Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

ARTISTS' VIEWS OF GLAMORGAN: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY/TIRLUNIAU 0 FORGANNWG: Y BEDWAREDD GANRIF AR BYMTHEG. A picture book with bilingual text in English and Welsh. By Donald Moore. Glamorgan Archive Service, 1988. Pp. 48. £ 2.75. In 1978 the Glamorgan Archive Service published The Earliest Views of Glamorgan, a delightful collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drawings, paintings and prints of old Glamorgan assembled and introduced by Donald Moore, former Keeper of Pictures and Maps at the National Library of Wales. Artists' Views of Glamorgan: the Nineteenth Century is a sequel to this. Almost identical in format to the earlier booklet, it contains ten colour and twenty black and white plates of high quality, together with a short bilingual introduction to the artists and history of nineteenth-century Glamorgan. The illustrations range from engravings of topical events in the Illustrated London News- Outside the Workhouse, Merthyr Tydfil, March 6, 1875', shows men waiting for parish relief after a strike and lockout— to detailed watercolours of antiquarian interest, of which the sixteenth-century tomb in St. Mary's Church, Swansea, destroyed in an air raid in 1941, is a fine example. Most of the artists were draughtsmen, engravers or lithographers, little known or in some cases anonymous, whose job it was to record the changing face of the newly industrialized county. Modem monuments-furnaces, factories, railways, bridges, docks, canals, schools- appear alongside ancient or enthusiastically restored monuments of earlier centuries (Llandaff Cathedral, Cardiff and St. Donat's castles) and the picturesque beauties of the rural scene. It is interesting to see how brash, new topographical subjects were assimilated into genteel conventional views following traditional principles of landscape painting. Only a couple of pictures— "The Treforest Tin Works' after G. F. Bragg is one example-convey the fearsome power and dehumanising drudgery of the new industries. In this lithograph innumerable ant-like workers (many of them women) toil in a massive factory interior which stretches into the distance like a student's perspective study. The endlessly repeated windows and openings echo the monotony of the work. The plates follow the bilingual text which begins with an essay on artists in Glamorgan in the nineteenth century (Glamorgan's pioneering photographers, Calvert Richard Jones and John Dillwyn Llewelyn are mentioned here), and continues with brief sections on towns (Swansea, Merthyr, Cardiff), buildings (places of worship, ruined abbeys, castles), industrial developments (the copper industry, iron and coal, transport, work and people), education and the countryside. But whereas in The Earliest Views of Glamorgan the text formed a lively commentary on the plates, here the text and illustrations are less well integrated and this sometimes leaves the reader feeling frustrated. It would be interesting, for example, to know more about Bridgend and its new station as they appear in a lithograph of c. 1850, about the Yniscedwyn Anthracite Iron Works illustrated on p. 15, and about Hensol Castle, a castellated mansion enlarged in the 1840s; but none of these gets a mention in the text.