art
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Glenys Cour: can mlynedd o liw
Ar 6 Ionawr 2024 ymgasglodd cryn nifer o gyfeillion a chyd-artistiaid yn ei thŷ yn y Mwmbwls i ddathlu pen-blwydd Glenys Cour yn 100 mlwydd oed. Eisteddai Glenys yn ei chadair arferol yn y lolfa, gyda’i golygfa wych dros Fae Abertawe, wrth i gyfeillion ddod ati fesul un, plygu drosodd neu benlinio, a dymuno’n dda […]
Two Carmarthen portraits
In Carmarthenshire Museum in Abergwili are two portraits painted in 1850 in oil on board by an artist called David Patrick. They don’t seem to have attracted much attention outside the Museum, except by Paul Joyner, but both possess a strange attraction, and deserve to be better known. Little is known about David Patrick. He […]
