John Varley

From early in his career, John Varley made numerous sketching tours of Wales, and Welsh subjects made up a large part of his output throughout his long career. He first visited Wales in 1798, in the company of the landscape painter George Arnald, and returned there often. The artist made several visits to the town of Conwy (or Conway), in Caernarvonshire on the north coast of Wales, and views of the town and its 13th century castle were among his earliest exhibited watercolours, shown at the Royal Academy in 1800, 1803 and 1804. 

Built by King Edward I between 1283 and 1287, during his conquest of Wales, Conwy Castle had fallen into ruin by the middle of the 17th century. Its picturesque setting was much admired by artists in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Varley painted numerous views of the Castle, several of which were exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society between 1805 and 1823. The artist was particularly fond of depicting the castle from a distance, with trees acting as repoussoir elements in the foreground of the composition, as here. One such example, a very large and finished watercolour with a similar distant view of Conwy Castle framed by trees in the foreground, is in the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.