View of Capel Curig with Snowdon and the Glyders beyond, North Wales

ALFRED WILLIAM HUNT
Liverpool 1830-1896 London

View of Capel Curig with Snowdon and the Glyders beyond, North Wales

Signed lower centre: AWHunt/1856
Watercolour over pencil heightened with bodycolour and gum arabic
Sheet 248 x 344mm., 9 ¾ by 13 ½ in.

Born in Liverpool, the son of a drawing master, Hunt read Classics at Corpus Christi, Oxford, on a scholarship. While a student, he was encouraged to draw by the Oxford picture dealer James Wyatt who had a shop on the High Street. Wyatt commissioned Hunt to go on a series of sketching trips to North Wales which he funded in exchange for the option to sell the finished works in his shop.

The present drawing, an early work, originates from such a trip and dates from the year of his first picture exhibited at the Royal Academy, in 1856, `The Stream from Lyn Idwal'. John Ruskin who had published his Modern Painters IV in April 1856, described it as `the best landscape I have seen in the [Academy] exhibition for many a day - uniting most subtle finish and watchfulness of Nature, with real and rare power of composition' (The Works of John Ruskin, ed. Cook & Wedderburn, 1903-12, vol. XIV, pp.50-51).