Our artist neighbour
From the rolling hills and cloud-topped mountains of the Eryri to the jagged coastlines of Pembrokeshire, the beauty of Wales has long inspired great artists. Sir Kyfinn, whose paintings pepper this page, lived and worked only a few miles from us here at Halen Môn and the brilliant Ben, from Cardiff auction house Rogers Jones & Co, has put together this beautiful introduction to him and his work for us here. All the images have recently been under the hammer at their auction house.
Halen Môn overlooks the wonderful Menai Straits, the body of water separating the island from the mountainous mainland of Wales. A few miles down the coast from the Halen Môn HQ is a cluster of waterside houses known as Pwllfanogl.
Before Thomas Telford’s Menai Suspension Bridge was completed in 1826, there was a ferry port at Pwllfanogl and the Boat Inn would have offered weary travellers respite before and after the ferry crossing.
In 1974, a landscaper painter moved into the Boat Inn, now called Min-y-Môr. The artist was originally from the Island but had been living in London since wartime where he had worked as art master at Highgate School. His name was John Kyffin Williams but more commonly and affectionately known as simply Kyffin (pronounced ‘cuff-fin’).
Sir Kyffin, as he was knighted in 1999, was born in 1916. He was to become Wales best loved artist and ‘the defining artist of Wales in the 20th Century’.
Richard Wilson (1714-1782), born in Montgomeryshire, mid-Wales, would probably hold that mantel. Wilson is considered the father of landscape painting in Wales and is one of the giants in British art history. Big bucks are also paid for work by these Welsh artists – Ceri Richards, Gwen John and Cedric Morris. However, accumulatively Sir Kyffin would be the highest grossing Welsh artist at auction.
Kyffin’s work comes to market regularly and consistently makes many thousands of pounds. The highest auction price as of November 2024, is £62,000 achieved at the Rogers Jones saleroom in 2021. The second highest is £61,000 which was again at Roger Jones’ auction rooms as recently as November 2024.
His oil paintings regularly make sums of more than £20,000 and his works on paper several thousand pounds too. These kinds of prices have been going on (and generally going up) for more than 20 years. Add all the prices up, together with gallery prices too, and you have a significant Kyffin industry. In 2024, we offered 112 works by Sir Kyffin Williams and only three of them failed to sell. The accumulative value of these works was more than half a million pounds. And that is at just one auction house.
Sir Kyffin’s work is very identifiable and that is part of his appeal. For most of his career, when working in oils, Kyffin would use a palette knife to thickly apply slabs of paint to the canvas. His technique was bold and confident, and it meant that he could be a prolific worker – the Kyffin industry started with Kyffin himself. Using his palette knife, Sir Kyffin would not set out to capture the landscape forensically, instead his objective was to simplify the landscape and to introduce mood and expression through colour and application. His landscapes were more often stormy and turbulent as they were quiet. This turbulence a reflection of the weather in the mountains of Eryri (Snowdonia) but also a reflection of Sir Kyffin Williams’ character as Kyffin was an epileptic and suffered from bouts of dark depression.
When Sir Kyffin resided at Pwllfanogl, he painted the mountains, the coastline and the villages of Ynys Mon and beyond. He would also introduce life to many of his canvases in the form of farmers, sheepdogs, cattle, farms, villages and chapels. Timeless dry-stone walls would also be a feature. All these Welsh motifs bring about a feeling of nostalgia when we gaze at his work; the old farmers are our forefathers and the solitary farms our ancestral homes now abandoned, and the remaining stone rubble is a monument to the past – a simpler time when all of us were more connected to our landscape. There is a word in Welsh called hiraeth, which can be best described in English as heart-felt longing for something that is missing, perhaps one’s parent or a place we once knew. Sir Kyffin is the conduit for our hiraeth and I think this is the biggest reason for the artist’s enduring appeal’’.
Sir Kyffin Williams is an artist that Wales is very proud of and he’s home, just a stone’s throw from Halen Môn, is where the artist lived during the most successful period of his life. Sir Kyffin Williams’ death, on September 1st, 2006, was felt acutely by the Anglesey community, but also beyond in mainland Wales and further afield in the world of art.
