A Scene on the Coast, Merionethshire - Storm Passing Off

Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding, 1787–1855

1818

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

A dramatic coastal landscape depicts a stormy sky breaking over mountains and a bay with sailing ships. Figures and cattle are visible on the shore. Romantic artists celebrated the transcendent beauty of wild, untamed nature. This painting represents Traeth Bychan, near Tremadog, a remote spot on the Isle of Anglesey in North Wales. The result is a great hymn to the sublime power of nature. Colonel Grant, a contemporary critic, described this view as “a vast, brooding canvas, lowering in storm and wrought with a brush full charged with thunder.” Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection