A port painter

The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery has got into the excellent habit of displaying a good mix of works from its permanent collection along a long wall in one of its upstairs rooms. This has the advantage of letting us see paintings that would not otherwise often see the light of day. When I was there […]
Francis Place, pioneer artist and potter

In the late seventeenth century York was a lively intellectual centre. The York Virtuosi – modesty was not one of their features – were a group of scientists, historians and artists including the zoologist Martin Lister, the antiquarian and historian of Leeds Ralph Thoresby and the glass painter Henry Gyles. Another member was a pioneering […]
Some books I read in 2022

Covid may have loosened its grip, but its ‘stay home’ message has lingered, so just as many books got read in 2022 as in the previous year. I’ve been steered to some of them by research needs, but that hasn’t reduced the enjoyment. Here are some of my favourites. The list doesn’t include any charity […]
Caerdydd, mas o’i gof

Daeth y newyddion yr wythnos hon bod Cyngor Dinas Caerdydd yn bwriadu cau Amgueddfa Caerdydd (‘Cardiff Museum’ neu ‘The Cardiff Story’ yn Saesneg), a leolir yn yr Hen Lyfrgell yn Yr Aes, reit yng nghanol y ddinas. Dymuniad doethion Cabinet y Cyngor yw troi’r gwasanaeth yn ‘amgueddfa symudol’ yng ngofal ‘tîm bach allweddol’ o staff […]
Dorian Gray discovers world music

In the cosy light of our post-colonial glow-lamps we tend to imagine that ‘world music’ was discovered, and given its long-deserved recognition, by our own generation. We still have dozens of LPs and CDs of Indian and west African music, rooted out in Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus in the 1980s. We kept an eye […]
On magpies

We’d both noticed that there seemed to be more of them, now that the cold weather has arrived and the last of the leaves have fallen. Always in pairs, they perch like snipers on the higher branches of the large, ailing cherry tree at the bottom of the garden. Often they land on the kitchen […]
Pant Glas: a Meirionnydd commune in 1840

Barmouth was not the only place in Meirionnydd to host utopian settlements in the nineteenth century. Fanny Talbot’s Ruskinian village there was preceded by a quixotic attempt to set up a socialist commune in a very different part of the region, Abergeirw. In Liverpool in 1839 a splinter group began to break away from Robert […]