Martin's Tower, Chepstow Castle

The subject, Chepstow Castle, dominates most of the print, sitting across the water from the viewer. It is in a state of ruin: ivy climbs up the towers, and the tops of the rightmost towers are either severely damaged or missing. The sun appears above the castle, gleaming in a wide rift between the clouds. In the foreground, shrubbery frames the castle on the left; to the right, it is bordered by grassland and trees. Two persons stand in front of the trees.

The subject, Chepstow Castle, was the final great spectacle of the Wye Tour. The crumbling walls, juxtaposed with luxuriant plant life, ensured both an impression of picturesque decay and a subtle reminder of human mortality: the closed body language of the travelers in the right extremity of the print suggests that they are awestruck by the "sublime" scene before them, while the “setting sun” and rapidly crumbling castle evoke the ephemeral nature of life and beauty (Bloomfield 3.313).

The print’s significance, like many of the landscape pieces of the day, is perhaps most evident in its picturesque subject. By examining a work of human architecture that has succumbed to the ravages of nature, the engraver is addressing the Romantic notion of the picturesque. The theme of mortality (established by the setting sun) suggests that the viewer of the ruins is evaluating himself rather than the castle’s picturesque qualities, and is therefore following in the footsteps of Wordsworth. In Wordsworth’s poem “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye Valley during a tour, July 13, 1798,” “memory and association are even stronger influences on [the poet’s] feelings . . . than is the impact of the physical scenery itself” (Andrews 86). This examination of one’s self rather than the landscape “launch[ed] a new phase in man’s relationship with the natural world, on the spot where, a generation earlier, Picturesque tourism itself was launched” (Andrews 86). By focusing on the self, rather than whether or not a scene is “correctly Picturesque," Bloomfield was embracing a shift in the way the natural world was viewed—less as a work of art to be judged, and more as a conduit to one’s innermost thoughts and feelings (Gilpin 18). This shift is a fundamental tenet of Romanticism as we understand it today.