🌦️ Victorian Welsh Landscape Oil Painting “A Summer Shower Passing Over the Snowdon Range” (1878) by Charles Leslie 

🏔️ Subject & Medium

A sweeping Victorian landscape view of Snowdon / Yr Wyddfa in Wales, captured at the exact moment a summer shower begins to pass and sunlight returns—revealing a luminous rainbow suspended over still waters. 🌈 The scene blends grandeur and quiet human presence, making it equally powerful from across the room and rewarding up close.
Medium: Oil on canvas (relined – see condition report).

🖼️🎨 Composition & Technique

This is a classic high-Victorian “sublime landscape” on a grand scale—expansive sky, distant mountains softened by weather, and a calm foreground that invites the viewer into the scene. Leslie constructs the view with strong recession: your eye moves from the quiet lake in the foreground, across the valley, and upward into the cool, misted Snowdon range where forms dissolve into cloud and haze.

The dramatic focal point is the sky. A refined, naturalistic rainbow arcs diagonally through layered storm clouds, while shafts of light and brightened vapour suggest the shower drifting away. The atmosphere is convincingly built through tonal control: distant peaks painted in cool silvery greys, slate tones, and soft blue-greens, with pale highlights that read as sunlight catching damp rock through thinning cloud. The sky itself shifts delicately between pearl white, smoke grey, and misted blue, giving the picture that sought-after Victorian sense of weather and distance.

In contrast, the nearer land at right glows with warmth and structure—golden ochres, russets, deep browns, and mossy greens in the grasses and trees—creating a rich counterpoint to the cooler mountains beyond. The water is rendered in muted blue-grey with subtle tonal variation and soft reflections, enhancing the hush after rainfall. Birds skim low over the surface, and at the right shoreline two small figures fish quietly—an intimate human note that heightens both scale and poetry. Overall, the painting balances drama and calm: storm light and mountain grandeur softened by still water and measured colour harmony.

👨🎨 About the Artist

Charles Leslie (British, 19th century), often identified as Charles Edward John Leslie (1839–1886), was a Victorian landscape painter closely associated with the celebrated Williams family of painters—a prolific dynasty whose members helped define the look of 19th-century British landscape art. Working within this tradition, Leslie developed a recognizable style admired for sweeping mountain backdrops, broad skies, reflective waters, and a strong sense of place.

He is recorded as exhibiting at major London venues including the Royal Academy of Arts, the British Institution, and the Suffolk Street Gallery (Society of British Artists). Leslie’s Welsh and Scottish subjects were especially prized in the Victorian period, when collectors sought paintings that conveyed both the romance and the power of nature—qualities that remain highly appealing to collectors today, particularly for grand interiors and refined traditional settings.

🏛️ Historical Significance

In the Victorian era, Wales—particularly Snowdon—carried powerful Romantic associations. Collectors valued scenes of rugged terrain and shifting weather as symbols of the sublime: nature’s beauty, scale, and emotional impact. Dated 1878, this work sits in the heart of the period when British landscape painting was deeply collected and ideally suited to grand rooms—uniting decorative presence with serious painterly atmosphere.

✍️ Signed

Signed and dated in red to the lower left: “Charles Leslie 1878” ✅
Also fitted with a brass title plaque reading: “A Summer Shower Passing Over The Snowdon Range – Charles Leslie – 1878.” 🏷️

🖼️ Framed

Presented in an impressive, richly ornamented gilt frame—substantial, visually commanding, and entirely in keeping with the painting’s Victorian character and scale.

📏 Size

Dimensions (including frame): 89.5 cm high x 140 cm wide x 6 cm deep
A true statement work for a prominent wall—ideal for a library, office, or main reception space.

🧾 Provenance

Private collection.
Documented UK auction provenance: sold by Bigwood Auctioneers & Valuers Ltd, Stratford-upon-Avon, in the Select Interiors & Antiques auction on 29 July 2022, Lot 168.
Curated by Cheshire Antiques Consultant LTD.

✅ Why You’ll Love It

✅ Monumental Victorian landscape presence—decorative impact with genuine period character
✅ Classic Snowdon / Wales subject matter with enduring collector appeal
✅ A refined rainbow-and-storm-clearing sky handled with real atmosphere and restraint
✅ Sophisticated colour harmony: cool misted distance balanced by warm, glowing foreground tones
✅ Signed and dated 1878, with matching title plaque
✅ Documented auction provenance from a UK saleroom for added buyer confidence

🔍 Condition Report

Offered in good antique condition overall. The painted surface shows age-appropriate craquelure and minor surface wear consistent with a 19th-century oil. There are small areas of paint loss and surface abrasion visible on close inspection. The canvas has been professionally relined. The gilt frame shows historic wear, cracking & old repairs, and localized losses consistent with age and use.