Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

In the later parts of the diary many weeks are omitted, followed by the usual reproaches on "my want of perseverance and my rapidly advancing age [which] gives double Solemnity to the reflection: May my Heavenly Father who has spared me thus long give me grace to redeem my time by a more diligent employment and a more rigid economy of that portion that may yet be afforded me!" In 1850 his son, Owen, caught smallpox, and Thomas and his wife, Caroline, nursed him constantly rather than risk the health of their servants. Their friends "stood afar off", the vicar's visit was "short and dry", and the doctor, after being assiduous to begin with, became uninterested. His son recovered, but Thomas was now weighed down by financial troubles and felt his age. On a visit to Reading he tried to sketch the door of an old house but his hand was not sufficiently steady to make a satisfactory drawing. There seems little doubt that he had given up painting some years earlier. He died at his home in Wyesham in 1855 and was buried at Dixton on March 15th. Tudor House was demolished to make way for new houses after the second war. At the sale, portfolios of Tudor drawings were bought by Walker's Gallery, 118 New Bond Street, and they exhibited 75 water- colours and drawings in 1961. Most of the work was topographical and ranged from Oxford to Dolgelly, but there were two industrial scenes. Most of the dated pictures were between 1810 and 1824, but there were two from 1852, which may have been by John. The Victoria and Albert Museum has one water-colour and nineteen cloud studies, and there are other pictures by Thomas in the Newport and Monmouth Museums and in the National Library of Wales. There are also numbers in private collections, and these formed the basis of the exhibition in the Mon- mouth Museum in December, 1979. Although his painting, after 1824 seems to have taken second place to his, none too successful, attempts at making a living as a land agent, he remains an interesting, capable and topographically accurate amateur who should be better known.