Love, Money and Art: The Davies Sisters and a Fortune for Wales
Gwenda Sippings, Chair of the Society’s Council in the chair
About the Lecture
Gwendoline Davies (1882-1951) and Margaret Davies (1884-1963) were the granddaughters of the nineteenth century industrialist, David Davies of Llandinam, Montgomeryshire, railway builder and pioneer of the coal industry in South Wales. The Davies sisters’ childhood was dominated by the strict beliefs of Calvinistic Methodism. They learned that it was their Christian duty to make good use of the great wealth they would inherit. They championed social, economic, educational and cultural initiatives in Wales and beyond. As young women they developed a deep love of the visual arts and music, travelled widely in Europe and collected the art works of what were to become some of the leading exponents of the Impressionist movement.
Gwendoline and Margaret believed that beauty had a power to do good. The art collection that they bequeathed to the Welsh nation embodies this belief, and it is thanks to their generosity that the National Museum Wales now houses the work of name such as Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir and Rodin. For all their fortune and privilege, they lived lives hones by shyness and self-denial, and haunted by love. Yet they adventured and pioneered: a medal salutes their Red Cross service in France during the Great War, for instance.
In his lecture, Trevor Fishlock outlined the lives of these extraordinary women and the remarkable impact that their idealism and generosity had on the cultural and intellectual life of Wales – an impact which is still with us today.
The Speaker
Trevor Fishlock is an author, broadcaster and foreign correspondent. He has worked on assignment in more than seventy countries and was staff correspondent of The Times in India and New York, and Moscow bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph. He has written books on Wales, India, Russia, America and on nineteenth-century exploration, and has presented more than 160 television programmes about life and history in Wales, winning a BAFTA award for his Wild Tracks series, which ran for fourteen years. He has made wo documentary programmes about the Davieses of Llandinam and about the Davies sisters’ trailblazing art collection. His book, A Gift of Sunlight: The fortune and quest of the Davies sisters of Llandinam, was published by the Gomer Press in 2014.
(With acknowledgement to Trevor Fishlock and to the publishers of A Gift of Sunlight, from which much of the above summary derives)
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Hwyl and Hiraeth: Richard Burton and Wales
Richard Burton (born Richard Jenkins, Pontrhydyfen, Glamorgan, 1925; died Celigny, Switzerland, 1984) is one of the most famous Welshmen of the twentieth century, whose global renown (or notoreity, depending on your point of view) is perhaps only exceeded by that of the equally colourful Dylan Thomas. Following on the publication of the Richard Burton Diaries (Yale University Press, 2012) this lecture by the Diaries’ editor examines the relationship between Richard Burton and Wales. Burton was a proud Welshman who is reputed always to have worn an item of red clothing and to have had a clause in his film contracts excusing him from working on St David’s Day. But what was the real nature of Burton’s relationship with and understanding of Wales? Was he, in more ways than one, a ‘stage Welshman’, with the necessarily distanced and inflexible patriotism of the exile? Drawing on his own words this lecture will explore the interweaving of both hwyl and hiraeth in the life and career of one of modern Wales’s most iconic figures.
About the speaker: Professor Chris Williams
Chris Williams is Professor of Welsh History at Swansea University and Director of the university’s Research Institute for Arts and Humanities. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford and at Cardiff University he previously held posts at Cardiff and the University of Glamorgan before joining Swansea in 2005. A specialist in the modern history of industrial South Wales he has written(amongst other topics) on the miners and the political history of the South Wales coalfield, on the utopian industrialist Robert Owen and on Wales and the First World War. His edition of the diaries of the actor Richard Burton is published by Yale University Press in November 2012. Chris is also a Royal Commissioner with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Chairman of the Welsh Heritage Schools Initiative and was historical adviser for the BBC / Open University television series ‘The Story of Wales’ (2012).