This is the edited text of a public talk given in Bangor University on Wednesday 19 November 2025 about the eleven oil paintings by Kyffin Williams housed in the University. The talk was followed by a guided tour of the paintings.
Diolch am y gwahoddiad i ddod i’r Brifysgol, a’r cyfle i siarad am artist arbennig – artist sy’n dal i fod yn ganolog i gelf ac i Gymru, bron i ugain mlynedd ar ôl ei farwolaeth.
I’m grateful to Bangor University for the invitation to give this talk. It’s a pleasure to be able to discuss Kyffin Williams and his work, both of which still mean a great deal to people in (and well beyond) Wales, almost 20 years after his death.
I was present at Kyffin’s funeral in Bangor Cathedral on 11 September 2006, where Prof. Derec Llwyd Morgan gave a memorable tribute. He finished with these words:
Sir Kyffin’s art was – is – magnificent. So was his humanity. In the galleries that showed his stuff, before his long last illness, I often wished that he too, like his paintings, could be an exhibit, so that viewers could peer closely at him, and admire not only the obvious grand moustache and greying mane of hair but admire also the kindest, acutest blue-grey eyes that interpreted our land and people in such a stunning way, with an artistic distinction unparalleled in our times.
I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to show you Kyffin in a glass case today, in the same way as you might view Jeremy Bentham in University College, London. But at least you’re going to see a fine selection of his paintings, first on screen and then in close up.
Derec was right: once seen, Kyffin Williams was never to be forgotten. I remember him well. He had a special connection with the National Library of Wales from the late 1940s until his death, and he bequeathed a large collection of his art work and papers to it. He would come to the building from time to time, especially when his works were the subject of exhibitions. He was a striking and unusual figure in the flesh. Brown suit and brogues, moustache and full hair, and a precise, upper-class English accent (I never heard him speak in Welsh). All these announced themselves with a flourish.
It’s no wonder that Kyffin turned quickly into one of those Welsh people known universally by their forenames. And that’s how I’m going to refer to him in the rest of this talk – not as ‘Williams’ or ‘Sir Kyffin’.
Kyffin was very fond of telling anecdotes. It wasn’t always clear whether they were entirely true. I remember one lunch in the President’s Room in the National Library, when we all listened, in virtual silence, to a constant stream of amusing stories. About how he became an artist: he was told by an army officer in 1941 ‘As you are in fact abnormal [a reference to his epilepsy], I think it would be a good idea if you took up art’. About how his mother’s home help, Gwyneth Griffiths, ‘a beautiful gazelle-like girl’ who had been trained at the Slade, wrote to the authorities there to suggest they take him on as a student. And about how, when he got to the Slade, his Professor told him, according to his own account, ‘Oh, Williams, why do you make your nudes look like oak trees? You can’t draw, so you had better see if you can paint.’
I’m going to talk about Kyffin’s art, taking as starting point the eleven oil paintings in Bangor University’s collection. Most of them were gifted to the University or Bangor Normal College. Painting may have been Kyffin’s principal medium, but we should remember that he was equally bold, fluent and prolific in other media, including watercolours, drawings, linocuts, woodcuts and cartoons.
Most of the paintings are undated and I won’t attempt to discuss them in chronological order. All but one of them have as their settings either Eryri and its surroundings or Ynys Môn. But I’ll start with the exception, a painting with a subject that most people won’t associate with Kyffin’s output, The crucifixion.
1 The crucifixion
The Principal of Bangor Normal College commissioned The crucifixion for a place of worship. The crucifixion and deposition from the cross were themes that preoccupied Kyffin in the early part of his career, in late 1940s, early 1950s, as his response to the paintings on these subjects by the Renaissance masters that he was studying during his apprenticeship as a painter.
But this and similar paintings were also influenced by twentieth century artists, especially by expressionist painters: note the extreme pose and cropping of human body, and the roughly handled paint. This is clearer still in another Crucifixion, in the National Library of Wales, and the Deposition in the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea. In general, the artists he admired, both old masters and more recent painters, who included Van Gogh, Oskar Kokoschka and Chaim Soutine, were those whose works carried, for him at least, a strong emotional charge. ‘I love artists, he said to one interviewer, who would make me cry’. In this case Kyffin was influenced specifically by the French painter Georges Rouault, for whom the crucifixion was a frequent theme and intensity of feeling a striking characteristic. He’d first seen work by Rouault, who was much influenced by medieval stained-glass painting, in the Redfern Gallery in London in 1948.
2 Hills above Nant Peris
But it’s not for religious painting that Kyffin came to be known. Above all, he’s associated with landscapes of Ynys Môn, where he lived from 1974, and, across the Menai Strait, the mountains of Eryri. Hills above Nant Peris is undated, but was exhibited in 1973.
The mountains of Eryri, and especially Yr Wyddfa, had attracted artists ever since Richard Wilson in the 1760s. What was it about them that appealed to Kyffin? He had grown up within sight of them, and they exerted a strong visual fascination on him. Another attraction was their extreme geological age and persistence through time. They had a metaphorical force, too, standing for the endurance of the Welsh people, including that of Kyffin’s own family, which had lived in north Wales for hundreds of years. Painting the mountains of Eryri might have seemed to him a sort of defensive strategy, in the face of the encroaching modernity and Anglicisation in the world beyond.
There was another reason. Though Kyffin was a sociable person, there was a deep strain of melancholy in his make-up, that sometimes merged into periods of depression. Mountains, in all their stark bareness, may also have reflected the streak of wintry loneliness in his own spirit.
Finally, there was a more practical reason. Kyffin’s mountain paintings held a strong attraction to his main audience, art collectors in Wales and beyond who liked to be able to say that they owned a ‘Kyffin’. The main reason for this appeal was his ability to express a vision of Wales – rural, elemental and decidedly un-English – that seemed to encapsulate the collectors’ own idealised Wales, even though it was far removed from their own distant, sheltered urban experience.
Usually, Kyffin preferred to paint the mountains at their bleakest and most elemental, in winter, what he called ‘the most exciting time for the painter’. In this wintry scene, where stormy clouds pass over the peaks and ridges, there’s no relief to the eye from the harshness of the landscape and relentlessness of the weather – and maybe the corresponding internal climate within the human heart.
Kyffin deliberately avoided painting in summer. ‘The land’, he said of that season, ‘attains a strange hibernation, for the mood is heavy and lacking in the stimulation that is necessary for an artist.’
3 Snowdon from Drws y Coed
Winter is again the setting for Snowdon from Drws y Coed. Drws y Coed is the last hamlet in Dyffryn Nantlle, and from it, on days of good visibility, you can see the peak of Yr Wydda, nestled between the nearer mountains of Mynydd Mawr on the left and Mynydd Drws-y-Coed on the right.
Kyffin was aware, of course, that the very first mountain portraitist in Britain, Richard Wilson, had painted much the same scene, Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle, in the 1760s, from a standpoint further down the valley. ‘The finest picture of a mountain that has ever been painted’ was Kyffin’s judgement. Apart from the view, the two paintings share little in common. Wilson’s is a carefully framed and balanced composition. Its atmosphere is calm and summery. Small figures adorn the lakeside. All of these features were derived from the kind of Italianate classical paintings Wilson made for visiting Grand Tourists when he lived in Rome before returning to Wales. Kyffin’s picture, by contrast, accentuates the wildness, ruggedness and asymmetry of the land as it is. Yr Wyddfa looms, dark and glowering, against a troubled, steel-grey sky. Rather than fading into the distant sunshine, it looks threatening and unpicturesque.
Kyffin loved painting Yr Wyddfa from the west, and emulated (or corrected) Richard Wilson when he took the same viewpoint as Wilson, the west shore of Llyn Nantlle, in Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle, now in the National Museum of Wales.
For the first 25 years of his career he painted with oils in the open air – he was impervious, he said, to cold and rain when painting or drawing outdoors – before realising that he could work just as well in the studio from his store of memories of the mountains.
4 Clouds above Crib Goch
Kyffin painted Crib Goch and its ‘fierce and crinkled ridge’ on many occasions. It offered steep rockfaces and a cruel, irregular horizon line, above which he could scatter his fast-running rainclouds. ‘Crib Goch’, he wrote, ‘is one of my favourite mountains. I like the way it seems to crouch, I like the variety of its shapes, while further up the valley at Pen-y-Pass I love the way it seems to rear into the sky like a Himalayan peak.’
In this picture the clouds are so rain-soaked and so low that the base of them obliterates the mountaintop. Kyffin was very fond of painting winter clouds in rapid movement, conveyed with broad strokes that sweep obliquely across the canvas, and colours that pass through almost every possible shade of grey.
Kyffin had this to say about Eryri clouds:
We, who live within sight of Snowdon, know the clouds that so often hide its upper ridges. They can hang heavily over them, dark grey-black shapes that can terrify those from the plains of England. They can play around the tops, dancing in and out of the cliffs and breasts of the grassy slopes, here one minute and gone the next, or they can sulk, a grey impenetrable mass eliminating every valley, cwm, bwlch or crag … although I might not love the clouds I accept them as part of my own landscape and they form an important part of my artistic work.
5 Cloud and hills above the Traeth
Very similar cloud formations give movement to a more static composition in Cloud and hills above the Traeth. It’s not clear which ‘Traeth’ this might be (could it be Traeth Bach in the Dwyryd estuary?). This is not a detailed topographical scene, but a simplified and abstracted landscape (though it’s worth noting that Kyffin insisted that he did not take liberties with the lie of the land he painted). He always claimed that he was impatient with academic art movements and ‘isms’, and he had no time for purely abstract art. But the influence of the artists who followed in the wake of the first wave of modernism, and especially those loosely grouped as the School of Paris, is clear in the simplicity of the composition and colours. This picture calls to mind the paintings of Nicolas de Staël, an artist whom Kyffin had met.
Kyffin’s colour palette, of course, was very different from De Staël’s, at least until he visited Patagonia in 1968-69, an experience that broadened his colour range considerably. The critic Rian Evans offers an explanation for this preference: ‘Due to an eye condition that made working in bright sunlight uncomfortable he preferred cloudy conditions, explaining why he often adopted a muted palette.’
To gain the effects he wanted in the cloudy sky, Kyffin used a palette knife, in preference to brushes, to apply broad impasto surfaces to his canvases. He’d found the benefits of the knife early on, in 1946, recognising ‘the palette-knife to be a great ally in expressing the massive bulk of the mountains’. Once he’d found his mountain landscape style, and especially once he’d discovered the palette knife, that style changed relatively little through the rest of his career.
It’s possible to imagine a very different view across Traeth Bach. J.M.W. Turner, on a trip to Eryri in 1799, painted a watercolour sketch that’s windy, impressionistic and optimistic – a far cry from Kyffin’s dark vision.
6 Farmer on the mountains
In the fourth mountain painting, Farmer on the mountains, Kyffin introduces a human figure. People who worked on the mountains, especially farmers and shepherds, were of special importance to him. In the early 1970s, he said: ‘On Moel-y-gadair I often saw the stocky, patriarchal figure of Mr Owen of Bron-y-Gadair, as he wandered, stick in hand and brindle sheepdog at his heels, to look at his flock and, I am sure, to gaze at that lovely world around him.’
He admired the farmers for their hardiness and endurance, and their care for the animals in their care. For him they were as much part of the landscape as the rocks and stunted vegetation of the mountain. (Though it should be said that he admired them at a social distance: Kyffin came from a very different, Anglican, gentry background.)
At first sight you could easily miss the farmer in this painting, so camouflaged are his clothes and face against the dark tones of the mountain slope. Remember the appearance of this man – his flat cap, sloping shoulders and collarless white shirt – because we’ll see him again before long (see no.11 below). If you were looking for a literary equivalent from a slightly earlier period, you might find him, as many critics have noticed, in the figure of Iago Prytherch, the old farmer who appears in several of the early poems of R.S. Thomas.
As in many of the Eryri scenes, an air of melancholia pervades the painting. It’s winter, late in the day, the light is fading, and the blue-grey sky seems to augur a cold night ahead. We wish the glum-looking farmer would hurry down to his cottage and his warm fire.
It’s worth noting that Kyffin is very selective in the type of people he allows to appear in his mountain paintings. There are plenty of farmers and shepherds, but no hikers or tourists or National Park officials. They would disturb the world he’s constructed so carefully. It’s a rural world, one that belongs to the past, that he’s celebrating and memorialising. That past is itself selective. It excludes, to take one example, most traces of the slate and other industries that gave employment and sustained communities across Eryri in the past. When you walk through the landscape today, it’s impossible to escape the quarries, spoil heaps and abandoned machinery left by the slate industry. But they don’t feature much in Kyffin’s works.
7 Farmer, Waunfawr
Farmer, Waunfawr is a rather similar picture, but set within the hill country to the north of the mountains, this time near the village of Waunfawr above Caernarfon. Again, the single human figure is almost fused in the landscape, as if it’s an immovable element within it.
(This picture was not an original gift to the University. It was bought in 2023 from the North America Wales Foundation, which had itself been left it by a Welsh- American, Lloyd Jones.)
8 Dyffryn, Cesarea
Cesarea, an ex-quarry village named after its chapel, is today known as Y Fron. ‘The village of Cesarea’, Kyffin said, ‘sprawls above the Nantlle valley and boasts but one row of houses that could be called a terrace.’
Elsewhere he wrote: ‘… stone walls, cottages, green fields and slate tips – these are what make up the strange broken land above Caernarfon. It is a hard land and at one time the dampness of it brought misery and tuberculosis to the people who lived there. Today the quarries are closed and only the aggressive tips remind us of the struggles of the last [19th] century.’
The area around Y Fron, Carmel and Rhosgafan is a unique landscape: high, sloping country that lies between the coastal strip and the mountains, criss-crossed by stone walls enclosing rocky, unpromising-looking fields, with low houses and cottages scattered across the land.
In this picture Kyffin focusses, as he says, on the terrace and a few other older buildings. He ignores the more recent houses that wouldn’t fit so easily into his vision. For him houses had to be seen to grow out of the land, not be imposed on them. His vision isn’t a comforting or comfortable one. The stone walls are crumbling, stones litter the fields, and people and animals alike seem to have abandoned the village. The slate quarries, as Kyffin says, are long closed, leaving the land untenanted.
Today, by the way, Y Fron is far from abandoned. Its old school has been modernised and adapted as a community centre, shop and café.
9 Hillside with sheep farmer and dog
Hillside with sheep farmer and dog has a rather similar composition. This unnamed village has a more hopeful air than the one in Dyffryn, Cesarea. It may also belong to the hills above Caernarfon, but more likely it’s somewhere on Ynys Môn. This time a farmer is in evidence, together with his collie – a pairing that is a trope in Kyffin paintings.
Kyffin made hundreds of sketches of dogs, in all kinds of poses. ‘I have always remembered the farmers and their collies’, he explained, ‘and have put them down on my canvases for they are truly part of my landscape. The men could never have been able to work their hill farms without the help of their dogs and I have always been fascinated at their relationship.’ Elsewhere he said, ‘The relationship between farmers and their dogs is much as if they were joined by a piece of string.’
Villages in north-west Wales are rarely nucleated settlements. Houses, cottages, chapels, halls are scattered about over a wide area. This suited Kyffin when composing his paintings and drawings. He prized what was crooked, accidental, rugged and asymmetrical – qualities he saw as fundamental to the landscape of Eryri and Ynys Môn and its people.
10 Ponies at Betws Garmon
Ponies, ‘the beautiful Welsh ponies that must be the most graceful animals in Britain’, are special creatures in Kyffin’s world. ‘I have always loved horses’, he wrote, ‘I have sensed their quivering bodies when I have ridden them, I have watched their nervous eyes and their flaring nostrils.’
11 Hugh Thomas, portrait of a farmer
There’s just one portrait in the Bangor collection, but it’s one of Kyffin’s finest. Painted in 1950, it was bought by Margaret Davies for the Contemporary Art Society of Wales, which donated it to Bangor Normal College.
Kyffin is sometimes overlooked as a portraitist, but the best of his portraits rank alongside his finest landscapes. They combine sometimes startling compositions and bold use of paint with a psychological insight born of empathy – he could draw on his own personal difficulties to see into those of others. An excellent example is the portrait of the troubled fellow-painter, Jack Jones.
He also took on portrait commissions, though in some of them he seems to have felt a distinct lack of connection with his subjects, as in the less than flattering picture of Alun Oldfield Davies, Controller of BBC Wales.
Kyffin himself rated his portraits highly: ‘Every portrait I have painted has been a considerable strain, for nothing comes easily to me, but I believe that some of my best work has been of the many interesting faces I have painted.’ The essence of the experience was the chance to study another person in depth. ‘I have been unable to resist the challenge of the portrait. I too have been obsessed by people and have always presumed that this has been because so many of my forebears were parsons who ministered to the needs of their parishioners.’
Kyffin had a keen admiration for the portraits of artists like Rembrandt and Géricault, and his own portraits, in their forms and their emotional penetration, often echo those of his predecessors.
Hugh Thomas was a farmer at Clytiau Poethion, near Ro-wen, Dyffryn Conwy. He could easily be the same man as the figure in Farmer on the mountains (no.6 above). Kyffin recalled him in the book Portraits:
His wife had just died and his doctor asked me to paint his portrait as some sort of therapy in order to give him relief from his loneliness and depression. I found him with a sickle in his hand trimming a disorderly hedge that appeared to grow out of a broken wall. He was a typical north Wales Celt, tall and spare with a drooping moustache that accented the melancholy in his face. He was bewildered when I asked if I could paint him but nevertheless he agreed and accompanied me across the field towards his farm buildings. I painted him in the rick-yard, seated on a stool against the blue of the stable door. The sunlight poured over the hills to streak between barn and stable, picking out his neck and cheekbones, the back of his cap and the edge of his big moustache. He never spoke and showed little interest in what I was doing. When the light failed and I had to stop work, a slow smile relieved the sadness of his face as he wandered away with his sickle, once again to go through the familiar motions of trimming his hedge. His daughter wept when she saw what I had done. Wailing echoed around the old kitchen and nothing would console her.
The art historian Ian Jeffrey wrote of this portrait and Kyffin’s note on it, ‘Portrait and text complement and enhance each other. Without the text Hugh Thomas might remain ‘a typical north Wales Celt’. Without the portrait the painter’s memoir would lack the material guarantee of the collar stud and of the cap set at an angle.’
I’ve quoted Kyffin’s words about his pictures often in this talk. That’s entirely fitting, because he was much more than a workaday author. He had a gift for storytelling and character drawing, and knew almost as much about manipulating words as he did about applying paint. His memoir Across the Straits (1973) – what Lloyd Roderick called ‘an act of written self-portraiture’ – is one of the best Welsh autobiographies written in the twentieth century.
I’d like to return finally to where we began, the Crucifixion. It might in retrospect look like an outlier in Kyffin’s work. Its religious content found no response in his later paintings: ’I cannot describe myself as a Christian in the conventional sense’, he once said. But the suffering that’s so explicit in that painting never left him. It underlies so many of the best landscapes and portraits. The mountains of Eryri were things of beauty – but it was a harsh beauty. Living and working among them meant hard, unrelenting labour, which took its toll on body and spirit. Stoicism, resignation and dogged labour, rather than energy and joy, are what you read in the portrait of Hugh Thomas and in the figures of so many of the farmers in their landscapes.
I’ve concentrated today on Kyffin’s art, rather than his writing or his character, or his reputation and standing. His continuing popularity, and his problematic position as the quintessential Welsh artist or ‘national institution’, often interfere with the process of looking at his best paintings and seeing them for what they tell us about Kyffin’s personal vision of his world. Bangor University is lucky to have some superb examples of his work.
Diolch yn fawr am wrando. Gobeithio imi roi rhyw fath o gyd-destun ichi i‘r lluniau arbennig gan Kyffin sydd yng ngofal y Brifysgol. Gobeithiaf hefyd eich bod chi’n cael eich ysbrydoli i edrych ar y lluniau o’r newydd.
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