Welsh Art - Expansion

Expansion

It remained difficult for artists relying on the Welsh market to support themselves until well into the 20th century. The 1851 census records only 136 people describing their occupation as "artist" out of a population of 945,000, with a further 50 engaged in fine arts-related occupations such as engraving. An Act of Parliament in 1857 provided for the establishment of a number of art schools throughout the United Kingdom, and the Cardiff School of Art opened in 1865. Prior to that the annual report for 1855 of the government Science and Art Department shows a list of the larger type of Art School in many British cities, but none in Wales. Under a recently-introduced new system "Local Schools of Art" had been established in 1853 in Llanelly and Merthyr, but had already closed; those in Swansea and Carmarthen continued, and Flint had applied to establish a school. There were "Drawing Schools" in Aberdare and Bangor, but apparently nothing at all in Cardiff. However all these pre-1857 schools, except perhaps Swansea, were mainly teaching school age children, usually in their normal schools, and training in industrial design or teacher-training under the elementary stages of the "South Kensington system".

Graduates of the new fine arts Welsh colleges still very often had to leave Wales to work. Established artists continued to move in the opposite direction, at least for the summer. David Cox was an English 19th century landscapist who spent much time in Wales, for many years spending the summer based in Betws-y-Coed, a popular centre for artists, including the English Henry Clarence Whaite and the German Hubert von Herkomer, one of whose wives was Welsh. Landscape continued to be the main focus, although the Welsh artist Charles William Mansel Lewis was among those who painted common working people, with varying measures of realism or picturesqueness. The "Betws-y-Coed artist's colony" was one of the groups forming the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art in 1881; this was always a group for exhibiting rather than a teaching institution, based in Conwy, until 1994 in Plas Mawr (see above). The sculptors John Evan Thomas (1810–1873) and Sir William Goscombe John (1860–1952) made many works for Welsh commissions, although they had settled in London. Even Christopher Williams (1873–1934), whose subjects were mostly resolutely Welsh, was based in London. Thomas E. Stephens (1886–1966) and Andrew Vicari (b. 1938) had very successful careers as portraitists based respectively in the United States and France. Sir Frank Brangwyn was Welsh by origin, but spent little time in Wales.

Perhaps the most famous Welsh painters, Augustus John and his sister Gwen John, mostly lived in London and Paris; however the landscapists Sir Kyffin Williams (1918–2006) and Peter Prendergast (1946–2007) remained living in Wales for most of their lives, though well in touch with the wider art world. Ceri Richards was very engaged in the Welsh art scene as a teacher in Cardiff, and even after moving to London; he was a figurative painter in international styles including Surrealism. Various artists have moved to Wales, usually the countryside, though paintings of Cardiff of around 1893-97 by the American artist Lionel Walden are in museums in Cardiff and Paris. These included Eric Gill, whose colony included for his most artistically productive period (1924–1927) the London-born Welshman David Jones, and the sculptor Jonah Jones. The Kardomah Gang was an intellectual circle centred on the poet Dylan Thomas and poet and artist Vernon Watkins in Swansea, which also included the painter Alfred Janes; the eponymous cafe was destroyed by a German bomb in 1941.

The situation gradually improved after World War II, with the appearance of new art groups. In the industrial valleys the Rhondda Group formed in the 1950s a loose group of art students whose most notable member was Ernest Zobole, whose expressionist work was deeply rooted in the juxtaposition of the industrialised buildings of the valleys set against the green hills that surround them.

In 1956 the 56 Group Wales emerged, with the aim of promoting modern Welsh art beyond Wales' borders.

In the 1970s Paul Davies formed Beca, a radical Welsh group whose founding was in part a reaction to the drowning of Capel Celyn. Beca used a mixture of artistic expression, including installation, painting, sculpture and performance, engaging with language, environmental and land rights issues.