Cader Idris, North Wales

Francis Greenacre (op. cit.) dates this watercolour to circa 1820. An earlier view of Cader Idris by Danby is in the Courtauld Institute (D.1952.RW.4553). Danby is recorded as visiting Wales in 1813 but there is little firm evidence to support it. Danby had trained in Dublin and in 1813 visited London with his fellow artists James O’Connor (1792-1841) and George Petrie (1789-1866). They were there only a few weeks before they ran out of money and Danby and O’Connor walked to Bristol with the intention of finding a boat to take them back to Ireland. However Danby found in Bristol a market for his landscapes and portraits and resolved to stay a while. In 1824, he moved to London and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817. By the 1820s he became famous for his grand landscape paintings. According to Redgrave ‘Danby will always take high rank with the lovers of art and genius. His imagination was of the highest class, his landscapes of the truest poetry’ (see Samuel Redgrave, A Dictionary of Artists of the English School, 1878, p.113).