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PRE-RAPHAELITE, JOHN SAMUEL RAVEN England 1848
Dynevor Castle
1873
Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 91.50 cm x 152.00 cm
Signed with monogram and dated 1873 lower right, inscribed on the reverse Property of Hugh M. Raven Trustee of the Raven Collection
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John Samuel Raven was born on August 21 1829. His father, Rev. Thomas Raven, was an amateur artist who painted in watercolour. John Samuel Raven followed his father’s footsteps and devoted himself to art as a profession, specialising in landscape and was most self-educated. Raven was influenced of an older school of artists, looking at the works of John Crome, Constable and Thompson of Duddingston.(1) It was not long before he, like many young artists of his era, fell under the spell of Pre-Raphaelitism and he abandoned sober darks to paint with joyful glazes of pure colour, directly from nature. John Ruskin, in his Notes on … the Royal Academy (2) of 1857, commented on Raven’s faithful study of nature.

The ruins of Dynevor Castle lie in an ancient woodland high on a wooded escarpment above the river Towy near the town of Llandilo. The castle lies not far from Carreg-Cennen Castle, which Raven painted the same year.(3) For another work by Raven of the Towy valley, The Vale of Towy, also dating from 1873, see the archives of The Leicester Galleries website.


(1) Collected works of the late John Samuel Raven, Catalogue, Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1878
(2) Notes on some the Principle Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy and Society of Painters in Watercolours, Smith Elder & Co, London 1857
(3) John Samuel Raven, The Lesser Light Rules the Night: Cerreg Cennen Castle, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873.


Hugh M. Raven, Barfield House
Sotheby's Belgravia, London, 8 March 1977, lot 56; sold to:
Private collection; to 2006

Exhibition Catalogue no, Page no, Illustration no. Institution/Venue People From To
The Leicester Galleries at The Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Art Fair 2006 Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries June 2006 June 2006
Visionary Landscapes 1850 - 2007 Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries
November 2007 December 2007
The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries
December 2010 January 2011


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