Cylchgronau Cymru

THOMAS TUDOR 1785-1855 The name of Thomas Tudor appears in no biography, either English or Welsh as far as I can ascertain, except for a brief entry in British Water Colour Artists up to 1920, yet he was no mean amateur artist and his output was quite large, mostly covering the counties of Monmouth and Hereford. The first mention of Tudor's name appears in the preface to Archdeacon Coxe's History of Monmouthshire. Coxes writes:- Nor can I withold a tribute of gratitude for the valued assistance I derived from Mr. Owen Tudor and his two sons John and Thomas who vied with each other in rendering me service, and from whom I received numerous plans and sketches'. This must have been before 1800, so Thomas started very young. Born in 1785, the son of Owen Tudor, a Monmouth bookseller, most of his life was spent near that town. He appears later to have been a man of some substance owning property in the village of Pen-allt. He worked mostly in water colour and monochrome and must have been considered sufficiently competent to have had seventeen landscapes and portraits accepted for exhibition by the Royal Academy. I possess several of his landscapes but have seen only one of his portraits. Tudor was for many years estate agent for Colonel Morgan Clifford, a large landowner who was M.P. for Hereford and Vice-Lieutenant of Monmouthshire. Clifford lived at Perrystone near Ross-on-Wye, but he also owned property in Monmouthshire and in the Llandeilo area of Carmarthenshire which Tudor had to visit from time to time to overlook and collect the rents. Just after the last war, the descendants of Tudor had a sale at their house in Wyesham, on the outskirts of Monmouth. This house was formerly the home of Thomas Tudor and contained a large number of his drawings. Mr. Keith Kissack of Monmouth has made a collection of fifteen of them, all landscapes of scenes in the Monmouth area. My friend Major Probert was able to secure Tudor's diary for the years 1847-51, which he has been kind enough to lend me. This diary is important as Tudor made several long visits to London where he visited a number of galleries and exhibitions and mixed with artists and dealers. On 16 June 1847, he visited Mr. Carpenter, the bookseller, in Bond Street. Mr. Carpenter was kind enough to show him his private collection of pictures which included 'a very fine portrait of Mrs. Woffington the actress by Hogarth; she is painted lying in bed, where she was con- fined for the last two or three years of her life'. There was also a fine portrait by Reynolds and a number of landscapes which included 'a very fine picture painted by Chrome of Norwich who died 40 or 50 years ago and of whom I never heard before'. He writes that he then visited Mr Griffith, 121 Pall Mall, 'respecting the sale of my Turner' and after a little discussion agreed with him at 600 guineas. Mr Griffith