Welsh Journals

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Art', and on 'Early Christian Art'; Mr. G. C. Boon on 'Art in Roman Wales'; Professor Glanmor Williams on 'Art in Medieval Wales'; and Mr. Ingamells on 'Painting in Wales, 1550-1850'. The first impression gained is one of the outstanding richness, both in quality and quantity, of the Collections of the National Museum, the principal lender-a fact which is not always appreciated by those who live outside the capital. The half-dozen objects of importance (three of them pre-Celtic and three of them Roman) lent by the British Museum were all discovered in the nineteenth century, before the establishment of the National Museum, and it is much to be wished that some means could be found to ensure their permanent display, if only on loan, at Cardiff. The Early Christian period is necessarily mainly represented by casts (from the N.M.W.) of our Christian crosses and, in the medieval section, the obvious and inevitable gap is that of the screens and lofts surviving in many of our churches, of which a masterly and comprehensive account was given by Messrs. Crossley and Ridgway in various volumes of Archaeologia Cambrensis between 1943 and 1962. In this section the thirteenth-century chalice from St. David's and the fourteenth-century pax from Abergavenny are the only pre-Reformation examples of church plate to be shown (though the Dolgellau chalice and patten are repre- sented by reproductions): the section has, however, been extended by courtesy to the end of the seventeenth century to allow of the inclusion of three more chalices, including the fine gold one of 1662 from Welshpool. The paintings are divided into two sections-pictures by Welsh artists and those by visiting artists: of the former, all, with one exception, are anonymous before the time of Richard Wilson. In the latter section there is a marked division, reflecting a division in the demands of patrons, if not in the approach of artists, between the portraits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the landscapes from the time of J. C. Ibbetson to that of Turner and Cox. It may be noted, in passing, that the only two examples of the work of Samuel Palmer are both from English galleries, and it is to be hoped that this lacuna in our national collections will one day be filled. The catalogue itself is well laid out, and there are illustrations of sixty-seven of the 222 exhibits. The photographs are, with a few exceptions, well reproduced, though it was surely a mistake to have included a comparatively poor one of the rood figure from Kemeys Inferior rather than one of the far finer figure from Mochdre. The photograph, too, of the thirteenth-century wooden 'Cantelupe' effigy from Abergavenny partakes of the nature of a gimmick, the angle at which it is taken giving the impression of a Brobdignagian figure instead of one of six feet. It is a pity that the opportunity was not taken of securing a photograph of the head which is (though Mr. Ingamells, in his general introduction, talks of the 'stiff and formalist' body) amongst the most beautiful things in Wales: