Gweledigaeth mewn 4,525 o ddarnau
Yr wythnos ddiwethaf cawson ni’r anrhydedd o gyfarfod ag un o drysorau mawr Cymru. Enw traddodiadol y campwaith hwn yw Cwilt Teiliwr Wrecsam – er nad yw’n gwilt yn dechnegol, ond clytwaith, ac er bod y geiriau ‘teiliwr Wrecsam’ yn tueddu i guddio enw ei wneuthurwr, James Williams, 8 College Street yn y dref honno. […]
Stanley Spencer at Llanfrothen
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 met in 1929, had been close and obsessive – he commemorated it in several nude […]
Gwen John on foot for Rome
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 emotional. In one of the letters, she describes a continental journey that Gwen made in […]
The problem of Vaughan Gething
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 ever before received such a huge sum. The donor was a firm called Dauson Environmental […]
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 […]
Fathers and sons
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 to how my dad looked in his later years, though in my younger days I […]
Aberystwyth yn 1863
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, yn arbennig i hala eu gwyliau haf yn yr ardal. Yn 1864 dechreuodd Thomas Savin […]
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. […]
