Landscape in Wales is a bright, freely executed panel painting from the period of Augustus John’s involvement with Snowdonia. The horizon line is set low and the sky dominates the scene: atmospheric washes of blue and dusky pink were brushed wet on wet, before clouds were added on the surface to give local detail. The muted, fading light suggests the scene was painted towards evening. In contrast to the broad handling of the sky, the land below is executed precisely with finely graded shifts of colour, which indicate the illumined crests and shadowy troughs of the hillscape; and broken touches of the brush, which suggest distant wind-blasted boulders and low bushes in the foreground. The paintwork was apparently applied in one sitting, mostly in a single layer, and the exposed, untreated woodgrain of the panel support is visible in places.

Between 1911 and 1913, Augustus John undertook several painting trips to Wales with his young friend and fellow painter James Dickson Innes (1887—1914), on occasion accompanied by Melbourne-born painter Derwent Lees (1884—1931). John and Innes rented a small cottage three miles from Rhyd-y-fen, which they first occupied in May 1911. All three worked from life en plein air. John’s work is often distinguishable from Innes’s by his use of finer brush marks, a more naturalistic palette and less exaggerated shaping of landscape motifs (especially clouds and hill summits). They preferred to paint on small-scale wood panels, often measuring 12 by 16 inches and seldom larger than 14 by 18, the modest size of which made them easily transportable and was feasibly covered before the light and atmosphere changed. Working on panel also facilitated a higher intensity of impasto richness and surface brush texture: where canvas tends to absorb paint and an imprint of the brush that applied it, panel allows paint and brush texture to stand proud against the surface.

Some critics have related John’s Welsh paintings to the tradition of lyrical, poetic landscapes descended from Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Of these visits to Wales, John’s biographer Michael Holroyd wrote: ‘The pictures which these three [John, Innes and Lees] painted before the war mark a short phase in British art which, though it has been labelled ‘Post-Impressionist’, belongs more properly to the tradition of the symbolist painters. But the war was to signal the end of their landscape painting.’ John, Innes and Lees all painted figures in their Welsh landscapes (fig. 1), and these certainly belong to Puvis’s vein of symbolism. However, in autonomous landscape paintings such as Landscape in Wales, the naturalism of the scene and the plein air method belong to an older and broader tradition of the oil sketch, which originated in the eighteenth century with artists across Europe including Thomas Jones and Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. Such painting was characterised by close attention to the specific, transitory appearance of light, atmosphere and cloud formations, and a swift application of paint using an inventive, unschematic form of notation. These qualities are richly apparent from the work of John.

The palette of John’s Welsh landscapes differs considerably from his contemporaneous paintings of Provence and the Étang de Berre. Although he consistently worked in a high key, often depicting blue skies and fair weather, the Welsh landscapes are piqued with earthiness and the sobriety of buff, brown, green and ochre hues of hillside, scrub and turf. Similar qualities are also apparent in landscape paintings he made in Ireland—he visited Connemara and the Aran Isles in summer 1911 and County Galway in 1915—and to a lesser extent those of Cornwall made in 1914.