Oil painting, 'Driftwood after a Storm, Betws-y-Coed', Richard Sebastian Bond, 1870

Scene in mountainous country at the junction of two torrents, which rush over rocks to meet in a boiling pool on the right. On the left, stranded by rocks on the further side of the nearer torrent, lie two tree trunks; in the centre lies another, which five men with two horses are trying to drag to the left bank. In the background are wild mountains and valleys.

Given by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, Bt

Given by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, Bart., 1901

Historical significance: Richard Sebastian Bond (1808-1886) was born in Liverpool, where he was educated and where he lived for the greater part of his life. He finally settled at Bettws-y-Coed in North Wales. Bond's subjects were principally landscape and coastal scenes. He occasionally exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere between 1846 and 1872, but the majority of his works appeared at Liverpool and midland towns.

Driftwood after a storm, Bettws-y-Coed is a scene in mountainous country at the junction of two torrents, which rush over rocks to meet in a boiling pool on the right. On the left, stranded by rocks on the further side of the nearer torrent, lie two tree trunks; in the centre lies another, which five men with two horses are trying to drag to the left bank. In the background are wild mountains and valleys. The twin peaks in the distance suggest that the mountain represented is 'Y Lliwedd' in Snowdonia, with Snowdon wreathed in cloud in the right background.

Bettws-y-Coed, the 'gateway to Snowdonia', was one of the most popular destinations for landscape painters in the second half of the nineteenth century. The popular pictorial image of Snowdonia was invented by the Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson (1713/14-1782) in the 1760s; however, the landscape became much more accessible from the 1840s, especially after the arrival of the railway at the coastal resort of Llandudno in 1848 encouraged large scale tourism from Liverpool and further afield. The painter David Cox (1783-1859), a friend of Bond, visited Betws-y-Coed to paint every year between 1844-56, encouraging many other artists to work there. In 1863 the railway line linking Llandudno Junction with Betws-y-Coed was begun, and was completed in 1868, two years before the execution of this painting.

Driftwood after a storm, Bettws-y-Coed was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1870. It was given to the museum in 1901 by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (1837-1914), the chief protagonist in the Bacon / Shakespeare authorship controversy, and author of Bacon is Shakespeare (1910) and The Shakespeare Myth (1912).

633-1901