PUBLIC LECTURE: IAS / CMEMS Public Lecture with Prof John Barrell

In 1794 the Welsh-speaking artist Edward Pugh (1763-1813), the son of a country barber, published in London a series of six engravings of the area around his home town Ruthin in Denbighshire. By focussing on one, the image of a tract of common land on the Flintshire-Denbighshire border, this lecture will examine the conflicts and compromises involved in making them: between the expectations of a metropolitan audience and the local and provincial nature of the material; between Pugh’s status as an aspiring artisan-class artist and the genteel Welsh squirearchy to which he looked for patronage; between the anti-industrial ideology of the ‘picturesque’ and his concern for the development and modernisation of the Welsh economy; between the grand style to which as a relatively humble artist he did not aspire, and what Henry Fuseli dismissed as ‘tame delineations of a given spot’