh views a grand classical appearance.

Paint Structure and Materials

Subjecting Wilson's work to X-rays has enabled the structure of Wilson's paintings to be examined. X-rays easily penetrate some materials, but are reflected by others. Some pigments traditionally used in oil painting come from heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium and lead. Lead white being one of the most commonly used. X-rays show up the structure of the painting and any changes that may have been made using lead white. Wilson usually painted his skies in a mixture of lead white and a blue pigment only down as far as the horizon, skirting around any trees and foliage silhouetted against the sky. The foreground and trees are painted largely with earth colours, which X-rays easily penetrate. A typical X-ray of a painting by Wilson should show a strong contrast between sky and foreground areas. This is best illustrated by Caernarfon Castle (NMW A 73). Any landscape not showing this characteristic contrast therefore can be assumed to have been produced by someone other than Wilson.

A few of the paintings examined so far show that Wilson sometimes completely reworked a composition. Dinas Bran (NMW A 3277) was originally started as a View of Tivoli (see NMW A 495). The town on the slopes of the hill is clearly visible in X-ray together with a wayside shrine, which occurs in other versions of that subject. He also occasionally reused a canvas. Dolbadarn Castle (NMW A 72) has been painted over a portrait of a woman, and Landscape with Banditti around a Tent (NMW A 69) is painted over a Venetian-style reclining nude.

Powerful microscopes

Tiny paint samples have been taken and looked at under incredibly powerful microscopes.

The pigments found in the paint layers almost exactly match the palette Wilson used. Prussian blue and indigo mixed with lead white are the chief pigments found in his skies, and ochre, Naples yellow, red and yellow lakes, Prussian blue and indigo in his foliage and foregrounds. Ultramarine blue however, which, according to contemporary accounts, Wilson used in finishing his skies, has not yet been found.

Proving Fakes

Although most of Wilson's close followers would have used a very similar palette to that of their master, this type of modern analysis has proved that later imitations were false as the pictures contained pigments that were not known in Wilson's day. These include NMW A 5195 Coast Scene near Naples, which contains cobalt blue, first introduced in 1817 and NMW A 5206 Cilgerran Castle which has a ground containing barytes, introduced at the end of the 18th century.

This research has produced information vital to a deeper historical understanding of individual works by Wilson, as well as some definite conclusions as to the status of paintings of doubtful origin.

Amgueddfa Cymru owns the largest collection of paintings by Richard Wilson outside London, holding over 20 paintings in its stores and on display to the public.

The Artist

Richard Wilson was born and brought up in Penegoes , Montgomeryshire and moved to London in 1729 to train as a portrait painter under Thomas Wright. Following his apprenticeship in 1735 he began producing portraits of Welsh and English sitters. In 1750 he left London for Rome where he remained until 1757. During this time he developed new skills as a landscape painter in the grand classical style following the examples of Poussin, Claude and Zuccarelli.

On his return to London he hired several apprentices and paying pupils included Thomas Jones and Joseph Farington who both ended up adopting something of Wilson's studio practice.

Over the next fifteen years he produced large numbers of Italian, English and Welsh landscapes repeating the more popular subjects many times over. Gradually the market for this type of painting disappeared and his income dwindled. The Royal Academy, of which he had been a founder member in 1768, eventually appointed him as Librarian with a salary of £50 per annum. Eventually his health deteriorated and he retired to Colomendy near Mold where he died in 1782.

Portrait Painting Technique

Wilson's initial portraits date from 1740-50 and reflect the taste of his day. Subjects are usually shown bust-length in an oval with a suitable background echoing the aspirations of the sitter. Wilson's loose but masterly handling of paint is visible in the costumes of his subjects, showing details of fastenings and other decorative features. Wilson painted skin tones in three stages. The first colouring established the basics of the face using a shade tint for the darker tones and a light tint for the general flesh tone. The second painting, after the first was dry, consisted in heightening of the lights, glazing the darks and adding carmine to the lips and cheeks. The final or third painting allowed final corrections to the glazing.

A particular hallmark of his portraiture is the grey underpainting left exposed to form a mid-tone of the skin. This is easily visible in the portraits of

Richard Owen (NMW A 5005) and the Maid of Honour (NMW A 67).

Landscape Painting Technique

Wilson decided to abandon portraiture in favour of landscape painting whilst in Italy. His landscape paintings were produced by first applying an underdrawing of brown paint, followed by ‘dead-colouring', a task which was given to the studio apprentices. Thin washes of colour were applied at this stage; Prussian blue and grey-brown for the sky, and a mixture of red and blue pigments for the landscape. The colour was applied to a thickness depending on the depth of tone required, allowing the light tone of the ground to show through more towards the horizon. Once the dead-colouring was dry it was oiled out before the second painting.

For the foreground Joseph Farington records that Wilson 'went over it a second time, heightening every part with colour and deepening the shadows, but still, brown, loose and flat, and left in a state for finishing: the half-tints laid in, without highlights.' In the third and final painting of the foreground Wilson altered the tints, adding the necessary sharpness to the different objects, before glazing them with rich warm tints, and finally adding further solid tints over this.

The sky and distant landscape, on the other hand, were worked wet-in wet after the initial dead-colouring, rather than in two separate stages. This allowed Wilson to achieve easier blending of the clouds with the blue of the sky, apparently using ultramarine rather than Prussian blue for this stage of painting. Last of all the horizon was adjusted and the distance softened with grey-brown again as necessary.

Drawing Practice

Drawing was important to Wilson with the first year of his pupils' training being devoted purely to drawing, which he believed gave them a good grounding 'in the principles of light and shade without being dazzled and misled by the flutter of colours.'

The majority of his surviving drawings date from his visit to Italy (1750-7). These are made up of studies taken directly from nature and designs drawn from his imagination. His preferred medium was black chalk and stump on a grey paper. He used these drawings as an inspiration for his oil paintings but rarely translated them directly into paint. He was constantly reworking the original designs and making adjustments as he painted.

In addition his colours were all derived from his visual memory or his imagination as he disapproved of tinted drawings and never used watercolours to make studies from nature.

Wilson's palette according to Paul Sandby from Whitley's Artists and their Friends in England 1700-1799. (Medici Society pub. 1928)

Wilson's Palette:

Both Joseph Farington, who became his pupil in 1763, and the watercolourist Paul Sandby, one of his friends, recorded Wilson's palette. Their accounts differ slightly but together give the range of pigments we would expect to find in his paintings.

Blues: ultramarine, Prussian blue, indigo
Reds: vermilion, light red, red lake
Yellows: yellow ochre, yellow lake, Naples yellow, brown pink
Browns: Roman ochre, burnt siena
Greens: terre verte
White: lead white
Black: ivory or bone black

At a glance:

• 1714: Born in Montgomeryshire
• 1728: Moved to London to take up apprenticeship with Thomas Wright
• 1735: Became Painter in his own right
• 1750: Travelled to Rome to developing his painting in the style of Poussin, Claude and Zuccarelli
• 1757: Returned to London training pupils such as Thomas Jones and Joseph Farington
• 1768: Founder member of The Royal Academy
• 1772: Appointed Librarian of The Royal Academy
• >1782: Died in Mold, Wales

Enjoy a journey through five hundred years of Welsh history. This gallery introduces you to the most fascinating ‘faces of Wales’, including faces from the world of politics, the theatre, sports and literature — all men and women who in their time changed the face of Wales. Click on the thumbnails below to discover an astonishing range of artists, some as world-famous as Augustus John and Hogarth, others who will be a revelation to you.