Welsh Journals

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REVIEWS A SURVEY OF PORTRAITS IN WELSH HOUSES, VOL. II: SOUTH WALES. By John Steegman. National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 1962. Pp. ix + 305, 48 pi. £ 3. The volume under review is a sequel to the volume on portraits in the houses of North Wales published in 1957. The survey was carried out over a period of seventeen years, mainly by Mr. John Steegman, whose work was more recently supplemented by that of the present Keeper of Art in the Museum, Mr. Rollo Charles. During these years, as we are told in the introduction, 'some of the collections have passed to new ownership (p. vii). Some of these losses could hardly have been more grievous. Among the major collections sold and dispersed during that time are those once housed at three such historic houses as Crosswood, Gogerddan, and Tredegar Park. Nevertheless, the two volumes published by the Museum contain an invaluable catalogue of Welsh portraits, many of them of very considerable interest to historians. The contents are arranged under counties, and the individual houses are taken in alphabetical order. All the portraits in each house, whether paintings, miniatures, drawings, or sculptures, are carefully listed and described in the text. The subjects and artists are identified where this is possible, and the position and costume of the sitter and other details are provided. Close on 200 of the originals are reproduced in the excellent plates, and the historian will probably welcome the large number of them, even though the connoisseur might have wished for more full-page reproductions of individual portraits of merit. There are also careful and comprehensive indexes of portraits, married women's names, artists, houses, and owners. Few of the portraits are great works of art. Many are by anonymous. artists; not a few are erroneously attributed to major artists. But among the important artists whose work is represented are Constable (one), Hogarth (three), Kneller (nine-including one of himself), Lely (five), Reynolds (nine), and Van Dyck (ten). Fashionable portrait painters of a later generation, like James Gunn, de Lazlo, and Sargent, are also not unrepresented. Most of the portraits date from the eighteenth century or later- an indication, perhaps, of the elevation of the large-scale landowners from among the ranks of small squires. But some families have a longer chronological run than this. Dynevor's earliest, for example, goes back to Henry Rice of Newton (1586-C.1656); Tredegar Park, along with a number of early seventeenth-century portraits, used to boast a late Elizabethan painting said to be of the famous Blanche Parry, though this identification must be held to be doubtful. Penrice, too, has a number of early Mansel portraits, one of which the reviewer has for years accepted 435