Edward Pugh(1761–1813)

Edward Pugh was born at Ruthin in the Vale of Clwyd, Denbighshire, in 1761, son of a Ruthin coach-painter. Apprenticed to his father's coach-painting trade at thirteen, he was sent at sixteen to Liverpool to study miniature painting under the miniaturist John Walters, the apprenticeship that gave him the technical foundation of his career: the ivory-and-watercolour portrait miniature of the late Georgian period.

He came back to Ruthin in 1781 and set up a studio above the family premises. The next twenty-three years were the miniature-painting career across north Wales, on a circuit through Wrexham, Mold, Denbigh, Conwy, Caernarfon, Bangor and the Welsh-speaking parishes of Anglesey, taking commissions from the local gentry, the parish clergy and the coastal mariners. About a hundred and twenty of his miniatures survive in identified provenance, a recognised speciality of late-Georgian Welsh portrait painting.

The book was the second register of his career. Having read the English-language tour books of Wales by Pennant and Wyndham, he recognised that no comparable book had been written by a Welshman with native Welsh-language access to the parish and chapel community. He proposed an illustrated tour of the whole country in 1804, took an advance against three guineas per delivered watercolour, and spent the next nine years walking.

He walked the whole country on foot at about ten miles a day, taking watercolour sketches of villages, parish churches, ruined castles, harbour scenes, lead-mining settlements and the ironworks-and-coal communities of south Wales, and writing the descriptive text in a Welsh-English bilingual register as he went, perhaps four hundred watercolour studies in all.

He died at Ruthin on 19 July 1813, fifty-two years old, with the manuscript nearly complete, and is buried at St Peter's parish church alongside his parents. Cambria Depicta: A Tour Through North Wales, Illustrated with Picturesque Views by a Native Artist was published in 1816, a folio of about four hundred and twenty pages with seventy-one hand-coloured aquatint plates after his watercolours, the first illustrated travel book on Wales written by a Welshman in his own country. About three hundred and twenty of the original sketches are preserved at the National Library of Wales, which made him the subject of a 2012 monograph and exhibition. The Pugh name, the Welsh patronymic ap Hugh, he carried from a Ruthin coach-painter's family into the foundation of the modern illustrated travel literature of Wales.