Since the eighteenth century, many artists have travelled to the West
of England and to Wales to find a world of myths and megaliths redolent
of an ancient Celtic past.
This section covers an area ranging from Stonehenge, depicted in Henry
Mark Anthony's huge painting, to North Wales, from the Wye Valley
to Cornwall.
Among the highlights are works by the classical Richard Wilson
and the late romantic Clarence Whaite, who discovered
a druidical world of myth and folklore in Snowdonia.
In the twentieth century, artists such as Graham Sutherland
and David Jones found in Pembrokeshire a mysterious world
of natural forces and enchantment, a refuge from the terrible realities
of the times.
By the same period, a number of artists, including Ben Nicholson
and Barbara Hepworth, had established a colony at St
Ives in Cornwall - and after the Second World War this fishing village
at the far western end of Britain had become an internationally renowned
centre for abstract art.
Artists such as Peter Lanyon married a commitment to
new techniques to a romantic vision in large canvases, which created an
entirely new form of landscape art.
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