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Kyffin Williams is regarded as one of the defining Welsh painters of the twentieth century, celebrated for his rugged landscapes of Snowdonia and Anglesey. Yet his portraits reveal an equally remarkable achievement. Painted with a powerful expressionist realism, they rank among the most compelling portrayals of rural life in North Wales.
Painted during Williams’s long London period, the present work is an especially compelling example of his portraiture. The young sitter is set against a muted grey-green background, the attention concentrated on her pale, angular face framed by her dark hair. Thick passages of paint are dragged and layered across the surface, particularly through the hair and clothing.
The portrait bears a remarkably close relationship to Williams’s portrait of Alice Sielle, the daughter of his long-term London framer Robert Sielle – a portrait that was painted in settlement of money he owed her father for framing. The similarities in pose and overall composition are striking and, if the present...
Kyffin Williams is regarded as one of the defining Welsh painters of the twentieth century, celebrated for his rugged landscapes of Snowdonia and Anglesey. Yet his portraits reveal an equally remarkable achievement. Painted with a powerful expressionist realism, they rank among the most compelling portrayals of rural life in North Wales.
Painted during Williams’s long London period, the present work is an especially compelling example of his portraiture. The young sitter is set against a muted grey-green background, the attention concentrated on her pale, angular face framed by her dark hair. Thick passages of paint are dragged and layered across the surface, particularly through the hair and clothing.
The portrait bears a remarkably close relationship to Williams’s portrait of Alice Sielle, the daughter of his long-term London framer Robert Sielle – a portrait that was painted in settlement of money he owed her father for framing. The similarities in pose and overall composition are striking and, if the present portrait and the Portrait of Alice Sielle were painted at around the same time, it is possible that one composition informed the other: the commissioner of the present work may have seen Alice’s portrait in Williams’s studio, or conversely Alice’s likeness may have developed from an arrangement first explored here.
