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I can't speak Welsh. I know a few words but I used an online translator for the title of this blog (so it's probably wrong). But my name, David Evans, is quite Welsh. Although if it was Dafydd Ifans, like the Aberystwyth born translator, it would be even more Welsh. On the Welsh name front, I'm beaten by my dad. He's Emlyn Evans. His own father was Cary and Cary was proper Welsh.
He was from Llanelli. Which I only discovered after he'd passed. I'd always assumed he came from either Betws-y-Coed or Blaenau Ffestiniog as that's where we seemed to go, quite regularly, on holiday when I was kid. The general Snowdonia area and then the resorts of Llandudno and Rhyl. I'm not complaining. I loved it. Some of my happiest memories as a child are there. In fact, some of my happiest recent memories are in Wales too.
I love the landscape, the dramatic mountains, the verdant green valleys, the babbling brooks running down the side of the hills and I feel deeply connected to the Welsh love of song. When Cary died the church filled up gloriously with the sound of his relations singing. Landscape and song, as well as poetry and rugby, are things Wales has long been associated with but art? The story of Welsh art is one told far less often.
So when BBC2 announced they were screening a three part series, The Story of Welsh Art, with Huw Stephens (presenter on Six Music and Radio Cymru) I was intrigued - even before I knew that Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals would be making a guest appearance. I thought I might learn something. Which I did. But, also, I discovered a whole world of art and even though it was one that had always been there I'd never thought to search for it.
Despite the unsurprising fact that there's a lot of that glorious Welsh landscape on show, the series starts at a rather unlikely location. An industrial estate halfway between Cardiff and Pontypridd. Where the surplus art collection of Cardiff's National Museum of Wales is kept. A treasure trove of paintings and Celtic crosses.
But that's a false start. For the real story of Welsh art begins in a far more remote spot, Anglesey, and at a time when neither Wales nor art, as concepts, even existed. Five thousand years ago. Barclodiad y Gawres (Welsh for The Giantess's Apronful) is a Neolithic burial chamber that is older than the pyramids and has outlived the wooden huts of Anglesey in which the locals would have lived at the time.
Barclodiad y Gawres (approx 3000BC)
The stones inside the chamber have been decorated with zig-zags and triangles to celebrate nature and to reflect the circularity, rather than the linearity, of life. It was rock art, abstract rock art, and the lights of the fires that would have burned within the chamber would have illuminated the art, made it dance. We can recognise it now as art but it was art made for the dead, rather than the living, to enjoy.
On the mainland, in 1833, at a site near Mold called Goblin's Hall which is supposedly haunted by a golden ghost, a gold cape (now in the British Museum in London) was discovered by those working the land. It's uncertain what, if any practical use, the cape had but it is considered to be one of the most spectacular examples of prehistoric
sheet gold working ever found. Both its form and its design are unparalleled and that much gold? It can only be art. Surely?
Mold cape (1900-1600BC)
Votive offering with triskele (800BC-100AD)
More than a century later during World War II, and back in Anglesey, a runway was being built for the RAF when William Owen Roberts, the head groundsman, and his team discovered, at the site of a small lake - Llyn Cerrig Bach, the most important hoard of Celtic artifacts ever found in Britain. The triskele (the triple spiral of rotational symmetry) has gone on to become a modern logo for Celticness and appears, of course, in jewellery and tattoos.
But all things Celtic were soon to become a niche concern in Wales with the arrival of Christianity. As small monasteries sprung up in Wales, Celtic culture slowly subsided. You have to leave Wales for England to see the first medieval Welsh Christian 'masterpiece'. Lichfield Cathedral in Staffordshire hosts the 8th century Saint Chad Gospels.
Saint Luke from the Saint Chad Gospels (8c AD)
A 236 page gospel book with eight of those pages 'illuminated'. They take in Euclidean and Pythagorean geometry as well as Hebrew numerology and they look, to me at least, not at all dissimilar to late Arabic and Islamic abstract art. Hundreds, thousands, of pilgrims would have journeyed to see the Saint Chad Gospels in the hope of a healing miracle.
It's not recorded how successful they were! As often is the case with successful new religions, Christianity used syncretism with local Celtic beliefs to cement its power. Celtic crosses, like the Nevern Cross in St Brynach's Church near Fishguard - tall and lanky, would come to be the symbol of Welsh Christianity. It's older than the English language and, when it first appeared, it would have, like many other crosses and stones, been brightly painted in vivid colours.
All the better to catch your attention, all the better to convert you. But it wasn't just Christianity making inroads into Wales. The English were too. In 1282, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last native born Prince of Wales, died in the Powys village of Cilmeri and, from that point on, though the process of joining Wales to England fully took several centuries, Wales has never regained independence.
The Tree of Jesse (late 15c)
That, fortunately, didn't stop great art being made in Wales. Andrew Graham-Dixon (who you half expected to be presenting this show) has described The Tree of Jesse, or Abergavenny Jesse, in St Mary's Priory Church in that Monmouthshire town as the one unarguably great wooden figure to survive the iconoclasm of the Reformation.
Carved from a single oak tree, Jesse was the father of the Hebrew King David. Stephens, and we - the audience, marvel at the belt buckles, the sleepy eyes, and the individual hairs of what, it's widely agreed, is one of the greatest medieval sculptures in all Europe. It still has flecks of paint on it from the time when it would, like the Nevern Cross, have been illustrated.
In Llanrhaeadr-yng-Nghinmeirch, Denbighshire there is a stained glass analogue to the Tree of Jesse which links Jesse back to David and, ultimately, to Solomon, Jesus, and God. It's the sort of thing you'd imagine Pete Frame would have worked on had he been around back then. When iconoclastic Protestant reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century took to smashing stained glass windows, the Jesse window was protected by locals who hid it.
Tree of Jesse stained window, St. Dyfnog's Church, Llanrhaeadr-yng-Nghinmeirch (1533)
Medieval wall painting of Saint George and the Dragon, St Cadoc's Church, Llancarfan (late 15c)
In the Vale of Glamorgan, in the village of Llancarfan - a couple of miles north of Cardiff Airport, the parish church of Saint Cadoc contains late 15c wall paintings of St George slaying the dragon (not an event often celebrated, or even represented, in Wales) and the Virgin Mary. These paintings probably only survived because they were hidden for centuries. Only being revealed during architectural work in the church in 2008.
The Welsh courtier, diplomat, and soldier Sir John Donne had, during the 15th century, travelled extensively around northern Europe and in Bruges he met with the Early Netherlandish painter Hans Fleming and commissioned him to paint what has become known as the Donne Triptych. There is nothing particularly Welsh about the painting, image wise it's a fairly typical religious painting of its era, but it is believed to be the first painting commissioned in Wales.
It resides now, of course, in London's National Gallery. Observers of the time were in awe of Memling's virtuoso cross hatching and the way he painted folded drapery. They rejoiced in his honest handling of the subject's wrinkles, stubble, and heavy eye lids. Even (possibly) the baby Jesus's tiny cock. It's not a flattering painting. But it is, for the time, a very real one.
It set a trend. Wealthy Welsh patrons now wanted not just to commission paintings but to be immortalised in them. In Powis Castle, near Welshpool, the Herbert family really went for this. Especially Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury. A soldier, a poet, a traveller, a musician, and author. Lord Herbert was a Renaissance man for sure.
Powis Castle (c.1200)
William Larkin - Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (1609-1610)
Isaac Oliver - Edward Herbert (1613-1614)
Lord Herbert had duels and he had affairs but, with portraits like Isaac Oliver's, he brought to the art of Wales not just a more casual manner but a greater swagger and a more intricate form of portraiture. We're unsure if Herbert is lying down in a fit of melancholy or if he is simply waiting to be joined by a lady.
Basically he's trying an old (and hugely unsuccessful) trick of teenage boys throughout time. The one where they sit on the stairs at a party sulking, hoping a girl comes along and puts their arm round them to see if they're alright. Which they don't - because they prefer the more confident boys in the front room dancing to Status Quo with tennis rackets (this reference may not work for younger readers).
Perhaps most importantly of all, moving away from flippant digression, is that paintings like this marked a move away from the sacred towards the personal in Welsh art. When Margam Abbey, near Port Talbot, was dissolved by King Henry VIII of England in 1536 it was sold to the Mansel family. At first the art created there was about the people who lived there (witness the Mansel wedding portrait) but by the end of the 17th century artists (sadly unnamed ones) were looking at the building and out from it instead of to those inside it.
John Lewis - The Marriage of Sir John Pryce (1793)
Richard Wilson - Cader Idris (1765)
Richard Wilson - Landscape with Banditti:The Murder (1752)
Before Richard Wilson, Welsh artists had turned their backs on Wales. Even Wilson himself had trained in London before moving to Rome, where he painted the above Landscape with Banditti and studied the work of Claude Lorrain before returning to the UK and making work beloved of royal patrons. He earned a lifetime's wages for the sale of single painting and became a founding member of the Royal Academy.
Aged fifty, and with money no longer a worry, Wilson returned to Wales and made works that fused a hitherto unconsummated marriage between truth and beauty. People realised mountains could be beautiful and if mountains could be beautiful perhaps other previously uncelebrated sights could be too. It was Wilson's student Thomas Jones who drilled down even further on the belief that beauty could be found in truthful expression.
Jones painted, quite simply, what he could see from his window. Until the 1950s he was virtually unknown but today he is celebrated. Not for fashionable Italianate landscapes or allegorical paintings like 1770's Death of Orpheus but for more personal, more honest, and far better works like Pencerrig, made just two years later.
Richard Wilson - Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle (1765-1766)
Thomas Jones - The Death or Orpheus (c.1770)
Thomas Jones - Pencerrig (1772)
Thomas Jones - Buildings in Naples (1782)
Even more so for the works he made when he travelled to Italy. In Rome, Jones struggled to make money so he moved south to Naples. From where he opened his window, looked out to a seemingly unremarkable scene and found it in an intense, and captivating, beauty. It's one of my favourite ever paintings.
When the French Revolution cut Europe off for English artists they turned, perhaps inspired by Wilson and Jones, to Wales. Wilson and Jones had captured the beauty of the mountains and the lush green valleys but it was an English artist, a London artist born in Covent Garden, that would be the first to successfully express the wildness of Wales' rugged coastline and the more imposing snow capped mountains.
Wales shaped JMW Turner and JMW Turner shaped how we see Wales. He was not always a truthful painter. He transformed gentle hills into mountains and streams into torrents. He had no desire to tame the landscape. He wanted it raw. He wanted awe, he wanted terror, and he wanted sensation.
Joseph Mallord William Turner - Llanthony Abbey (1794)
Joseph Mallord William Turner - Dolbadarn Castle (1798)
Joseph Mallord William Turner - The Destruction of the Bards by Edward I (1799-1800)
Ruins, clouds, the sense of the sublime. But at the time Turner was making these paintings the Wales he had come to know, and love, was being transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Though Turner, in other works, did not shy away from creating art inspired by industrial buildings and steam trains in Wales the artist that best depicted the changes bought on by the Industrial Revolution was Merthyr Tydfil's Penry Williams.
Merthyr, previously a small village, found itself conveniently located at the time. It was near deposits of coal, iron ore, and limestone and soon grew into a dirty, crowded town. At one point it had four of the world's greatest ironworks and these were open twenty-four hours a day. Vast chimneys spewing smoke out over the valleys.
All these people together working long hours in unsafe and unsanitary conditions resulted in an inevitable uprising against the management classes. That was, predictably, put down by the British army who, it should be remembered at all times, serve to protect the nobility rather than the nation. But to go with the army's force there was a concept of using soft power to placate people as regards the plight of the ironworkers.
The industrialist William Crawshay used some of his vast wealth to commission Merthyr's own Penry Williams to make a painting that showed there was beauty, and dignity, in hard labour. Williams created Cyfarthfa Ironworks at Night because, oh, the ironmasters, they always get their way.
Penry Williams - Cyfarthfa Ironworks at Night (1825)
But Penry Williams didn't just make the ironworks look good. He gives dignity and respect to the workers too. Like him, they are local men. Possibly they are friends and acquaintances. Williams had somehow managed to please everyone with this painting. As did Henry Hawkins, with an equivalent work from the North Wales slate quarries near Blaenau Ffestiniog.
They're great paintings. Imposing yet still beautiful. But the men who populate them are defined solely by their labour. Unlike their bosses, or the aristocracy, artists, until this point, had denied them a personal, or interior, life. In Wales, it was William Jones Chapman who changed that. Commissioned by Francis Crawshay, of the aforementioned industrialist family, Jones Chapman used an intentionally naive style of painting to capture what he saw as the true nature, the innocence even, of the men who worked for Crawshay.
William Jones Chapman - Thos. Francis, Quarryman, Forest (1835-1840)
William Jones Chapman - William James, Roller, Forest (1835-1840)
William Jones Chapman - John Richards (John Cwmbran) (1835-1840)
Jones Chapman doesn't seem to be a well remembered man, he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, and that seems a shame as he appears to be an interesting character. He learnt the Welsh language and was fascinated with occultism and Druidism while at the same time clearly intent on improving lives and conditions for working class communities.
He was one of several do-gooders, a word I can assure you I mean as a compliment, in Victorian Wales. Another was Hugh Hughes. Born around 1790 in Pwllygwichiad, near Llandudno, Hughes, by the mid-19th century, had become one of many painters who would criss-cross Wales looking for inspiration and sitters.
Hughes believed that newspapers, then a relatively new phenomenon, could be used as fundamental tools for improving ordinary people's lives. When he painted John Evans, a newspaper man, and his family at breakfast he paid as much attention to Evans' wife and child as he did to Evans. Evans' wife had a harelip and, in the past, obsequious portraitists (or perhaps sensitive ones) may have ignored this but Hughes felt it would have been a sin of pride to not include it.
Hughes painted it accurately - but respectfully. But Hughes, as with the more polished Caernarfon painter William Roos (whom Hughes had beaten to the John Evans gig, Roos at least getting to live next door to the fantastically named one eyed and blind Baptist preacher and star Christmas Evans across the Menai Strait from Anglesey) ended his days in poverty and obscurity. Photography had arrived and was starting to replace portrait painting. I could barely find work by Hughes or Roos on the whole Internet!
Hugh Hughes - Portrait of the Artist with his Wife and Daughter (c.1850)
William Roos - Reverend Christmas Evans (1835)
As the Industrial Revolution led to further overcrowding, pollution, and fears of a moral decline some sought comfort in the past. Or in places that felt like the past. Betws-y-Coed is now a honeypot tourist location at the gateway of Snowdonia but when the Birmingham artist David Cox set up Europe's first artist colony there in the mid-19th century, its population was around about only one hundred.
As now, they spoke Welsh in Betws-y-Coed but this did not deter visitors arriving not just from England but from France, Norway, and Hungary too.
David Cox - A Welsh Funeral, Betws-y-Coed (1847-1850)
Henry Clarence Whaite - A Welsh Funeral (To the Cold Earth) (1865)
Henry Clarence Whaite - The Rainbow (1862)
The star artist in the Betws-y-Coed colony was Henry Clarence Whaite who would sketch out of doors, en plein air, in all weathers and once even brought a sheep back to his hotel room in a local inn so that he could study it. Or at least that's his story. Later on, and presumably unrelated to the sheep incident, Whaite moved to the even more remote Capel Curig. A village now most famous for appearing in a title of a Half Man Half Biscuit song.
Cox and Whaite's paintings were technically proficient, dramatic, and pleasing to the eye but within half a century that would come to look very dated. The turn of the 20th century saw a revolution in art all over Europe and Wales was no exception. Ideas of shape and of colour having to be in any way realistic were, for some artists, thrown out of the window. What was important, in the new century, was not what something looked like but what it felt like.
In 1911, two young artists arrived in Snowdonia. Augustus John, in his early thirties, was already famous and he'd even met Picasso. The younger man, James Dickson Innes, was, and remains, less well known. Innes' life was cut short just three years later, at the age of just twenty-seven, by tuberculosis. A disease the Llanelli born artist was fully aware he had.
Innes knew his days were numbered. We can't know if this influenced how he painted or if he'd have painted like that anyway (or, indeed, what he may have gone on to create) but the intensity of his vision has been described, quite correctly I believe, as 'stained glass brilliance'.
James Dickson Innes - Arenig, North Wales (1913)
James Dickson Innes - Sunset, Arenig (1911-1914)
Which is fair enough. The paintings are excellent. Radiant, warm, fauvist images that would have been beyond the brush of other British artists of the time. Even Augustus John lived, briefly, in his shade. Innes wasn't the artist who would come to overshadow Augustus John when his story would be told in the future though.
He even knew that he would, one day, eventually be known as the brother of Gwen John rather than as a painter in his own right. Quite a refreshing reversal of roles, really. Augustus and Gwen had grown up in the small Pembrokeshire seaside town of Tenby and while Augustus may have met Picasso, perhaps the world's most famous painter, Gwen went a step further and became the lover and model of Auguste Rodin, then the world's most famous sculptor.
Augustus John - Dorelia in a Landscape (1910)
Gwen John - Self-Portrait (1900)
Gwen John - Corner of the Artist's Room in Paris (1907-1909)
Her art, too, would have an intimacy and a lightness of touch quite at odds with contemporary British painters. Owing more to continental developments. Gwen John, and her brother, and Innes were modernists and internationalists at heart but there were other Welsh artists who remained interested in history, tradition, and the myths and folklore of Wales.
One of these was Christopher Williams who, in 1904, took a trip to Caernarfon Castle to attend a Pan-Celtic Congress. An event that proved to be something of an epiphany for him. After it he took to dressing in bardic robes and became obsessed with pre-Arthurian tales. He painted Ceridwen, a shapeshifter from the 12/13c collection of folk tales, the Mabinogion.
Ceridwen could transform into a greyhound, a hawk or even a fish. Deffroad Cymru shows the daughter of the last native born Prince of Wales and The Welsh at Mametz Wood, showing Welsh soldiers at the First Battle of the Somme in World War I, was commissioned by Williams' friend David Lloyd George who had become PM during that conflict.
It is painting that is filled with despair and with anger about hardscrabble life in the valleys. It features stigmata, wasted youth, and, almost merging into the dark slagheap of a hill they stand atop, a choir singing a dismal lament. It is a painting that seems resigned to the fact the dice will always be loaded in favour of the rich and yet, at the same time, rallies against this, powerfully demands change.
The 1930s had left the industrial heartlands of South Wales devastated. Cedric Morris, an eccentric artist and gardener and, dangerously in those times, an open and proud homosexual, believed he was the man who could transform society. Morris would both work and teach in local valley communities, joined the local Labour party, and arranged for touring exhibitions of Welsh art. His idea was to give the working class Welsh people pride in themselves and to take control of their own destinies.
Cedric Morris - Lougher from Penclawdd (1936)
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