Welsh Cottages

‘Welsh Cottages’ reflects Uhlman’s long love affair with the Welsh landscape, which later earned him the title the ‘Anglo-German Welshman’ (Graham Samuel, Western Mail, 11 March 1968). He first visited Wales during the war with family holidays to Portmeirion, a coastal village in Cardigan Bay, designed and conceived by architect and fellow Hampstead resident, Clough Williams-Ellis. Williams-Ellis wrote the text for Uhlman's 1946 publication, 'An Artist in North Wales', and later transformed an old cowshed in the Croesor Valley, Beuddy Neuwdd (New Barn), into a small house for the Uhlmans. The artist described it as standing in ‘the most dramatic scenery of the whole British Isles and of all Europe perhaps’, adding, ‘I have travelled wide and far – and I know what I am talking about’. From a steep path behind the house, he would ascend to a field where, working at an immense slate table, he sketched the dramatic landscape in changing light, afterwards working up his ideas into finished paintings back in his London studio. He favoured a strong palette, particularly red sunsets, alternately fiery and brooding, or moonlit skies, always meticulously painted and mostly devoid of figures, evoking his feeling for ‘the loneliness and overwhelming grandeur of the country’.