Category: art
-
Making an impression
In Aberystwyth last week I called in the School of Art to see an exhibition, arranged by Mary Lloyd Jones, and organised by Neil Holland and Phil Garratt, as a tribute to her husband, John Jones, who died last year aged 89. Surprisingly, this is the first time he’s had a show to himself. As…
-
Welsh paintings: gwallter’s top 10
Paintings, not painters, you’ll notice. And the artists are all safely dead (this avoids treading on the toes of the living). Third, I wouldn’t claim that these are the best ten paintings. They’re just works that have given me special pleasure and contemplation. Many aren’t very well known. But see what you think about my…
-
Cefn Bryn and the writers
The sandsone ridge of Cefn Bryn is an obvious magnet for painters, but it doesn’t seem to have drawn many creative writers, despite its brooding presence along the backbone of the Gower peninsula. One exception is Amy Dillwyn, the pioneering industrialist, feminist and lesbian, in her best-known work The Rebecca rioter (1880), an historical novel…
-
Can the British Museum change?
The recent return to Nigeria of some of the Benin bronzes from collections across Europe has heightened the debate about ‘repatriating’ museum objects to the places from which they were illegally seized. The finely made bronze plaques and sculptures once adorned the royal palace in Benin City and were made over a lengthy period, from…
-
Sir Boris Walpole and the cartoonists
It’s a commonplace that since George Osborne set in motion the immiseration of poor people, through his programme of austerity and big cuts in benefits, Britain has seemed to regress to the time of our Victorian ancestors. ‘Poor laws’, and the nineteenth century distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, are back with us, and so…
-
William Blake, map-maker
You can’t wander far in south and mid-Wales in the early years of the nineteenth century without coming across the name of Benjamin Heath Malkin. The second edition of his book The scenery, antiquities and biography of south Wales, published in two volumes in 1807, was described by the historian R.T. Jenkins as ‘by far…
-
Late style: Edgar Degas looks at a flax field
In 1892 Edgar Degas was around 58 years old. Not old, certainly by our standards, and he had twenty years and more left to live. But the landscapes he painted in the 1890s tend to get called ‘late paintings’, with good reason. Degas was a Parisian, an urban painter, and the works of his youth…
-
The ageing of Henri Rouart
Henri Rouart was one of Edgar Degas’ oldest and most loyal friends. They went to same school in Paris, Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and served in the artillery together during the Franco-Prussian War (Degas was an indifferent soldier). Rouart became an engineer and industrial designer, specialising in vapour-compressed refrigeration. He owned a successful company and used his…
-
A Gresford decapitation
Today is 29 August, the traditional date, faithtourism reminds me on Twitter, for remembering the Decollation of St John the Baptist. Decollation is a euphemism for having your head violently removed from your body. It’s often used of this particular episode, when Herod Antipas, puppet ruler of Galilee and Perea, ordered John to undergo this…
-
Y cartŵn Cymraeg cyntaf?
Yn ôl Marian Löffler, hwn yw’r cartŵn cyntaf i ymddangos mewn print yn yr iaith Gymraeg. Mae’n wynebddalen mewn llyfryn gan Thomas Roberts a gyhoeddwyd yn Llundain yn 1798, Cwyn yn erbyn gorthrymder. Brodor o Llwyn’rhudol Uchaf ger Pwllheli oedd Thomas Roberts. Cyfreithiwr oedd ei dad, William. Ganwyd e yn 1765 neu 1766, a symudodd…