Author Archive: Andrew Green
Pwy oedd Llywelyn ap Gwynn?
Dechrau’r stori hon yw llyfr. Llyfr o’r enw Rambles and walking tours around the Cambrian coast, gan Hugh E. Page. Mae’n perthyn i genre o deithlyfrau oedd yn boblogaidd yn y cyfnod rhwng y ddau ryfel byd, pan oedd marchnad barod i lyfrau o deithiau cerdded a gychwynnai o orsafoedd trenau. Y cyhoeddwr oedd y […]
Fathers and sons
In time, they say, sons turn into their fathers. For a while I’ve been aware of this metamorphosis taking place in myself. The most obvious change is physiognomic. Nowadays my head and face seem, to me at least, remarkably close to how my dad looked in his later years, though in my younger days I […]
Aberystwyth yn 1863
Roedd oes newydd yn ddechrau gwawrio i dref Aberystwyth yn 1863. Ym mis Awst y flwyddyn ganlynol cyrhaeddodd y rheilffordd o’r Amwythig, ac agorwyd yr orsaf drenau. Bron ar unwaith daeth hi’n bosib i bobl deithio i’r dref yn hawdd, yn arbennig i hala eu gwyliau haf yn yr ardal. Yn 1864 dechreuodd Thomas Savin […]
The offbeat eye of Edgar Degas
The Musée D’Orsay is big. To make the best of your time you need to have a destination in mind. So once inside it made sense to march straight for the Degas paintings on show. Three of them took my eye. Though painted at different times over a period of maybe twenty years, they’ve much […]
Édouard Vuillard’s gardens
One of the most obvious, but also the most useful, advantages of seeing the original, as opposed to a reproduction, of an art work is that you gain an immediate sense of its scale. The French painter Édouard Vuillard would often work on small, even tiny canvasses. But he was also comfortable with much larger […]
A tiger in the castle
Powis Castle is quite a frightening place. A huge lump of sandstone glowering down on the Severn valley from its ridge, it was always intended to be intimidating, when it was first built by Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, a Welsh ally of the Normans, and later on when it was controlled by the powerful Herbert family. […]
Gustav Klimt’s ‘Schubert at the piano’
Until it was mentioned on the radio the other day I’d never heard of ‘Schubert at the piano’, and apart from being fellow-Austrians I wouldn’t have thought that Gustav Klimt and Franz Schubert had much in common – one an extrovert artist fond of painterly extravagance, the other a reticent musician famously given to introspection […]
In praise of Paul Oliver
The name Paul Oliver probably won’t ring a bell for you, unless you’re a vernacular architectural historian or a blues enthusiast. But if you belong to either camp or (unlikely, but possible) both, then you’ll almost certainly feel a debt to him. Born in Nottingham in 1927 and brought up in London, he was many […]
Y llyn a ddiflannodd
Rydyn ni’n hen gyfarwydd yng Nghymru â’r arfer o greu llynnoedd newydd. Cronfeydd dŵr yw’r rhan fwyaf ohonyn nhw, wrth gwrs. Mae eu henwau – Efyrnwy, Clywedog, Elan, Claerwen, Brianne, Tryweryn – yn niferus, ac yn atseinio’n alarus trwy’r degawdau, ynghyd â geiriau cysylltiedig: boddi cymoedd, symud cymunedau, codi argaeau concrit. Ond mae hanes arall […]
Swansea’s golden age of innovation
After five years of labour our baby was born last week. It weighed in at a whopping 1.88 kilograms and almost 600 pages. Its many parents are rightly proud of it. You’ll have guessed by now that it’s a big book. Entitled Swansea’s Royal Institution and Wales’s first museum, it will stand for many years […]
