‘No Welsh art’

January 31, 2025 1 Comment

Peter Lord’s exhibition ‘Dim Celf Cymreig / No Welsh Art’ fills the whole of the largest exhibition space in Wales, the Gregynog Gallery in the National Library.  It needs such a big space because Peter’s personal gallery, built up over forty years of collecting, is unrivalled in size and scope among private collections of Welsh art.  Even the hundred additional works in the show from the Library’s own collection are easily outnumbered by the 155 items he owns.

Hugh Hughes, The sons of Pryse Pryse, Gogerddan (1827) (detail)

You could see ‘No Welsh Art’ as the culmination of Peter Lord’s personal art journey over fifty years, from artist to art historian and polemicist, and as a visible summation of his long-held belief that, contrary to the old prejudice, Wales has always been rich in visual culture.  This is a show with a manifesto and a programme.  Its starting point is the blunt statement of Dr Llewelyn Wyn Griffith, chair of the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council, in 1950, ‘So much for the past.  No patron, no critic, therefore no painter, no sculptor, no Welsh art.  It is as simple as that.’

William H. Chapman, Elizabeth Waidson, Aber-rhiw (1859) (detail)

Peter sets up Griffith as bogeyman right at the start by including the National Library’s dark, saturnine oil portrait of him by Kyffin Williams.  Even in 1950, when systematic art history in Wales barely existed, Griffith’s assertion was asinine, and Peter pulls it apart, arranging the works on display into three categories, patrons, critics and artists. He shows how patrons certainly existed at all times: aristocratic and gentry to begin with, then the middle classes, especially nonconformists.  There were plenty of artists too, though in the nineteenth century, though they were often ‘artisan’ painters, generally self-taught or at least lacking in formal art training.  Griffith, David Bell and other critics were too blinkered by their narrow definition of traditional, academy art to consider that Wales had always been rich in other kinds of visual culture.

Evan Hugh Parry, He, being dead, yet speaketh (1892)

All this will be familiar enough to those who’ve read Peter’s magisterial trilogy The visual culture of Wales and other works, or listened to him speak on the history of art in Wales.  But even if you’ve heard the thesis many times you can’t fail to be impressed by the exhibition.  Not every work is a masterpiece, as Peter readily admits, but taken together his collection amounts to overwhelming evidence of flourishing traditions of painting and other forms of visual art in Wales.  Painters like Hugh Hughes, William Roos, William Jones Chapman, John Cambrian Rowland, and the most prolific of all, Anhysbys (Anon.), may not have had the orthodox London art training, but they could produce images that remain vivid, powerful, moving and sometimes stunning.

Many of these ‘artisan’ paintings Peter picked up cheaply at sales and auctions, when they were little valued financially or intrinsically.  Often they were in poor condition – dirty, torn or in poor frames – and the conservators he’s used have worked wonders in restoring them to something like their original condition.

Ivor Powell, Survivors will be prosecuted (c1970)

A particular pleasure for the visitor is teasing out some of the secondary themes Peter explores through his juxtapositions.  The way, for example, the ‘Welshman’ is viewed satirically from the other side of Offa’s Dyke – Taffy riding a goat – is turned on its head by a Welsh sign artist, and how the external personification of Wales mutates from man to woman (complete with ‘Welsh hat’), and, during the First World War, from woman to infant.  During that war images of mourning (Hedd Wyn) and longing for peace coexist with pictures of startlingly xenophobic aggression.  Images of star nonconformist preachers like Christmas Evans and John Elias trended like internet memes, in paintings, prints and Staffordshire figurines.  On a smaller scale, David Cox’s painting The Welsh funeral, gave rise to a minor fashion for similar peasant funeral scenes in mountain settings, illustrated here by Benjamin Leader’s large Bettws-y-Coed Church.  The harsh and dangerous lives of coalminers in the interwar period evoked different responses from painters, according to their varying interpretations of Christianity (or atheism).

Hugh Hughes, Rev. John Elias (1838) (detail)

As usual Peter’s interests lie in the sociological rather than aesthetic aspects of his chosen art, backed by impressively thorough knowledge and research.  Richard Elis, solicitor, in Hugh Hughes’s portrait of that name, holds the front page of the North Wales Gazette.  So exact is the detailing of the newspaper that Peter was able to track down the page, and discover that Elis’s thumb lies over an article about himself.  This picture appears in John Barnie’s ekphrastic collection of short poems, Afterlives (2021, available at a reduced price in the NLW shop), with a facing verse, entitled ‘Solid’:

I’ve a long nose to look down
and never make jokes

but I have a name, ELIS, CYFREITHIWR,
the man to go to, opening a door

on my brown-painted room, sparse
as a vestry and me looking up

casually holding a thumb where
I’m mentioned in the Gazette.

Christine Mills, Cymerwch sêt (2021)

The culmination of the show, and a pointer to a possible future for Welsh art, is a very large pencil drawing, Cymerwch sêt (‘Take a seat’, 2002) by the Montgomeryshire artist Christine Mills (artist-in-residence in the National Library in 2005-6).  The picture is a reworking of Nicolas Poussin’s Dance to the music of time.  Elements from that painting – women dancing in a circle, cherubs blowing bubbles and holding an hourglass – are rearranged around a low-ceilinged room in Christine’s own hill farm.  Time, wingless, plays the harp rather than Poussin’s lyre.  Time works forwards as well as back -or possibly in circles, like the dancers – and the artist is invited to take a seat at the table and help create a new Wales.

Jonoval Jones, Boy carrying books (c1820)

This brings us to the difficult question of the future of Peter’s collection.  He says he’d always seen it as part of a future National Gallery of Wales.  Artists and many others have been calling for a national gallery, or a national gallery of modern art, to be established for decades, filling a gap that most countries have long since filled.  Years ago, it seemed a possibility.  Meetings were held, articles written, speeches made.  But today we’re probably as far away from such an enlightened innovation as we’ve ever been.  The current Welsh government takes a depressingly philistine and careless view of all the arts in Wales.  It refuses to fund them as it should, and it seems to consider culture a wholly dispensable part of contemporary Wales.

It would be an enormous public loss if Peter Lord’s great collection were to be dispersed or sold, for want of anyone in a position of cultural authority to care enough about it.

The exhibition ‘Dim Celf Cymreig / No Welsh Art’ is on at the National Library of Wales until 6 September 2025.

William Roos, A young boy with his dog (1852) (detail)

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  1. Dafydd Pritchard says:

    Mae hi’n arddangosfa eithriadol o bwysig ac yn haeddu trafodaeth a sylw helaeth.

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