300 Years of Welsh Artists Abroad & Foreign Artists in Wales.

In 1897 Alfred Sisley, an Impressionist painter born in France to British parents, came to Wales. Staying in Penarth, and later on the Gower coast, he produced a number of canvases prompted by the Bristol Channel coast, including his view of Lavernock Point, returning to Penarth for the first time in this exhibition.

Sisley was just one of a long line of foreign artists to have found inspiration in the Welsh landscape and culture. From just across the border or the other side of Europe, Wales’ beautiful countryside has played host to romantic visionaries like JMW Turner, abstract modernists like Graham Sutherland, and the arresting industrial landscapes have attracted the likes of L.S Lowry and Josef Herman. For just as long, Art has also been a Welsh export, with great painters, sculptors, and architects, making waves across the world. Whether it’s Richard Wilson bringing the landscapes of Italy back to North Wales, or Augustus John taking the London of the Bloomsbury Group by storm, Cedric Morris founding a maverick art school in East Anglia or Gwen John finding her place Parisian avant garde.

In this lecture, Art Historian Morgan Haigh will present Wales as both inspiration and homeland to artists within and without its borders, showing how, although small in size, Wales has always punched above its weight in British and European art history.