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 […]
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 […]
Breaking up the Hannibal
Bruges may be his birthplace and where you’ll find his museum, but Swansea has a claim to be the second home of Frank Brangwyn, ever since his huge ‘British Empire’ panels were diverted from the House of Lords in London to Swansea’s Guildhall in 1933. Today it’s possible to see Brangwyn’s visions of the fruits […]
Late style and Glenys Cour
To mark Glenys Cour’s hundredth birthday the Mission Gallery is currently showing around thirty of her paintings, some oil on canvas, others oil on paper. Most were painted in the last five years, so it’s a very different exhibition from the big retrospective in the Glynn Vivian in 2017, which looked back at over sixty […]
Two architects of light
Mention Sir Christopher Wren and most people will instantly think of St Paul’s Cathedral. That includes Edmund Bentley, the inventor of the poetical form known, after his middle name, as the clerihew: Sir Christopher WrenSaid, ‘I am going to dine with some men.If anybody callsSay I am designing St. Paul’s.’ Last week we visited St […]