‘The Edge of the Moor near Barmouth’, a Landscape by David Bates

#18262: ‘The Edge of the Moor near Barmouth’, a Landscape by David Bates
British, dated 1893
Canvas: Height 62cm, width 92cm, depth 2cm
Frame: Height 76cm, width 106cm, depth 7cm

This Victorian oil on canvas by David Bates shows cattle grazing beside a moorland pool near Barmouth, with the mountains of north-west Wales beyond.
The foreground is taken up by a still pool edged with rushes and dry grasses, its surface reflecting the sky. A broken post and rail stand in the water at the right, and a rustic fence runs back across the marshy ground behind. Beyond the reeds, five cattle graze and drink on the open meadow: one is white and the others brown and black.
At the left, a grassy hill crowned by a rocky crag rises above a dry-stone wall and patches of woodland. To the right, the valley opens onto a range of blue-grey mountains on the horizon. Banks of white cumulus cloud cross a pale blue sky, and a pair of birds is in flight above the hill.
The canvas is signed and dated lower left ‘David Bates 1893’ and inscribed on the reverse ‘The Edge of the Moor near Barmouth / David Bates / 1893’. It is presented in a giltwood frame with foliate and beaded mouldings.
Views of Wales and the Worcestershire countryside, often with cattle, pools and open moorland, form a large part of David Bates’s work. He was born in 1840 in March, Cambridgeshire, and grew up in Upton upon Severn. From 1855 he was apprenticed at the Royal Worcester Porcelain Works, where he specialised in painting flowers. He later turned to landscape full time and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1863 to 1893, as well as at the Grosvenor Gallery, Suffolk Street and the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. This canvas dates from the last year in which he showed at the Academy. His work reflects the influence of Benjamin Williams Leader, and a snow scene by Bates was bought by Lord Leighton, then President of the Royal Academy. Bates travelled widely in Wales, and dated views near Llanbedr (1894) and on the Glaslyn (1895) show him working in the same part of Gwynedd in the years that followed. Examples are held in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Nottingham Castle Museum, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Worcester City Museum. He died at Teddington in 1921. Barmouth lies on the coast of north-west Wales at the mouth of the Mawddach estuary, and had grown as a resort after the railway arrived in the 1860s. With its still water, grazing cattle and distant peaks, the painting reflects the late 19th-century appetite for the scenery of north Wales.
$11,250