Edward Pugh(1761–1813)

Edward Pugh was born at Ruthin in the Vale of Clwyd, Denbighshire, in 1761, son of a Ruthin coach-painter who decorated carriages and inn signs for the north-Wales market towns. The family was Welsh-speaking and Anglican, of small means; the father's coach trade kept the household at a respectable but pinched level through the boy's childhood. He was schooled briefly at the Ruthin grammar school, was apprenticed at thirteen to the father's coach-painting trade, and at sixteen was sent to Liverpool on the recommendation of a local Ruthin gentry patron to study miniature painting under the Liverpool miniaturist John Walters. The Liverpool apprenticeship gave him the technical foundation of his adult career: the ivory-and-watercolour portrait miniature, painted with a single-hair brush at the size of an oval pocket-locket, that was the dominant portable-portrait form of the late Georgian period.

He came back to Ruthin in 1781 at twenty and set up a small studio above the family coach-painter's premises on Castle Street. The next twenty-three years were the miniature-painting career across north Wales. He travelled from Ruthin on a circuit that took him through Wrexham, Mold, Denbigh, Conwy, Caernarfon, Bangor and the Welsh-speaking parishes of Anglesey, taking small portrait commissions from the local Welsh-speaking gentry, the parish clergy, the coastal mariners of the Conwy and Menai stations, and the seasonal Welsh-tour visitors. The miniatures sold for between five and twelve guineas each across the period; he was producing perhaps thirty to forty miniatures a year by 1800; about a hundred and twenty of his miniatures survive in identified provenance in modern public and private collections, scattered across the Welsh national-museum collection at Cardiff, the Welsh-American descendant collections of the early diaspora, and the Whitechapel-art-dealer market through the 1960s and 1970s.

The book was the second register of his career. He had read the post-1750 English-language tour books of Wales (Thomas Pennant's *Tours in Wales* 1778-83, Henry Penruddocke Wyndham's *A Gentleman's Tour through Monmouthshire and Wales* 1781) and had recognised that no comparable tour book had been written by a Welshman with native Welsh-language access to the local parish and chapel community. He proposed an illustrated tour of the whole country in 1804 to the London publisher Edward Williams of Rolls Buildings, took a thirty-pound advance against three guineas per delivered watercolour, and spent the next nine years walking. He walked the whole country on foot at the rate of about ten miles a day, taking watercolour sketches of villages, parish churches, ruined castles, harbour scenes, lead-mining settlements, agricultural improvements and the ironworks-and-coal-pit industrial communities of south Wales as they ran. He wrote the descriptive text in Welsh-English bilingual register as he walked. He took perhaps four hundred watercolour studies in total across the nine years.

He died at Ruthin on 19 July 1813 of complications from pneumonia contracted on the final southern Wales section of the tour, fifty-two years old, and is buried at St Peter's parish church Ruthin alongside his parents. The manuscript was nearly complete at his death; his executor, the Ruthin solicitor John Roberts, sold the manuscript and watercolours to the London publisher E. Williams on the original Williams contract. *Cambria Depicta: A Tour Through North Wales, Illustrated with Picturesque Views by a Native Artist* was published in 1816, three years after his death, in a folio volume of about four hundred and twenty pages with seventy-one hand-coloured aquatint plates engraved by John Hill of London after the Pugh watercolours. The book ran to a single edition of about a thousand copies, sold slowly across the next two decades, and was the foundation Welsh-language-and-image tour book of the early nineteenth century: the first illustrated travel book on Wales written by a Welshman in his own country.

The original watercolour drawings have been mostly preserved at the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth (which holds about three hundred and twenty of the original four hundred sketches) and at the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings (which holds about sixty). The southern volume he had planned (*Cambria Depicta: South Wales*) was never compiled, the southern sketches dispersed through the Roberts-Williams executor sale. His miniatures remain a recognised speciality of late-Georgian Welsh portrait painting and turn up periodically at the London-and-Cardiff auction houses; he was the subject of a National Library of Wales monograph and exhibition in 2012, *Edward Pugh of Ruthin: A Native Artist*. The Pugh name in the Welsh-side catalogue is the patronymic *ap Hugh* (son of Hugh), with the standard Welsh-mutation prefix compressed into the surname across the Welsh Marches and the Vale of Clwyd; Edward Pugh carried it from a Ruthin coach-painter's family into the foundation of the modern illustrated travel-and-topographical literature of Wales.