Welsh Journals

We have in this book principally a picture of Thomas Jones the squire, the rich county landowner, zealously developing his estates to such an extent as to bring an end to his career as an artist. Aesthetes cannot fail to lament the death of his elder brother, which forced Thomas into these conventional duties. But the air of Pencerrig must be thick with 'agrarian improvement', for it overlooks the present site of the 'Royal Welsh' at Llanelwedd. PRYS MORGAN Swansea STAINED GLASS IN NORTH WALES UP TO 1850. By Mostyn Lewis. John Sherratt and Sons, Altrincham, 1970. Pp. xxi, 137, 73 plates (1 colour). £ 7-50. This is one of the most sumptuously-produced books on things Welsh to be published for a very long time. Far from being a 'coffee-table book', it is a reference work for specialists in art history, medieval history and Welsh topography, consisting mainly of a very detailed catalogue of all the stained and coloured glass of the period up to 1850 to be found in the churches and houses of the north, and preceded by an 'historical survey' which is perhaps more antiquarian than historical. A detailed catalogue of this kind is needed for many reasons: firstly, it is a field on which little has been written; secondly, only scholarly research of Dr. Lewis's kind can possibly reveal what is really old and what is Victorian restoration; thirdly, the almost total destruction of the glorious early-Tudor windows of Gresford by misusing a detergent cleanser as recently as 1966 shows how fragile stained glass is, and how easily this rich heritage might disappear. Dr. Lewis says that 'it is strange that the wealth of ancient stained glass in north Wales has been comparatively neglected by art historians'. But this is probably because the Welsh have hitherto not produced art historians, and that the English art historians have supposed that because Wales is poor it has no art at all. Dr. Lewis displays a remarkable collection of ancient glass in many lowland churches in the north, especially in Flintshire and eastern Denbighshire. It is not clear why so much should survive in comparison with south Wales or even with neighbouring Cheshire. The golden age for this stained glass, we are told, was the very end of the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth century. The catalogue confirms what one would guess, that more heraldic and less religious glass is to be seen after the Reformation. An interesting feature of this book is that it deals with as much enthusiasim with post- Reformation glass, and especially with the work of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries-the work of Francis Eglinton, and the Welsh glass painter David Evans-as it does with medieval glass. Dr. Lewis has virtually rediscovered the artist David Evans.