Llyn Cau, Cader Idris

Wilson was the first artist to paint this view in Merionethshire, some seven miles from his childhood home at Penegoes. It is taken from the slopes of Mynydd Moel, looking toward Llyn Cau, near the summit of Cader Idris. The precipice of Craig Cau is heightened and schematized in the cause of primitive simplicity. The mistaken contemporary belief that Llyn Cau was volcanic in origin may have encouraged Wilson to associate this view with the volcanic landscape of the Alban hills near Rome, especially Lake Nemi. Contemporary enthusiasm for such remote scenery, as reflected in the figure with the telescope in the left middle ground, was stimulated by the publication in 1757 of the popular aesthetic treatise by Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.