George Orleans De La Motte (1788-1861)

There is very little known of this artist other than he was brother to William Alfred Delamotte, a better known landscape artist, Royal Academician and Professor of Landscape Drawing at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

There are examples by George Orleans, at the National Museum of Wales. This painting is one of the finest in the Neath collection, it is in the Italianate style adopted by artists of the period who travelled the 'Grand Tour'. Three of George Orleans De La Motte's sons became artists.

Thomas Hornor (1758-1844)

Thomas Hornor was was born in Kingston upon Hull. He set up as a topographical artist and surveyor and gained a reputation as an accomplished delineator of landed properties, common lands, roads, canals and drainage.

His interest in landscape gardening and the picturesque influenced his style of estate mapping with panoramas which he called ‘panoramic chorometry’.

He was commissioned by a lawyer, John Edwards, to record his John Nash house, grounds and the surrounding landscape of the Rheola estate in the Vale of Neath. He also produced a series of sumptuous leather-bound albums around south Wales.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)

Turner was a landscape painter, traveller, poet and teacher. Many people consider him the first modern painter! The art critic John Ruskin said he was ‘the greatest of the age’.

Joseph Mallord William was born in London in 1775. His dad was a barber, but Turner always knew he wanted to be an artist. When he was just 14 years old he became a student at the Royal Academy of Art in London.

One of the reasons that Turner was so extraordinary was because he liked to draw and paint ‘en plein air’, which means out in the open. This was unusual in Turner’s day as most artists painted in their studios. Turner took his sketchbooks, canvases and his paints out with him every day and painted what he saw.

Turner's will left more than 19,000 watercolours, drawings, and oils to the British nation. Most of these works are in the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, London.