Turner exhibited a number of oil paintings of castles, mainly Welsh, from 1798 to 1800, including 'Harlech Castle, from Twgwyn Ferry, Summer's Evening Twilight' (Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon) in the same exhibition as this picture; see also No.48. There are a number of watercolours and drawings of both Kilgarren and Harlech in the 'Hereford Court' sketchbook including a watercolour of this composition (T.B.XXXVIII-88; see also 28-9, 100). There are other versions in oil, of greater or lesser authenticity, but this picture seems to be the one exhibited in 1799 and probably purchased by Sir John Leicester, apparently at Oxford, before 1804 from the painter William Delamotte.

The very titles of this landscape and that of the 'Harlech' reflect Turner's interest in the special light of a particular moment on a particular kind of summer's day. This interest, which accompanies and perhaps even eclipses the interest of the picturesque castle, was anticipated most fully by the works of P. J. de Loutherbourg, who used similar titles for such paintings as the Tate Gallery's picture of 'A Distant Hail-Storm coming on, and the March of Soldiers with their Baggage', exhibited the same year; an earlier example is 'Daybreak Dispelling a Mist', shown in 1783. The landscape is grander and rather more solidly constructed, and the fall of light more accentuated, than in the exhibits of the previous year (see No.30), and Turner's handling of paint is broader and less close to Wilson, whose own picture of the subject, from much the same view, is much less dramatic (see W. G. Constable, Richard Wilson, 1953, pl.30a). There is an extraordinary use of basic squares and triangles to indicate the little buildings on the right.