This landscape depicts the slate quarry of Blaenau Ffestiniog in north Wales, just south of Bangor where Peter Prendergast lived at the time. Amgueddfa Cymru commissioned the painting to hang in the restaurant at National Museum Cardiff. The large scale, bright colours, thickly applied paint and heavy outlining in black are all strong characteristics of Prendergast’s landscape paintings. The expressiveness of the brushstrokes and the thickness of the paint imply the cragginess and climatic changeability of the north Wales landscape. The artist saw beauty in the hewn industrialised landscape of Wales, having grown up in a Welsh mining village. Prendergast always began a composition with numerous drawings before beginning to paint in order to understand the landscape he was representing, often adding new sections of paper to extend the image to a wider view.