Adam Somerset
The presence of the H’mm Foundation among the imprints of Wales grows. This season the company publishes works from two veteran observers of different, but complementary, dimensions of the life of Wales.
John Osmond’s “Soul on Fire” is a documentary novel of 650 pages, the second volume of two that appears eight years after its predecessor. It distills the author’s experience, and participation, in the fervid years that culminated in the referendum of 1997 that led to the foundation of the then Assembly.
Peter Lord has created over a series of books of weight the foundations for understanding the visual culture of Wales. In “Other” Peter Lord continues with six essays of length that both reinforce and extend the life’s work.
He avoids the characterisation of being an art critic. “I’m not interested in making relative evaluations of the aesthetic quality of the work of painters” appears in the essay on Kyffin Williams.
The reason is straightforward: “I don’t find it enlightening in terms of understanding the wider issues that pictures reflect.” A picture is a physical object. Much is to be seen, and said, as it makes its passage through time, subject to ownership and to estimation.
The essay on Kyffin Williams is a complex blend that embraces elements of autobiography. Williams and Lord exchanged correspondence. Both were opposed to the policies of the National Museum. “You and I are both loners” the artist wrote.
Winifred Coombe Tennant was an early buyer of his work. She bought a landscape in 1950 and by 1956 five more oils and a group of watercolours. Lord follows the divergence of reception that ensued. Williams was much loved by private buyers, particularly Welsh-speakers, and little loved by the arbiters of opinion and control over the public galleries. The artist himself in interview referred to “the South”, “as if it were a foreign country.”
Lord calls the view of the artist of himself as an outsider “delusional.” He cites Williams’ own writing that supports this self-making “Opinions, I believe, are important, even if they can be proved wrong. Opinion is healthy; blind acceptance of what is stated to be artistic fact is not.”
Writers of craft see and make connections that illuminate. Lord links Williams to Richard Wilson. “It was the idea of Richard Wilson, rather than the quality of the pictures, that had the most lasting influence in Wales itself.” So too “to buy a Kyffin…is not so much to purchase a painting, as to purchase an idea.” Lord convincingly locates Williams in a tradition of a painter of the previous century, Henry Clarence Whaite.
The central hub of “Other” comprises two essays with a common theme “The social mobility and visual transformation of art images.” The images under scrutiny move from canvas to engravings, medals, ceramics and pub signs. Even Richard Wilson may have played a part in this diffusion of imagery with a possible sign at Loggerheads, on the Ruthin to Mold hill route.
Lord has a depth of knowledge of locality and religion, and the divisions of religion. Visual history manifests itself in public action. At a procession in Rhuddlan in June 1985 at least a thousand scholars gathered. “Every one of the members wore a beautiful medal on their breasts, made especially to celebrate the centenary.” Visual imagery feeds into the Great Revival and the story of Mary Jones.
Social history, as distinct from art history, courses through the Lord interpretation, as it always has. In 2026 the National Museum has mounted an acclaimed exhibition of Gwen John. In another era “she and her circle”, he writes, were marginal figures if, indeed, they were known at all, promoted largely in the small shows of the London avant-garde.”
An essay of twenty-eight pages is given to the study of a single portrait, that of William Griffith Rector of Abergwynregyn by William Parry. “The Drawing Room” opens with two pages of an episode from Lord’s own family history, one of social division and childhood alarm. He moves to the career of the artist Lily Whaite and other women of the suffragette era, including Maud Salmon, Clara Knight and Queenie Perrin.
Performance runs throughout the first essay on Edith Nepean, born Edith Bellis from Llandudno. When Caradoc Evans’ “Taffy” was transferred to theatre she designed the costume for the lead player, Edith Evans. Nepean’s literary career produced a word-count of vastness. An early essay “A Vindication of Welsh Loyalty” came to the attention of Lloyd George, then at the height of fame as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Novels flowed and she had a forty-year period as film correspondent for “Picture Post.”
Many of her books were published as serials in cheap magazines, thence to six-shilling novel format. Lord’s final verdict is generous. “It may be that the popularity of the romance form of her novels and the fan-magazine context of her journalism represent a cultural neediness…But Edith Nepean’s contribution to meeting that need should surely go into the positive side of the balance in our valuation of her life.”
“Other” has an introduction with points of reflection. He does not keep a diary but on occasion events are of a kind to generate a response in private writing. That of 3rd November 2025 is a meditation on the rise of the moving image. The images that have been his object for examination are inseparable from their time and their place. “Place”, he writes, “insofar as meaningfully it survives at all, is mediated on addictive screens in the interests of wealth and power.”
He wonders if the essays that follow may be “no more than a tiny elegy- a relic of a misconception that certain aspects of experience are unchanging, since they manifest the essence of what it is to be human?”
His response, and affirmation, is written as: “I try to maintain belief in human creativity when that creativity is expressed in the knowledge of cultural particularity- that I, that we, sharing the fundamental need both for communal identity and for individuation, express our creativity within a sense of historical identities.” If “Other” is to be a last piece of cultural service that makes for an epitaph of high eloquence.
The H”mm Foundation has made a book on visual culture that is a work of visual elegance itself. The inner cover is printed in a rich dark blue. 140 pictures accompany the text. “Other” is a collection of studies of depth and importance.
The post Book Review: Other: Essays on the Visual World of Wales by Peter Lord appeared first on Nation.Cymru.