Oil painting, 'Moel Siabod, from Capel Curig, North Wales', John Finnie, ca. 1860

Purchased, 1863

Historical significance: John Finnie (1829-1907) was born in Aberdeen. After living at Edinburgh, Wolverhampton and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he came to London in 1853. After three years' work at the School of Design, Marlborough House, he was appointed headmaster at the School of Art at Liverpool, a post he held until 1896. In 1860 he became an Associate of the Liverpool Academy, and later its President. He exhibited in London from 1861 at the Royal Academy (until 1905), Suffolk Street, and elsewhere. Finnie was well-known as a landscape-painter and mezzotint-engraver; he was Treasurer of the Royal Cambrian Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers.

Finnie painted numerous views in North Wales, often under dark, stormy skies. This painting represents Moel Siabod, a mountain in Snowdonia above the villages of Betws-y-Coed and Capel Curig. The flecks and dots of paint, typical of Finnie's style, here create the effect of rapidly changing weather on an autumn day.

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. David Cox (1783-1859) visited Betws-y-Coed (the gateway to Snowdonia) 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, but was only completed in 1868.

9098-1863