gwallter

  • 1938 was a difficult year for Stanley Spencer.  His marriage to his wife Hilda Carline had been in trouble for years.  Divorce followed in 1937, though the two never lost contact.  His relationship with the artist Patricia Preece, whom he’d…

  • I’ve been reading Celia Paul’s painfully honest book Letters to Gwen John, a series of imaginary messages to her fellow-artist, dead for almost a hundred years.  She shares many circumstances with Gwen, and feels many close affinities, both creative and…

  • The facts are clear enough.  Between December 2023 and January 2024 Vaughan Gething, a candidate for the post of First Minister in the Welsh Government, was given a donation of £200,000 towards his campaign.  No one in his position had…

  • 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…

  • In time, they say, sons turn into their fathers.  For a while I’ve been aware of this metamorphosis taking place in myself.  The most obvious change is physiognomic.  Nowadays my head and face seem, to me at least, remarkably close…

  • Roedd oes newydd yn ddechrau gwawrio i dref Aberystwyth yn 1863.  Ym mis Awst y flwyddyn ganlynol cyrhaeddodd y rheilffordd o’r Amwythig, ac agorwyd yr orsaf drenau.  Bron ar unwaith daeth hi’n bosib i bobl deithio i’r dref yn hawdd,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

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