Part of the current large exhibition at y Gaer, featuring artworks gifted to the museum over the past quarter-century by the Brecknock Art Trust, focuses on Brecon.
David Moore, who curated the show, explains more about the Brecknock Art Trust.
“The Trust was formed in 2000 to support the museum to acquire high-quality artworks that it would not otherwise be able to afford,” he said.
“Since then, it has enabled around 200 artworks of regional interest to be added to the collection, some of them attracting additional grants.”
Many of the early paintings of Brecon focus on bridges. Early watercolours shown, dating from a significant period of British watercolour painting in the late 18th to the mid-19th centuries, are by painters who toured Wales, a tradition in part stimulated when the continent was, due to conflict, inaccessible.
A spirited scene by Paul Sandby Munn, ‘Brecon Bridge with Castle Beyond’, explores light falling on the stone Watergate bridge which then spanned the Honddu with the castle behind in dark shadow.
Antiquarian Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who inherited the Wiltshire Stourhead estate in 1785, also made sepia-wash drawings of the town.
The fashionable London drawing master William Payne was known for the use of a neutral tint known as Payne’s Grey. One of his small lyrical paintings shows the bridge over the Afon Tarrell with, nearby, the 18th-century county gaol.
William Payne’s ‘Tarrallt Bridge and Jail near Brecon’ (.)
Painter and astrologer John Varley, a friend of the mystic William Blake, was skilled at laying flat transparent washes of watercolour. His later compositions are bolder but are often painted with little concern for accuracy.
Later paintings in the exhibition capture less obvious, yet often characteristic, scenes in and around Brecon.
The prolific artist Sam Garratt ran a shoe-making and repair business in town in the early 20th century. On display is his striking watercolour of Llanddew church.
Roger Reese became fascinated with recording the recent redevelopment of the former Brecknock Shire Hall into the current y Gaer cultural complex. Using source photographs he stitched together multiple images and transformed them into stylised crayon compositions.
Roger Reese – Museum Series 8 (.)
A favourite subject for Brecon resident, Veronica Gibson, known for lyrical oil landscapes painted with a palette knife, is her allotment off Brecon’s Island Fields.
Robert Macdonald’s watercolour, ‘In the Bulwark, Brecon Jazz’, captures in bold gestural colour the New Orleans-style Adamant band which was once a feature of the Brecon Jazz carnival atmosphere.
Robert Macdonald’s ‘In the Bulwark, Brecon Jazz’ (.)
In the Brecon Gallery upstairs, but also included in the exhibition, is an impressive circa 1814 porcelain plate hand painted at the Worcester Royal Porcelain Works by Thomas Baxter with an image, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, of ‘Mrs Siddons in the Character of the Tragic Muse’. It was acquired with additional funding from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund and Art Fund. The actress, born in Brecon into the touring-theatre Kemble family and renowned for striking looks and electrifying performances, had a flair for self promotion. Nearby, suspended in an old loom, is an unusual wool-woven sculpture ‘Folds’ by Brecon resident Sue Hiley Harris.
The exhibition includes notable paintings by former Brecon High School art teacher Roy Powell as well as a striking portrait of him by his friend Ivor Davies.
There is also a sombre, yet poignant, embroidery by Marcelle Davies of livestock being burned during the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic.
At £10 a richly illustrated book, ‘Championing Artists in Wales: 25 Years of the Brecknock Art Trust’, is excellent value as it includes colour images of over a hundred works in this remarkable must-see show.
Brecon’s y Gaer, Museum, Art Gallery & Library, can be found on Glamorgan Street (LD3 7DW).
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