Victorian Brecon - the Struet from the Honddu

Brecon and district
in Victorian times

An artist's view of Brecon, 1850

This picture is from a fine watercolour painting of the bridge over the River Honddu in Brecon, with the peaks of Pen y Fan visible in the distance.
It was the work of the Victorian landscape artist Joseph Murray Ince, who spent much of his life in the Welsh border country around Presteigne.

For more about this painter see our Presteigne page on Joseph Murray Ince

A view of
Brecon
1850

Joseph Murray Ince was born in London in 1806, but moved to Presteigne as a young child.
He was a very skilled artist and showed paintings at the
Royal Academy at the age of only 19. He produced many landscapes of Wales and Herefordshire, and also painted the colleges of Cambridge. He died in London in 1859 at the age of 53.

The view is looking across the River Honddu and along the Struet. The building at the centre of the painting, now the Bull's Head Hotel, is little changed today.
The artist was already a successful painter by the start of the Victorian age in 1837, so his pictures show landscapes as they appeared in the first half of Queen Victoria's long reign.

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