ANTIQUES FAIR An affair of the art

NOTABLE among a number of exhibitions celebrating Kyffin’s centenary is a major retrospective at Oriel Ynys Môn in Llangefni, which runs until July 1. He was a great champion of the gallery and donated more than 400 of his own works and those by other artists to the Isle of Anglesey Art Collection, which is held there. Others include: Selling exhibition: The Albany Gallery, 74b Albany Road, Cardiff, until June 2. Director Mary Yapp was Kyffin’s agent in Wales for more than three decades.

Selling exhibition: Martin Tinney Gallery, 18 St Andrew’s Crescent, Cardiff, to June 2.

MOMA Machynlleth to June 23. An exhibition of works by Kyffin from the Tabernacle Collection Heol Penrallt, Machynlleth, Powys.

A Passion for Wales at the Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy, to June 30. Work by RCA members including prints, sketches and drawings by Kyffin.

Kyffin Williams: Behind the Frame, through his art, archives and his own words at the National Library of Wales, Cardiff, until September 1 The auction record for an oil by Kyffin Williams stands currently at £60,000, paid in September 2016 for this “Fox Shoot” painting, in which a group of seven men with dogs descend from a mountain in pursuit of a fox. The painting appeared on invitations to an exhibition at the Albany Gallery, Cardiff, prompting the vendor to pay an individual to queue outside the gallery for three days to be sure he could purchase it when the exhibition opened. It cost him £45,000 in 2004. The auctioneer was Rogers Jones Co, of Cardiff and Colwyn Bay, who lead the market for works by the artist Clockwise: A watercolour and pencil of an old farmer leaning on his stick. Sold for £3,750; Anglesey coastal view, titled “Mountains from Beaumaris” (£30,000); A snow-covered coastal view of a derelict farm near Aberffraw, close to Sir Kyffin’s home, with the sun setting over the Irish Sea (sold for £50,000 in 2013) and “Penrhiwiau”, showing a farmer and sheepdog leaving their Snowdonia cottage, (£24,000) take up art as therapy. He enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in Camden later that year, where, he said modestly: “They took me in because everyone else was away at the war.”

A teacher at prep school had already introduced him to the joys of painting. Kyffin later wrote: “Mr Glazebrook was different, for he taught us art and could make trains disappear across bridges and into tunnels in a wonder of perspective.”

Later, while he was away studying, he wrote: “I first began to draw on my library of memories until I often ceased to be in London as the room became peopled with farmers and sheepdogs, and bounded by stone walls and rocky cliffs.”

Despite being determined to become a professional artist, he took a part-time job teaching art at Highgate School in London, rising to become senior art master in 1944.

His first solo exhibition was staged at leading London dealers Colnaghi in 1948, followed by his inclusion in 1949 in the Council of Great Britain’s show “Twenty-five Paintings by Contemporary Welsh Artists”.

In 1968, he secured a Winston Churchill Fellowship to travel to Patagonia to spend several months in the community established by Welsh settlers who had emigrated there in 1865, later donating the paintings and watercolours he made during the trip, to the National Library of Wales.

Further exhibitions brought him more exposure and a flow of commissions, notably from eminent Welsh politicians whose portraits he painted. All of this established him as an artist of some prominence, which led to him quitting his teaching job in 1973 and returning to Anglesey.

A small cottage on the shore of the Menai Straits was renovated for him by his patron, the Marquess of Anglesey, and he lived there alone – he never married – sketching and painting whatever the weather, his pictures inspired by the mountains and farmland around him.

He was also an accomplished writer. He wrote two autobiographies Across the Straits, published in 1973, which describes his boyhood and youth, and A Wider Sky, dedicated to Lord Anglesey and published eight years later, about his adult years.

He was both witty and acerbic, critical of the Welsh Arts Council which neglected him for many years, and a great raconteur at events supporting young talent and galleries.

He was President of the Royal Cambrian Academy and was appointed a member of the Royal Academy in 1974.

In 1995, he received the Glyndwr Award for an Outstanding Contribution to the Arts in Wales and was awarded the OBE for his services to the arts in 1982 and a KBE in 1999.

He died on September 1, 2006, aged 88 after a long battle with cancer.