Tag: Snowdonia
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George Bowring: murdered by Welsh magic
The Victorian writer R.D. Blackmore, if he’s remembered at all today, is known for his three-volume novel Lorna Doone. It’s an adventure story, set on Exmoor in the seventeenth century, about the feuding and violent Doone clan and the love between the narrator, John Ridd, and the eponymous Lorna. The book sold badly on its…
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Cornelius Varley again
I’ve been revisiting the miraculous drawings made by Cornelius Varley when he spent time in Dolgellau in the summer of 1803. The end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century was an age of wonder for watercolour painting in Britain, but I think it’s a shame that Varley’s name isn’t celebrated as widely…
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Tennyson in Llanberis
Alfred Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire, and lived there throughout the first part of his life. The portrait of him that always comes to mind is the photo Julia Margaret Cameron took of him in 1865, which shows him as prematurely aged, with thinning, straggly hair, untidy beard and lined face (Tennyson said it made…
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Cornelius Varley in Wales
Among the many artists who came to draw and paint in Wales around the turn of the eighteenth century, Cornelius Varley is yet to receive just attention. The pictures he made in Wales are fresh, delicate and strong, the work of a young man with great visual intelligence who reacted with instinctive wonder and clarity…